Do you want to know what incest is? What it really is? No ...

fenders, continues as needed for as long as needed. Free of charge.
In California, as in most states, the child victim who complains of abuse must take the
witness stand in criminal proceedings. Someone at Stuart House asked me to imagine
what it ' s like: You are five years old. You have been told by your father that he will kill
you and your mother and your baby sister if you ever tell the truth about what he did.
Your mother isn't allowed in the courtroom with you. You had to leave her crying outside
in the hall. You sit in the witness chair. Your father sits in front of you. The judge asks if
you know who God is. He orders you to tell the truth. Your father, whom you love, glares
at you with his don't-you-dare expression. A strange, scary crowd of adults also stares
at you. You can't speak. The judge tells you to speak up. You start to cry. On crossexamination,
your father's lawyers ridicule you, trick you, and call you a liar.
Stuart House children who must testify are shown the courtroom ahead of time. They
are allowed to sit on the witness stand, talk into the microphone, and meet the bailiff
and the judge. At trial, someone the children know and trust from Stuart House goes
into the courtroom with them for support. (A parent who is not a witness can also
accompany the child, but parents are often called to testify, and witnesses are allowed
into the courtroom only to give their own testimony.)
When her abuser came to trial, Matti had to testify. She had to look at every picture he
had taken of her and tell the judge what was happening in each one. Her mother, who
has never seen the photographs —"I don't want to," she says—stood in the back of the
courtroom and listened. Matti's abuser, who, it had been revealed by investigators at
Stuart House, had also molested his stepdaughter, was sentenced to 34 years in prison.
The counselors explained to Matti how old she will be when he is released.
For more than a year, Matti continued to go to Stuart House for therapy. Her mother
attended the weekly moms' group. "Before that," she told me, "I couldn't open up. It
helped me so much to be with other mothers and to really talk."
The support Stuart House gives to its clients is unequaled anywhere in the country or
the world; delegates from as far away as Fiji, Japan, Australia, and England have come
to study what goes on there. "We could reorganize the whole system," Abarbanel says,
" if there were Stuart Houses everywhere. Then the professionals could do what they're
supposed to do: provide services. It takes leadership more than money. A community
could convert a room or a floor in an existing building—establish a place for the
agencies to operate in one place and make a commitment to work as a team. There
could be children's courts, with rooms scaled down and designed for kids, where the
environment isn't scary. In the long run it saves money. Cases are well put together and
end in more guilty pleas. That saves hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars per
case."
Convictions
"It's getting better," says Los Angeles District Attorney Bill Penzin. "Partly because of
Stuart House, we're getting better statutes and having better outcomes." Also partly
responsible for the improvement is a recent change in California law extending the
statute of limitations in civil cases pertaining to sexual abuse and incest.
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