National Sexual Assault Hotline services are now available to Spanish speakers

This week, the country’s largest and only national sexual assault hotline became bilingual, offering free and confidential around-the-clock services in Spanish—the language spoken by 37.6 million people in the U.S.— for the first time.

“Over the years, we’ve gotten requests from thousands of survivors to access services in Spanish but we just haven’t had the capacity,” said Scott Berkowitz, founder and president of the nonprofit Rape, Abuse, Incest National Network, which operates the National Sexual Assault Hotline. 

They do now, thanks to a grant from the Justice Department’s Office for Victims of Crimes.  

According to a statement emailed to Yahoo, OVC specifically chose RAINN for funding as part of its Vision 21 Transforming Victim Services strategic initiative to “provide crime victims, including underserved victims with more immediate access to services and using innovative technology when appropriate to facilitate that access.”

Rather than a traditional telephone call center, RAINN’s hotline is actually an online chat, connecting survivors anonymously with trained specialists who can offer crisis intervention support, basic legal and medical guidance, and referrals to local resources through an instant messenger-like setup. Developed in 2006 as a response to many in need who found it difficult to speak about their traumas out loud, Berkowitz said the online hotline is particularly popular among survivors under the age of 25, a trend he hopes will translate.

“In the general population, about one in three victims report rape to the police,” Berkowitz said. “In immigrant communities, or among people who speak languages other than English, reporting rates are even lower. It is not uncommon to see a sort of disengagement with authorities and discomfort reaching out to police.”

But, he said, “one thing we’ve found with the English hotlines is that people who can get help, ask questions, have our staff demystify the process, are more likely to report their crimes to police.”

Julia Barden is one of thousands who have petitioned RAINN for Spanish-language services over the years.

A Puerto Rican-American and outspoken sexual-assault survivor, Barden is determined to knock down some of the barriers that—45 years after her own assault—still make talking about rape particularly difficult within the Hispanic community.

At 9 years old, Barden was abducted while walking home from school on New York City’s Upper East Side. A man she’d never seen before blocked her path on the sidewalk and told her he was a police officer and that he needed her help finding an old woman’s dog. Barden had always been taught not the question the authority of adults—least of all police officers—so she didn’t, and he led her to the basement of an apartment building a mere 500 yards from her own. There, behind a steel door, Barden was sexually assaulted. The man threatened to hurt her if she told anyone what happened and instructed her to count to 100 before leaving. When she finished, he was gone, leaving her terrified, stunned, and ashamed.

In her traditionally Puerto Rican household, she’d been taught at a young age that a woman’s purity and virginity were tied not only to her honor but her family’s.

“I felt dirty, I felt sullied for the rest of my life,” Barden, now 54, told Yahoo News. “I was thinking about it in terms of my personal wealth, in terms of my ability to be somebody’s wife someday.”

After finding her way out of the maze-like New York City basement and back to her own apartment, Barden immediately took a bath. In hindsight, it was a pretty unusual after school activity for a fourth grader, but none of the adults Barden lived with at the time—which included her mother, stepfather, aunt, aunt’s boyfriend and a nanny—seemed to notice. Or if they did, they never said anything. So neither did she.

“I realized at that moment, ‘Holy s--t, I’m in this all by myself,” Barden said. She held tightly to her secret into her 20s, living in constant fear that she would run into her attacker again, or discover she’d contracted a life-threatening venereal disease. Even after she finally told her fiance, it was several more years before she could speak about it openly.

Today, as a mother and a member of RAINN’s speakers bureau, Barden shares her story with ease, hoping to prevent future victims from living in fear and silence by educating parents. She sees RAINN’s new Spanish-language service as a major step towards accomplishing that goal and can’t help but wonder what life would have been like if she had access to such services during her time of need.

 “Had I had the opportunity to speak with someone where I didn’t feel judged, my entire life might have been different,” she said. “I might have done better in school because I spent so much time looking for that person who wanted to harm me I couldn’t concentrate. It might have lightened my fear and shame. It might have alleviated 20 years of high anxiety. I could have had a happier childhood.”

Though she is careful to clarify that she can only speak to her experience as a Puerto Rican woman, Barden said a lot of the same beliefs and cultural stigma that silenced her as a child still loom large in Latino families.

 “I believe the Hispanic community in general, along national lines, is still a highly patriarchal society,” she said. For a demographic that represents the country’s largest and youngest minority, Barden said “that means there’s a lot of kids out there struggling, suffering, exploring and not feeling like the culture allows them to be open about such topics.”

While the population of native-born Hispanic Americans continues to grow (one in four newborns was Hispanic as of 2013) so too grows a disconnect between the younger generation, who increasingly identify with English as their primary language, and their elders.

Even those who speak Spanish at home don’t necessarily have the vocabulary to articulate what they’re going through to someone who might be able to help or at least comfort them.

Barden, who grew up fluent in English, said she was particularly attached to her Spanish-speaking grandmother in the years following her assault, but her own ability to communicate in Spanish was limited.

“I didn’t know the Spanish word for rape, I still don’t,” Barden said. “But if I had access to a Spanish language rep at RAINN when I was 10 or 11, when I was spending afternoons with my grandma and I felt like maybe she was the person I could open up to, then who knows.”

With a beefed-up staff of about 175 bilingual hotline workers, Berkowitz hopes to eliminate language as one of the many obstacles facing survivors of rape and other kinds of sexual abuse.  

“One thing we often see is folks who are hesitant to use the hotline because they’re not entirely sure if what happened qualifies as a crime,” said Berkowitz. “This is here to give you the emotional support and help you need. We hope [the Spanish language services] will tear down barriers and encourage more people to reach out for help.”