Keeping Children Home

The Violence Intervention Program (VIP) was founded in 1984, as the Center for the Vulnerable Child, the first Child Advocacy Center in the U.S. that was medically based.

This child abuse focused program rapidly grew into a clinic that provides medical and mental health services for all victims of family violence and sexual assault. Importantly, VIP provided 24-hour response to children, youth, women, and elderly. 

While sitting in a child death review case, founder Dr. Astrid Heppenstall Heger, a professor of clinical pediatrics, realized that protecting children in Los Angeles would require a 24-hour center where her highly trained team could assess any child referred for possible abuse or any child at risk for foster care, and where VIP with social services would determine the appropriate and best intervention. This access to expert evaluations help cut foster care numbers in half, and likely prevented hundreds of children’s deaths at the hands of abusive caretakers. 

Heger began VIP with a handful of staff in a room she said was smaller than her current guest bathroom. Through her pioneering work in the field of child abuse and sexual assault, VIP has changed interventions and outcomes. Because of VIP’s groundbreaking work, Heger received the highest U.S. honor for service to crime victims, accepting the Crime Victim Service Award from the Department of Justice. 

Today the organization has more than 200 employees and offers dozens of services. The 24-hour multidisciplinary clinic evaluates 70% of all child abuse cases in L.A. County and is the only 24/7 clinic for abuse and assault in the county. 

It also has specialized clinics that include the Elder Abuse Forensic Center, the only one of its kind in L.A., and an LGBTQ focused clinic named in partnership with The Alexis Arquette Family Foundation. Altogether, VIP fills a key need in the county by helping 20,000 people a year move past abuse, neglect, and assault.

The group’s mission is to act and build programs where the welfare system fails.

“I personally believe that when issues come up that impact our patient population or the community, and no one is [solving] it, we should be doing it,” Heger says.   

With that same attitude, VIP and Heger have ambitious goals ahead. That includes transforming L.A.’s foster care system by helping families living below the poverty line prevent in-home violence and providing the support they need to retain their children within the nuclear family. Some funds will go directly to supporting families as they struggle to keep their children in their homes.

VIP’s new program “No Kid Graduates to the Streets” will be part of its mentoring program and community outreach efforts housed at its Leonard Hill Hope Center on the campus of the Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center in East Los Angeles, and will emphasize a need to change the desperate course that is set out for most foster children and youth. The program will provide a coordinated approach to “each child has a mentor” and hopes to build an IT system to streamline information sharing and easy access to County services, activities, and apprenticeships.  

“We want to stop homelessness where it starts, when the child is small and loses the true concept of home,” Heger said. “I really want to focus on the children and see the world through their eyes, their expectations, and provide a lens of hope.”