20 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY FEBRUARY 20-26, 2025 www.montereycountynow.com Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin were in progress. “Sexual assault and sexual harassment remain a persistent challenge across the Total Force,” the report concluded. “The Department continues to address these harmful behaviors holistically with a focus on prevention, addressing problematic culture, improving the skills of all leaders at all levels, and evaluating ways to make the reporting of these harmful behaviors easier for survivors.” IT IS NOT JUST THE LEADER of the Department of Defense who has been accused of sexual violence and sought to discredit his accuser. President Donald Trump has also been repeatedly accused of sexual misconduct. Since the 1970s, more than two dozen women have accused Trump of groping them or other unwanted sexual contact. In 2023, a jury found Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation and awarded $5 million to the writer E. Jean Carroll, who said Trump had raped her. Trump has publicly denied all allegations. Of course, Trump has also flaunted such behavior. Back in 2016, before he was elected the first time, an Access Hollywood hot mic moment from 2005 revealed what seemed sensational at the time, with Trump saying, “Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything…Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.” (Representatives of Trump, Hegseth and the DoD did not respond to requests for comment for this story.) “It’s a problem when we promote people who do sexual harm to positions of power and authority,” DaSilva says. She is referring in part to a general sense of permissiveness—that instead of holding people to account for alleged sexual misconduct, we are ignoring the conduct, or worse, celebrating it. Beyond normalizing a tolerance for sexual misconduct, DaSilva says organizations like the Monterey County Rape Crisis Center are bracing for hard times ahead. Challenges for funding are not new. Groups advocating to end sexual violence have already faced tough times in recent years. In 1984, President Ronald Reagan signed the Victims of Crime Act (VOCA) into law, securing a funding stream for services for victims of sex abuse, human trafficking and domestic violence, thanks to revenue from successful prosecution of white-collar crimes. The group VALOR is a coalition representing California’s 84 rape crisis centers, which rely on federal VOCA funds funneled to the state, then to the various nonprofits. In 2023, they were notified that a 45-percent reduction in VOCA funding was coming. “It was going to be one of the steepest cuts we had seen thus far,” says Grace Glaser of VALOR. “The fund has just become relatively unstable.” At the Monterey County Rape Crisis Center, “it’s our biggest single source of funding,” DaSilva says. “It was dicey there for a while.” The State of California came through to backfill the federal cuts with $103 million in one-time funding in the current year, but VALOR leaders still see a need for a longer-term fix. The California Victims of Crime Act took effect Jan. 1, establishing a statewide fund similar to VOCA, but as Glaser says, “It will take time for that fund to build up.” Meanwhile, since Trump was sworn in in January, there are new questions about the federal government’s support for sexual violence prevention work, when it comes to funding and beyond. On the U.S. Centers for Disease Control website, some pages with information on various topics related to sexual assault prevention are no longer live. From the landing page “Preventing Sexual Violence,” people can click bullet points for resources on topics like “Bringing in the Bystander” or “Shifting Boundaries,” but those links now go nowhere. A banner on top of the site reads, “CDC’s website is being modified to comply with President Trump’s Executive Orders.” “The sexual violence prevention information that we use every day—it’s just gone,” DaSilva says. There are also concerns that will be familiar to organizations reliant on federal funds. The MCRCC just completed the first year of a five-year CDC grant, at $170,000 annually, for rape prevention education. What happens next is unknown. “I don’t know what there is to do at this point other than continue to do our work to the best of our ability, until we can’t—and that point may not come,” DaSilva says. “It’s going to be hard,” she adds, “but it was always hard.” BACK IN THE EARLY 1970S, groups of mostly women were organizing what would become a vast infrastructure of rape crisis centers and similar organizations across the country. In those days, in Monterey County, it was just a group of people who saw a need and stepped in as volunteers, then began recruiting friends and neighbors. They would meet in their living rooms to coordinate what started out as an all-volunteer hotline. During 12-hours shifts, volunteers would need to be near a landline at home, in the era well before cell phones. (At the time, the hotline might receive 10 calls a month. Today, it gets 95 calls a month.) Soon after, Lynne White Dixon moved to town and quickly joined in as a volunteer on the rape crisis hotline. Meanwhile, in her job as a social worker, she was hired to set up a mental health clinic in Seaside as an outreach arm of Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula. In that role, she helped formalized a training manual for sexual violence prevention. The team of volunteers coached police, doctors and nurses on how to respond to rape victims. They started offering workshops with information that is now, 50 years later, widely understood—with basics like just because you buy someone dinner doesn’t mean you are entitled to sex. But even as their work gained traction, the team was frustrated. They went repeatedly to Fort Ord to train a roomful of 100 or so young troops, but they found the audience might push back. Inevitably, four or five women would stay behind afterward. “They would linger behind and say, ‘I was sexually assaulted.’ We were starting to get pissed, we were very angry,” White Dixon says. “We were watching Army police say horrible things to women in the course of interviewing them,” she adds. The volunteers reached out to Leon Panetta, then their congressman, who said he would take action. “It turned around,” White Dixon says. “That was huge. At least when women had to go to the Army hospital, we saw less abusive behavior in the interviews and better treatment.” Meanwhile, the volunteers continued their work, raising enough money through things like plant sales to keep the hotline going. In 1979, White Dixon was hired as the Monterey County Rape Crisis Center’s first executive director. These days, the center runs on about $2 million a year from grants and donations. In 2022, the organization acquired a building space in Salinas, a century-old farmhouse, which serves about 70 percent of clients. And thanks to a surprise donation of $1.2 million, the nonprofit last year acquired its own building in downtown Monterey. The former residence smells like fresh paint, before furniture is ready to be moved in, and it’s bright and airy. To enter, a visitor walks on a slate pathway through a lovingly landscaped garden. There’s space for therapy, for youth prevention groups to meet and for administrative offices. Trainings twice a year bring on roughly 15-20 volunteers to support the 24/7 helpline and to respond in person to sexual assault forensic exams at hospitals as victim advocates. And law enforcement agencies have been trained on what to look for, and to take the issue seriously. (Pacioni recently Lauren DaSilva, executive director of Monterey County Rape Crisis Center, in the nonprofit’s new Monterey office, set to open by the end of February. “We’ve been here for 52 years, and we’re going to continue to be,” she says. DANIEL DREIFUSS
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