BODY POLITIC

What the Los Angeles Commission on Assaults Against Women needs is its own telephone company. Each year, its 46 volunteer counselors answer more than 12,000 calls on the Rape and Battering Hotline--calls from victims seeking counseling or trying to break patterns of violence, calls from victims’ friends and relatives wanting to know what to do to help. At the nonprofit agency’s office, phones ring off the hook, with corporations calling to schedule employee Personal Awareness Training Seminars, people wanting to take self-defense classes, and other centers ordering the commission’s self-defense training video.

And then there’s the Industry. Domestic violence and sexual assault are frequent themes in post-”Burning Bed” Hollywood. Researchers and writers from TV series such as “L.A. Law,” “21 Jump Street” and a dozen soap operas and actors and directors working on movies such as “The Accused” want advice on how to re-create a violent scene sensitively but realistically or how to portray a victim or court scene believably.

The agency, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, was one of the first rape-crisis centers in the country and now is one of the most influential. When crimes such as the 1989 assault on the jogger in New York’s Central Park or the alleged Palm Beach /Kennedy rape hit the news, reporters and lawyers all over the country contacted the center wanting opinions on everything from how common the type of crime is to whether or not the media should identify alleged victims. Recently, CNN interviewed agency members about California’s new stalking law, under which a person can be arrested for “maliciously following” someone. “Twenty years ago, no one wanted to talk about these issues,” says six-year executive director Patricia Occhiuzzo Giggans. “There were no shelters or hot lines then. Now there are more than 600 across the country.”

Despite its success, the center and other agencies like it must still fight for funding, piecing together a patchwork of grants, donations and federal programs. “There is only $200,000 in the California state budget for rape prevention,” Giggans says. “That’s for the whole state. We’re a volunteer organization. If we had to pay people, we would not survive.” Despite the center’s strides, the problems of violence against women is far from solved. As the Palm Beach story unfolded, Giggans says she was “amazed” at the degree of misinformation about rape “and at how much work we still had to do.”

The center’s hotline is (213) 392-8381.