History of the Austin Rape Crisis Center: Pioneering Support for Survivors

The Austin Rape Crisis Center (ARCC), the first rape crisis center in Texas, opened on July 1, 1974. By early 1973, at the request of the National Rape Task Force of the National Organization for Women (NOW), the Austin chapter of NOW established a local rape task force to determine if there was a need to create a rape crisis center in Austin. The student chapter of NOW at the University of Texas joined a dozen women from Austin NOW and formed the committee, chaired by Laura Guerrero Brookshire. They decided to establish the center.

 Local studies had established a need, and an article in the February 3, 1973, edition of the Austin American-Statesman reported on the many challenges facing victims of sexual violence. In Austin, forty-eight rapes and twenty-three attempted rapes had been reported to police in 1972, but law enforcement estimated that only 50 percent to as low as 20 percent of all rapes were actually reported. At the time, no social workers worked at the hospital during the night to support rape victims, who sometimes had to wait more than twelve hours for treatment, as other physical emergencies were prioritized. Lab tests took a long time to complete, and a victim who went to the hospital for a rape examination had to pay for it herself. No psychological assistance was available to support victims/survivors, and the Austin Police Department had no female police officers. Both the prosecution and conviction rates for rape were poor.

The purpose of the Austin Rape Crisis Center from the beginning was two-fold: to provide services to survivors of sexual assault and to educate the public about the frequency of rape, its causes, and what could be done about it. Laura Brookshire, Vicky Worsham, Karen Duggan, Patricia Davis, Karen Bartoletti, Ellen Rubenstein Fisher, and many other women created the ARCC through the local NOW task force, supported by the Austin City Council and other women’s groups. Work began with a $2,700 grant from the city of Austin to open a rape hotline. The ARCC worked with the Austin Police Department, the district attorney’s office, and Brackenridge Hospital, and the city council and county commissioners court assisted with early funding. The United Way eventually also provided funding. 

The Austin Rape Crisis Center was a not-for-profit organization with tax exempt status and was governed by a board of directors and administered by a paid staff. Volunteers (mostly women) under the direction of staff conducted much of the work and were on twenty-four-hour-call to go to the hospital to be with survivors. Volunteers and staff made presentations to community groups and school classes at all levels. Such services had never been available before in Austin. ARCC created a volunteer training program that prepared new volunteers for the work two or three times a year. 

Lee Donaldson served as the first executive director of ARCC. In addition to working with the Austin Police Department and the district attorney’s office, she advocated putting rape education in schools, creating aftercare groups for victims, and promoting an anti-hitchhiking campaign. She also addressed the issue of false reports of rape, which many people incorrectly believed were a frequent occurrence. Her successor, Arlene Lyons, took over in June 1975. At that time reports of rape in Austin had increased by 88 percent since 1972. Lyons raised the issue of child sexual abuse at a time when the need to confront that problem was barely acknowledged publicly. She applied through the Department of Public Welfare for a $200,000 grant to start a "group foster care facility" for sexually abused children, but the project never came to fruition. During this time ARCC began working with Brackenridge Hospital to address emergency room accommodations for child rape victims.  

In 1977 Sylvia Callaway became the third executive director. In her training of ARCC staff and volunteers, she created a methodology of rape work grounded in love and common humanity. In 1978 she hired the first male staff member at ARCC, as public education director. She was an early leader in the newly-formed National Coalition Against Sexual Assault (NCASA) and served as vice president and president. The second national conference of NCASA, cosponsored by ARCC and the University of Texas School of Social Work, was held in Austin in 1980 at her request. By 1980 the ARCC’s team of volunteers also included a number of men. Volunteer Sherri Goode Sunaz became the first manager of the State of Texas Sexual Assault Prevention and Crisis Services program when it was created in the early 1980s, and she later served as president of the Texas Association Against Sexual Assault and went to Washington, D. C., to testify before Congress in support of passage of the first Violence Against Women Act.

During Callaway’s tenure as ARCC director, the center celebrated its tenth anniversary in 1984. In addition to providing survivor support and community education, other accomplishments included: the formation of an Interagency Committee on Sexual Assault to coordinate activities between the police department, district attorney's office, hospital, child welfare groups, and other organizations involved in sexual assault cases; assistance in establishing the Texas Association Against Sexual Assault and that organization’s success in obtaining funding for rape crisis centers across the state; and the creation of Project SEY, Services to Exploited Youth, in Austin. In 1984 the National Center for the Prevention and Control of Rape selected the Austin Rape Crisis Center as one of nine exemplary rape crisis centers in the U. S. and recognized it “for its accomplishments as an independent agency, its full complement of direct and educational services, and for the program’s ‘non-traditional and daring’ use of men as volunteers and staff.”  

Sue Johnson succeeded Sylvia Callaway as executive director of ARCC from late 1985 to 1989. A successful businesswomen and active in the Austin Area Human Services Association, she secured grants from the Travis County Victims Crime Fund and Shoal Creek Hospital to create a thirty-minute video, produced by ARCC public education coordinator Pamela Kinney, for middle school and high school students on violence-free relationships. Fifth ARCC executive director Lynn Thompson-Haas was the first ARCC executive director to be a licensed social worker with administrative experience. She expanded the outreach of the ARCC and created the People of Color Task Force to bring several minority groups together to discover their common issues.

Thompson-Haas hired ARCC volunteer Tonya Edmond to be the director of client services in 1990. In this role, Edmond expanded client services to be more inclusive of survivors of color, men, and the LGBTQ community, which resulted in the formation of the ARCC’s first support groups for women of color and male survivors. Lacey Sloan was hired as public education director for ARCC in 1991. Together Edmond and Sloan surveyed the LGBTQ community about their perceptions of ARCC and their needs as survivors, which led to changes in services and volunteer training. They expanded outreach to people with disabilities, elders, LGBTQ people, Asian and Asian-American communities, and Latinx communities and recruited volunteers from these communities to ensure services met their needs. Edmond and others also developed an interagency committee whose major outcome was the development and implementation of the first Sexual Assault Nurse Examiners program in the Austin region.

ARCC staff members sometimes contributed features and opinion pieces to the Austin American-Statesman in the effort to further its mission to educate the public regarding rape and rape survivors and the center’s core belief that the socialization of men and women is a major factor leading to violence against women. In 1993 the ARCC served 1,655 sexual assault survivors and reached 8,423 students in presentations to schools. Work included volunteer training in different languages as well as working with special needs and physically challenged people. In an interview with the Austin American-Statesman for the March 25, 1994, edition, Lynn Thompson-Haas emphasized that the ARCC had developed and expanded its professional services while maintaining its “strong grassroots component” to foster social change in terms of sexual violence. At that time the center had more than 200 volunteers.

In October 1994 it was announced that the ARCC board of directors hired Ginger Eways as executive director. By January 1997 the ARCC board and director began talking to the Austin Center for Battered Women about a merger. A year later, on January 1, 1998, the two organizations merged and became SafePlace.