The Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel (ARCCI) was founded in 1990 as an umbrella organization for the nine regional Rape Crisis Centers (RCCs). It is the only organization in Israel whose main aim is to combat sexual violence. The RCCs work at the individual and regional levels providing services and support for individual victims of sexual violence and working to raise awareness in their local communities.
ARCCI's mission is to combat sexual violence at the national level by making the silent voices of victims heard. Due to the culture of silence that surrounds sexual abuse, the deep shame victims are made to feel, and because of the unique elements of sexual violence, victims are unable to demand their rights and make full use of them. Public space remains an arena of danger: 1 out of every 6 children, 1 out of every 6 men, and 1 out of every 3 women are sexually assaulted in their lifetime. The ARCCI's mission is to act in a multi-pronged approach to combat sexual violence: promoting policies that take the victims into account in the health, social welfare, education, and law enforcement fields, in preventing, handling, and identifying cases of sexual assault. This work strives to create a reality wherein every child, woman, and man could feel safe from sexual assault, and would receive optimal treatment that puts the victim at its focus, if they do experience sexual assault.
More specifically, ARCCI's mission includes:
- Widening and improving the services available to victims of sexual violence in the education, health, law enforcement and social welfare fields.
- Initiating and expanding legislation to broaden the rights of victims, and making punishments for sexual offenders stricter, in order to create deterrence.
- Creating a body of knowledge and adapted models for working with sexual violence victims from unique populations on the topic of sexual assault, its characteristics, and ways of dealing with it, that is accessible and applicable, and that will serve professionals working with victims.
- Raising public awareness and bringing to the fore the implications and consequences of the assault on the victims and their families, as well as to the society around them, and helping the public grasp its scale, characteristics and consequences.