Rebuilding Hope! Sexual Assault Center for Pierce County
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Mission Statement
Rebuilding Hope! Sexual Assault Center for Pierce County offers support toward healing through advocacy and therapy for those affected by sexual assault and abuse. Through education and collaboration, Rebuilding Hope improves the community’s response to sexual assault and abuse victims and challenges the behaviors and beliefs that promote sexual violence.
About This Cause
Rebuilding Hope, the Sexual Assault Center for Pierce County has been providing specialized sexual assault and abuse survivor services, outreach and prevention education to Pierce County, Washington for almost 50 years! We are the longest-running standalone community sexual assault program in Washington State and we are the only state-accredited community sexual assault program serving Pierce County. The beginning of this agency dates back to 1972, the same year often quoted as the beginning of the ‘Sexual Assault Movement’. A group of young women attending the Tacoma Learning Center surveyed Pierce County and found there were very few services available to help individuals who had been raped or sexually abused. They decided to provide support services to victims of sexual assault in the local community and founded what was then called Pierce County Rape Relief, which formally incorporated as a 501(c)(3) organization in 1975. With no initial funding, they began to handle crisis calls from their own homes, with referrals and then housing and resources coming from other local organizations. Pioneers in the field have told us that when they started, they “didn’t even have language.” Initially, agency services were designed and delivered to meet the needs of sexual assault victims during their time of crisis; hence advocacy was developed. Services were expanded to include secondary victim advocacy (for partners, children and other family members, and friends) and therapy, where behavioral effects could be identified and dealt with in an effort to re-attain healthy, whole individuals. In 1989, the agency changed its name to Sexual Assault Crisis Center of Pierce County to broaden the focus beyond rape to include all forms of sexual assault. In 1997, the agency’s name changed once more to the Sexual Assault Center of Pierce County, lessening the focus on immediate crisis intervention and becoming more inclusive of prevention, education and long-term healing. During that same year, the agency become a Washington State Accredited Sexual Assault Program and as such, is responsible as the primary provider of sexual assault advocacy and education/prevention services for all of Pierce County. In 2011, the agency expanded its name to include Rebuilding Hope! Sexual Assault Center for Pierce County. The addition of "Rebuilding Hope" was inspired by an effort to make the agency more approachable to the community we serve, to better acknowledge to positive outcomes associated with connecting survivors with support and to offer clients more options to identify where they were seeking services from. In 2015, Rebuilding Hope added an initiative to its strategic plan and programming that specifically addresses commercial sexual exploitation/sex trafficking in Pierce County. The Sex Trafficking and Exploitation Program (STEP) employs wrap-around community case managers that help the County better identify and respond to individuals at-risk of and experiencing commercial sexual exploitation. In the beginning, the agency struggled to meet the needs of victims; today we struggle to end sexual assault, through prevention and societal intolerance for sexual violence. Until this is accomplished the need for education and therapy services/advocacy efforts on behalf of victims, their families and friends will continue and grow as more victims become willing to step forward for help and assistance.