The Oasis shelter in Lake Charles offers information and emotional support services to domestic and sexual assault victims and their families, Kelli Barnes, community educator and trainer at Oasis, told the Westlake Rotary Club on Thursday.
Barnes said someone is sexually assaulted every two minutes in the United States. She said sexual violence includes rape, child molestation, incest and sexual harassment.
Oasis provides hospital accompaniment and medical advocacy, Barnes said. Volunteers will take sexual assault victims to Lake Charles Memorial Hospital, where nurses will examine them, she said.
“Volunteers are essential to our program,” Barnes said. “It takes a special person to go through the training and to be on call.”
She said Oasis also provides legal advocacy and offers referrals for victims who need long-term therapy. Oasis refers them to a therapist at Family and Youth Counseling, Barnes said, and if the referral comes from Oasis, there is no cost to that person.
Community education is another facet of Oasis, she said. “I go anywhere and everywhere to talk about sexual violence,” Barnes said.
Oasis has school curriculums that are approved by the state, she said. “We talk about developing social skills and healthy behaviors which we hope will help reduce victimization,” she said.
Another hot topic, she said, is sexting. “There have been serious, horrible, very sad repercussions if someone has been the victim of sexting,” Barnes said.
She said the shelter also works with victims of sex trafficking. The center for sex trafficking in Texas is Houston, and the center in Louisiana is Baton Rouge, Barnes said.
She said she goes to the juvenile detention center and works with its teams. There are girls there who have been trafficked for sex, she said. “They don’t know what to do with them,” Barnes said. “They need to be in a safe place.”
Barnes said the U.S. Justice Department estimates that there is one child molester per square mile in the United States. She said the average child molester victimizes 50-150 children before he or she is caught. “With our population increasing,” Barnes said, “we’re going to see an increase in sexual violence.”
For more information on Oasis, call 436-4552. For assistance, call the National Sexual Assault hotline at 866-570-7273.
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