Oleta Kirk Abrams: co-founder of rape crisis center
Sunday, January 16, 2005
Oleta Kirk Abrams, who co-founded the nation’s first rape crisis center after her foster daughter was sexually attacked in a Berkeley High stairwell, died Jan. 8 from medical complications during a lung biopsy at Alta Bates Summit Medical Center. She was 77.
A lifelong activist, Ms. Abrams and two friends created Bay Area Women Against Rape in 1971 after Ms. Abrams’ 15-year-old foster daughter was raped and then mistreated by police officers and doctors.
More than three decades later, the Oakland-based nonprofit agency receives more than 1,000 emergency calls a year and has become an international model, most recently replicated in Croatia and Japan.
Ms. Abrams, known by many as “Lee,” created the first 24-hour hot line for victims, and became the first person to accompany rape survivors to court when they testified against their attackers. She was the first victim-witness advocate for the Alameda County district attorney’s office — a position that has been copied nationwide.
Bill Danenhower, who met Ms. Abrams while working as an investigator with the Oakland Police Department’s sexual assault unit, described Ms. Abrams in a recent e-mail as his unit’s “right arm, our mother confessor and adviser.”
She made the district attorney’s office, the hospitals and the police investigators “more aware of the need for special considerations in dealing with special victims,” he said.
Bay Area Women Against Rape, known as BAWAR, now runs several counseling programs and sends rape survivors to prisons to talk to rapists about the long- lasting impact of their crimes.
“She was a visionary person, and she was willing to do the hard work behind it to create that vision,” said Diane Beynon, coordinator of the sexual assault team at BAWAR.
“A lot of us have vision — it’s the follow-through we lack.”
Ms. Abrams turned into a pioneer after her foster daughter was attacked at Berkeley High by someone who came in off Martin Luther King Jr. Way. A janitor interrupted the rape but thought it involved two youngsters “fooling around,” and he didn’t report the crime, said Ms. Abrams’ biological daughter, Rebecca Abrams of Hayward.
Police officers who eventually responded didn’t allow the girl to phone Ms. Abrams and kept her separated from her family at the station, according to published accounts of the attack. The girl had to wait an hour at the hospital for a doctor, who made jokes in the examination room and never checked her for pregnancy or venereal disease.
“It’s horrendous enough to be raped, but to then be treated as if you are guilty or you asked for it, that just outraged my mother,” Rebecca Abrams said.
“She saw an injustice, and she fixed it.”
Friends and family members described Ms. Abrams as a woman who could look at something and see what it could be. After moving from Pennsylvania to Berkeley in 1959 with her husband, Ms. Abrams kept herself busy as a stay-at- home mom by remodeling — which to her meant knocking down walls with a hammer.
Nothing was impossible. When she decided roses would cheer up the yard, she planted a garden that grew to 250 bushes and drew crowds when they bloomed.
Born in Montana, she traveled to Turkey and Haiti as a child, as the family followed her father’s geology career. She graduated from Emerson College in Boston with a drama degree and worked as an elementary school teacher for a short time.
She was accepted into the master’s program at the University of Pittsburg and worked on a thesis involving autistic children before getting married in 1959 and moving to Berkeley.
In the Bay Area, her generosity and activism made her a local legend, said friend Joan Thomson. Ms. Abrams became a foster mother, but she also fostered anyone who showed up on her doorstep looking for a meal, some advice or a place to sleep in troubled times.
“Rape victims would come in, and she’d take care of them for days,” Thomson said. “When my husband and I came from New York and his job fell through, she took us in for two weeks. I once saw her feed 18 people with a pound of meat loaf.”
Ms. Abrams didn’t retire until she was 70. From 1984 to 1999, she worked as a teacher at Hintil Kuu Ca, a preschool for Native American children in the Oakland public school system.
She recently took a trip with Thomson to the Asilomar resort near Monterey, where the girlfriends delighted in breaking the no-food policy by sneaking in a cappuccino maker and drinking their contraband behind drawn curtains.
In her last days, her children sang folk songs and lullabies to her from her beloved piano songbooks.
In addition to her daughter, Rebecca Abrams, she is survived by sons Maxey McClintock of Berkeley and Simon Peter Kirk Abrams of Oakland; daughter Alexandra Chordas of Berkeley; and five grandchildren. Her husband, Melvin Saul Abrams, preceded her in death.
Services will be held in May or June when the roses are in bloom at her Bateman Street home. For more information, contact Rebecca Abrams at [email protected].
Donations in Ms. Abrams’ name can be made to the Hintil Parent Committee, c/o Hintil Kuu Ca, 11850 Campus Drive, Oakland, CA 94619.