Warning: this article contains mentions of sexual assault.
From Montecito to the Santa Ynez Valley, the local nonprofit Standing Together to End Sexual Assault has been providing support to sexual assault survivors for the past 50 years.
Standing Together to End Sexual Assault (STESA) was established in 1974 as a 24-hour hotline out of Muff Bizwell’s garage in Santa Barbara. Bizwell, along with Nora Hochman and Barbara Lindemann, established the first crisis hotline for sexual assault in Santa Barbara, with the help of volunteers. In the following decades, the nonprofit organization expanded to include counseling, education and self-defense classes while running the 24-hour hotline.
STESA is relocating to Anacapa Street from their current location on East Canon Perdido Street. Jack Dindia / Daily Nexus
To accommodate the nonlinear forms of coping with sexual assault, STESA provides counseling for survivors in a variety of ways. Its “crisis counseling” focuses on immediate incidents and provides survivors with up to 10 free sessions. The organization also provides long-term counseling and helps clients work through past or recent trauma they may have experienced.
Pricing for counseling services varies based on a client’s financial situation. According to STESA Community Engagement Manager Karla Huizar, the organization uses a “sliding scale” to determine how much a client will pay.
“To be honest with you, we’ve offered counseling at 25 cents per session. So it really just depends on where that survivor is at,” Huizar said.
According to Huizar, most of STESA’s clients come through its 24-hour hotline and start with crisis counseling before moving into long-term. She said that clients can come and go as they please, and they are always assessed on the type of counseling suitable for them when they return.
As a nonprofit organization, STESA heavily relies on volunteers to run the hotline. In order to become a first responder for the hotline, volunteers must undergo crisis intervention training. If no first responder is available, the hotline call is directed to staff members.
Huizar underlined the significance of STESA operating as a nonprofit, since its goal is to “work for the people.” While STESA needs money to function, Huizar said, they’re ultimately here to “work for survivors.”
STESA’s main philosophy when counseling clients is to believe, support and validate them. Huizar emphasized that STESA uses the “empowerment model” when counseling clients, meaning they won’t guide survivors in a specific direction, but rather help them gain internal validation for whatever decision may suit them best.
Approaches may also differ by age. Huizar said the empowerment model may be confusing for underage clients who are still learning to set boundaries.
“With minors, we tend to just take a little bit more time. They’re super aware, it’s just they don’t give themselves the permission, is what I’ve seen,” Huizar said. “But nevertheless, we use the empowerment model.”
STESA also allows survivors to report perpetrators and can provide some legal assistance, such as contacting the police or pressing charges. Through STESA, survivors can also report incidents anonymously to law enforcement. Huizar highlighted that there have been a few cases where multiple anonymous reports helped identify a serial perpetrator.
“I know that we’ve had at least three different survivors who all submitted anonymous reports, and their reports were tied to other sexual assaults. So then these perpetrators were incarcerated because they had multiple sexual assaults,” Huizar said. “It was that anonymous report, where [survivors] were initially not ready to disclose their personal information, but it led to their perpetrator being arrested.”
Huizar emphasized the importance of having trauma-informed law enforcement in the community. Huizar said STESA trains local law enforcement agencies three times throughout each year.
“Regardless of what’s going on in the community, survivors will always be treated with fairness [and] with integrity,” Huizar said.
When discussing sexual assault, Huizar believes there needs to be “a lot more education” on both consent and boundaries on college campuses. When Huizar was doing crisis work around four years ago, she felt as if UC Santa Barbara had failed to protect survivors and penalize perpetrators.
“They are letting a lot of cases slide, and a lot of these perpetrators are getting away with what they did, and the survivors are the ones that are left with the responsibility of ‘do I continue school or not?’” Huizar said. “We’ve had cases where the survivors were sexually assaulted by their professors, and their professors are still today teaching, and why didn’t anything happen? There’s no intervention there and there’s no accountability that was taken.”
STESA’s current biggest project is its “Raise the Bar” campaign, which seeks to make night life in Santa Barbara safer by reducing sexual assaults at bars and clubs. The campaign is built around bystander intervention training for night life staff and has been expanded to focus more on policy and education since its cultivation in 2015.
In 2022, the campaign was revived in collaboration with UCSB partners and received a $180,000 grant in 2024 to reboot the project, according to Huiraz. As of now, STESA is collecting data from nightlife transport services such as Bill’s Bus or Jump on the School Bus, as well as from patrons, in order to better develop their education curriculum.
STESA specifically collaborates with campus organizations like Associated Students (A.S.) Take Back the Night (TBTN) and the Pardall Center to better prepare students for recognizing sexual assault, as well as further bystander training.
In regard to male sexual violence, Huizar suspects that men experience sexual assault at a higher rate than reported but are less likely to come forward. Additionally, Huizar suspects that people assaulted within marginalized groups are less likely to report their assaulter as they “want to protect each other.”
“[Survivors] did not report the perpetrator because they don’t want them to be another statistic, and that was their sole reason. I don’t want them to be another statistic,” Huizar said. “Justice looks different for everyone, so [survivors] just need them to know that they did something bad, and that law enforcement is aware. But I don’t want them to go to jail because I know this is not going to go good for my race.”
With sexual assault being at the forefront of American politics due to the Epstein files[[ok]], Huizar said “we don’t see the justice system working in favor of survivors.” She highlighted that powerful people “getting away” with sexual assault can lead to a survivor feeling discouraged about reporting their assaulter.
“These are such powerful people, and they’re getting away with what they’re doing,” Huizar said. “For survivors whose cases don’t have all this evidence, they’re feeling like, ‘if that’s what that survivor didn’t get what am I gonna expect for my own case?’”
However, Huizar noted a positive that came from the Epstein files: “a lot more compassion and empathy” on a broad scale. Additionally, she said the files help prove that sexual assault looks vastly different across many cases.
“In Santa Barbara County, human trafficking looks very different. One of my concerns is there’s this idea of what sexual assault looks like, and when it doesn’t fit that box, then you just don’t accept anything else,” Huizar said.
Looking forward, Huizar hopes that STESA will focus more on human sex trafficking, as she said it’s a prevalent issue in Santa Barbara County. Within 10 years, she hopes that STESA will continue to grow and expand its services to focus more on prevention and create additional support groups for men or the LGBTQIA+ community.
“STESA has helped the community move to a place where we’ve made it supportive and have validated and said ‘yes, you need to heal.’ So I see our community shifting, and I do see our community moving towards a more supportive and less tolerant of sexual violence,” Huizar concluded.
A version of this article appeared on p. 1 of the April 16 print edition of the Daily Nexus.
