Teresa D’Anza, program director at Sexual Assault Nurse Examiners, said she agrees with the policy, and that it has never come up as an issue for those who come seeking services.
SANE, which is housed within AFAC, provides important medical services to sexual assault survivors, such as rape kits used to identify assailants.
“I have nurses here who are going to be in an exam room with a patient, and knowing what’s in their background allows them to be vigilant if they need to,” she said. “We get very complimentary feedback from our clients about the services they get while they’re here. None of our patients so far have complained about background checks.”
However, some survivors may never come close enough to AFAC to even complain about the policy.
A woman who referred to herself as Red to protect her identity said she has been raped five times since she became homeless six years ago. She has received medical treatment from a hospital after she was assaulted, but said she would not seek medical treatment if a background check was required.
“When you bring up everything with the police, they don’t care. I would not do it because it’s none of their business what my background is. Sure wouldn’t, and they’re going to arrest me now,” she said. “I don’t want to make it worse than it is.”
Christine Barber is executive director at Street Safe New Mexico, a nonprofit working to protect prostitutes and other marginalized women. Barber and her associates at Street Safe do outreach with women who are addicted, homeless or street-based sex workers. She said not one of her clients is willing to go to AFAC for help anymore, due to the background check.
“First thing we always say is, ‘Are you okay? What can we do?’ And the second thing we always say is, ‘Do you want medical treatment?’” Barber said. “If they say yes, I say, ‘Okay, just so you know, you’ll have to have a background check’ — and that’s it. There is no conversation beyond that. We’re never going to get one of our clients to go down to SANE to get a rape exam anymore. Before the check it was very difficult to get girls to go anyway, because the SANE offices are located in the police department.”
AFAC shares a building with an Albuquerque Police Department substation, and Barber said she thinks the proximity of that substation should leave no additional cause for safety concerns or policies to address those concerns.
“They are going to have the best response time of anybody in the city because they are in a police department,” she said. “They have 10 armed officers who will be there within seconds because they are literally across the hall.”
Street Safe sees two to three women a week who say they were sexually assaulted, but none of these women alert APD, she said.
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“They keep saying they won’t arrest any (victims), but they won’t put that in the policy,” she said. “It’s a stupid policy; it’s incredibly stupid and incredibly discriminatory. You’re re-victimizing these rape victims, you’re treating them like criminals — (AFAC) is making Albuquerque a haven for rapists.”
D’Anza said there is no reason for those seeking services to worry about being arrested.
“We don’t do background checks here in order to arrest people. We do background checks here to make sure that we’re aware if we have someone who could potentially be of harm or danger to people who are in this facility,” D’Anza said. “To my knowledge — and I’ve been here since 2008, I came here three months after the facility opened — nobody has ever been arrested. The policy has probably been poorly worded in the past, but when you write policies you don’t expect them to be scrutinized by the entire community.”
D’Anza said the policy has been used since AFAC opened in 2007, but since a Standard Operating Procedure review last year the policy has been consistently applied to everyone who enters the office.
“It’s been used on and off, sporadically, inconsistently, since it was implemented in 2007. But the fact of the matter is, there are background checks done here at the AFAC. You might not know whether you would be the person who was asked to provide the information, but it was occurring,” she said. “We’re working on making it so that the policy more properly reflects what the activity is about, which is to keep people safe.”
If people wish to remain anonymous, or if the results of a background check flag them as a security risk, they are never denied services, D’Anza said. People in those situations can instead meet with AFAC employees in a room just off the lobby. However, because of the room’s small size and lack of equipment, full sex assault examinations cannot be done there, she said.
D’Anza said APD lieutenants are also alerted if an AFAC employee is meeting with someone who either refused or failed the background check.
“We want to make sure that we are as accessible as we can be to those who want to seek services here, but we’re not a perfect fit for everybody in the community — just like no agency is,” she said. “We do our best. There are a lot of really high-quality services provided out of this facility, so I hate for people to think that they can’t come here because they might get arrested.”
Matthew Reisen is a staff reporter at the Daily Lobo. He can be contacted at news@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @DailyLobo.
