Susan Xenarios, a founder of New York City’s first rape crisis center, who ran the organization for four decades and helped transform how the law, hospitals and the police respond to rape survivors after own experience of a sexual assault, died on Sept. 6 at her home in Manhattan. She was 79.
Roberta Sklar, a friend, said the cause was cancer.
In November 1974, Ms. Xenarios was a 28-year-old social worker when she entered an apartment building in Harlem to investigate a report about a missing baby. A man attacked her in the stairwell, held a knife to her throat, dragged her to the roof and threatened to toss her over.
“You really don’t want to do this,” she kept saying calmly, she recalled to The New York Times decades later. He raped her, ran away and was never caught. Shaken, Ms. Xenarios staggered to a previously scheduled meeting but was so distraught that she collapsed midway through it.
There were no special services for rape survivors in New York City at the time. Ms. Xenarios said she was treated indifferently by the police and an emergency room doctor. She became angry trying to reckon psychologically with the assault, including its impact on her husband.
It was an era when many women who experienced the violation of rape never reported or spoke of it, and legal reforms of the early 1970s meant to make rape cases easier to prosecute were just beginning to be felt.
In 1977, Ms. Xenarios and an emergency room administrator founded the Rape Intervention Program at St. Luke’s Hospital in Upper Manhattan (now Mount Sinai Morningside). Attached to the hospital’s emergency room, it provided forensic evidence collection kits and volunteer counselors who held rape victims’ hands, explained the medical procedures they could expect and offered fresh clothes to wear home.
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The post Susan Xenarios, Who Transformed Rape Crisis Response, Dies at 79 appeared first on New York Times.
