Wanda Vision star Elizabeth Olsen plans to battle sexual abuse on internet

Elizabeth Olsen pays tribute to Rape Foundation and Stuart House founder Gail Abarbanel for changing lives of sexually abused victims.

Marvel superhero Elizabeth Olsen paid tribute to the real-life superhero Gail Abarbanel, the founder and director of the Los Angeles based The Rape Foundation and Stuart House – an organization providing a place where children who are sexually assault survivors are provided free medical, legal and psychological care.

Wanda Vision star Elizabeth Olsen plans to battle sexual abuse on internet

According to Variety, in her speech at Variety’s Power of Women event, Olsen spoke passionately about Abarbanel, also in attendance, and the Los Angeles organization that the activist founded nearly five decades ago. “When I learned about tonight, I asked Gail if there is anything that she would like to do next with the foundation, because in my mind she’s already thought of everything. She said, ‘Yes, to stop sexual abuse on the internet,'” she said.

“To me that sounded very, very big and maybe impossible. But if you were to ask her what she wanted to create in 1974, I think that would have also sounded just as big and impossible.” As the report notes, Abarbanel founded Stuart House after recognizing how poor support networks for sexual abuse victims were during her time as a social worker in Santa Monica.

“I learned about all the ways that Stuart House has managed to fill a need in a system that can otherwise be so damaging to child victims,” Olsen continued. “Without a program like Stuart House, it’s not unheard of for a child to have to go to as many as six different agencies to report their abuse and sit through interviews by professionals with no training whatsoever on how to work with children. At Stuart House, they provide in-house police detectives, prosecutors, child advocates, therapists and forensic services to help expedite investigations and child protection actions.”

Elizabeth Olsen also shared an instance of a boy who has been with the foundation for three months and started going early since a while as he liked to go there. “I don’t say this lightly, but the kids who come to Stuart House really love coming… There’s a 5-year-old boy who’s been with us for the last three months and he started coming early just because he wants to play with our magnetic tiles,” Olsen shared. “Ultimately, he’s having a positive association with the people and the place where he is receiving treatment — treatment that will ultimately be life-saving for his future. And his future is one of many that Gail has helped transform.”

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