SURVIVOR'S SAFE HAVEN

Community Safety

City of Los Angeles

Expand existing project, program, or initiative

Sexual violence is a widespread problem in California, traumatically affecting people’s lives and negatively affecting communities and society. Statewide, 86% of women and 53% of men reported experiencing some form of sexual assault in their lifetime. The impact of sexual violence extends far beyond the assault itself. Social structures shape victims’ experiences with institutions designed to help them: shelters, hospitals, police, and courts, but often end up re-victimizing instead. The short and long terms effects of such trauma are vast: PTSD, social anxiety, suicide, depression and/or drug and alcohol addiction. There is a lack of survivor support and rehabilitation. Advocates, on-call professionals, emotional support, therapy, police reporting options in a safe and confidential location is a lifeline for survivors. Coordinated sexual assault services are survivor-centred and reduce the long-term effects of trauma by providing survivors social support and control over their care.

Our Safe Haven Center and programs are tailored to empower survivors of sexual and domestic violence and amplify their voices. Our focus is for survivors to heal. By creating a safe, supportive, survivorship community there is a greater potential for them to thrive past trauma. We use a community-based approach to prevention, ensuring schools, businesses, law enforcement and beyond are committed to survivor-centered responses and sexual violence education. Our programs provide direct services to survivors who are still dealing with the constant effects of sexual and domestic violence. The programs include support groups, advocacy assistance regarding the civil and criminal legal system, therapy, permanent support that promotes healing from the impact of trauma and education on intimate partner violence, child abuse, sexual assault, and consent. Because healing is not linear and every survivor has special needs, we created a survivorship program amongst survivors to encourage one another. Our survivorship programs are innovative methods of therapy that consist of social activities and therapeutic recreation: yoga, sounds baths, mediation, self-defense classes, retreats, spa treatments, dance, one on one therapy as well as group therapy.

Our plan to change rape culture and DV culture requires our paradigm shift and our complete restructuring of how we support survivors and think and talk about the issues of violence. Changing attitudes within Los Angeles means changing behaviors, both of which contribute to a healthier, more aware community of active bystanders. Increased community awareness helps shift from victim to predator blaming. Once survivors are believed and supported by their community, empowered survivors are more likely to seek medical attention and report the crime. An informed community leads to an informed jury, then the District attorney will feel more confident in prosecuting cases. More prosecutions lead to more convictions. More convictions establish predator accountability in the justice system. More convictions signify a community with a NO tolerance policy for sexual or domestic violence. THIS WILL MAKE FOR A SAFER LOS ANGELES COUNTY AND STRONGER, HEALTHIER AND MORE CONFIDENT COMMUNITY.

We measure our impact by our membership growth, number of visitors, survivors served, partnerships, and our volunteers. We have served 2,907 survivors- 1011 more than 2020 74% being Women 21% men 5% Trans/nonbinary identified- The percentage of males doubled from 2021. We have grown our social media network by 75% - totally 6,304 of followers stating that they feel empowered by our work to heal. 153 survivors received individual therapy, 389 participated in our group therapies Our partnerships with corporate organizations, therapists, yoga/meditation professionals, and other therapeutic healing has increased by 100% Sexual and domestic violence isn't a bias act, so our network for marginalized communities has advanced with interns: VBA Español, VBA Françias, VBA LGBTQI+, VBA AAPI, VBA SriLanka divisions to serve a greater community of survivors within Los Angeles. Because of the increased impact, we have been able to make a healthier community of survivors, which will create change!