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Who We Are
The Tel Aviv Sexual Assault Crisis Center, initially called the Tel Aviv Rape Crisis Center, was founded in 1978 by the Tel Aviv branch of the Israel Feminist Movement, evolving in 1982 into an independent, fully accredited, non-profit organization. It was the first such entity in Israel and remains the largest, offering the most services. Israel's Sexual Assault/Rape Crisis Centers are divided by region, with 9 sister Centers offering direct services to survivors across Israel.
The Tel Aviv Center serves several parallel roles:
• Providing immediate crisis intervention services to women
• Raising public awareness
• Initiating essential social change through extensive educational outreach programs
How We Operate
The Tel Aviv Sexual Assault Crisis Center is directed by an elected 7-member Board of Directors. Financial and operational oversight is conducted by an elected 3-member Oversight Committee. All these officers are elected by the organization’s approximately 250 volunteers from among themselves, on the basis of criteria set forth in the organization’s charter.
Day-to-day administration and professional support for the Center’s services and activities is managed by a highly qualified Executive Director and carried out by a 16-member professional staff that includes Coordinators for each of the Center’s departments and activities:
- Women's Crisis Hotline: Crisis Interventions and Supplementary Support Services.
- Volunteers: Training, Supervision and Retention.
- Men's Hotline: Crisis Interventions and Supplementary Support Services.
- Religious Men's Hotline: Crisis Interventions, Supplementary Support Services and Outreach to the Religious Community.
- Educational Outreach Programming
- At-Risk Youth Educational Outreach Programming
- Religious Sector Educational Programming
- Training Professionals Educational Programming
- Law Enforcement Process Accompaniment
- Judicial Process Accompaniment
- Sexual Harassment Prevention
The volunteers have two main avenues for volunteering: staffing the Hotlines in 3-hour shifts once a week, or engaging in the Education Department’s broad outreach program to junior and senior high schools, boarding schools, army, places of employment and other sectors. They can also volunteer for information and library activities, organizing public events, and more. All volunteers and staff members, as well, must participate in a 24-week training program. The volunteers must also regularly attend supervision sessions. The volunteers are supported in their work by the Center’s professional staff.
What We Do
Unlike other traumatic events, sexual abuse is often experienced as a trauma that one undergoes alone. The survivor can feel that society is unable to accept her story and her experience, and as a result, in addition to the trauma of the event itself, she is left with a feeling of isolation, exclusion and guilt.
The Tel Aviv Sexual Assault Crisis Center’s main service is its 24 hours a day, 7 days a week Hotline for Women. The Hotline for Men, which is the only such line for men in Israel, is staffed 7 days a week. In 2003, the Center opened a designated Hotline for Religious Men and Youth operating 5 days a week from 7:00 PM to 11:00 PM.
All three hotlines provide immediate emotional, “lending an ear” assistance, tailored to the caller’s specific needs and give basic information to survivors of sexual assault, which can be of any type and of any degree of severity. The guiding philosophy is based on three main principles: the survivor is never the guilty party; there is no room for a judgmental attitude; the volunteer and the caller are equal in status.
Supplementary Services
The Tel Aviv Sexual Assault Crisis Center provides a number of additional services to those who seek assistance:
- Customized support groups
- Individual face-to-face crisis meetings
- Case management
- Law Enforcement Process Accompaniment
- Judicial Process Accompaniment
- Sexual Trauma Rehabilitation Services Process (Bituach Leumi/Sal Shikum) Accompaniment
Public Outreach Projects
The Tel Aviv Sexual Assault Crisis Center conducts a number of public outreach projects, the majority of which are aimed at promoting change in the prevailing public attitudes towards survivors of sexual assault. This is done in order to achieve an improvement in the policy, procedure and treatment of sexual assault victims, eventually leading towards increased reporting by survivors. Another aim is to significantly reduce and hopefully prevent acts of sexual assault through education and raising public awareness.
Included among the projects are:
- Age-appropirate psychodymanic workshops for middle and high school students.
- Psychodynamic workshops for at-risk youth
- Workshops for youth groups and informal education structures
- Trainings for educators
- Trainings for parents
- Sexual harassment prevention in the workplace programming.
- Workshops for inmates in state prisons.
- Police trainings, secondary trauma support.
- Prosecutors/DA trainings, secondary trauma support.
- Trauma rehabilitation systems trainings (Bituach Leumi/Sal Shikum)
- Mental health professionals trainings
- Medical professionals trainings
- -Social service workers trainings
- Advanced specialization course in sexual trauma treatment in conjunction with Bar Ilan University
- Programming in conjunction with the Israeli Military (IDF)
- "Fear Not for Thou Shalt Not Be Ashamed: Ultra-Orthodox Programming"
- Pride partnership with the LGBTQ community
- Raising awareness: Activism events
- Raising awareness: Digital and media outreach
- The audio-visual testimonies project
- The good-night campaign