Some of you reading this will be new to my work; others have become acquainted through my past Examiner column, my radio programs, or the interview at 50 in 52. A few of you I know, will have been with me since the beginning.
Almost ten years have passed since I first made my tentative inquiries with domestic violence shelters and resources, asking for information. At the time, I was writing a novel and simply wanted to get my facts straight, as I’m well aware even fiction needs to make sense in the real world. Much to my chagrin, and despite my 10+ years of experience in the field of social/human services, I found that unlike every other program or agency in the country, those that dealt with partner abuse had no interest in serving most of the people in their communities. Their restrictions were based on gender, and a variety of other quantifiers that made very little sense to someone used to agencies who strictly adhere to federal equality provisions.
As I found later, it hadn’t always been that way. I knew from personal experience that our local shelter for abused women was a quite different agency in 1991 than it was in 2005, both years when I served as a member of my local Allocations Panel for United Way.
I’ve since had occasion to find out that many shelters and programs nationwide had been poised to provide equal services to both men and women, prior to the passage of the Violence Against Women Act of 1994. At the level of those who provide direct client services, this made sense, as it was obvious to those agencies that times were changing, and their communities had a need for different services than had been provided in the past.
Unfortunately for those agencies with a forward-looking bent, VAWA turned the entire issue of partner abuse into a political and gender issue which placed their agencies and services back several decades. Ideas from the 1960s and even 1950s were now apparently guiding principles by which communities nationwide were expected to run their programs, or risk loss of the newly-available federal grant money.
The overwhelming majority of those services complied, and today we have a system that is not only broken, but so regressive as to cause more harm than good.
I would not refer my worst enemy to our local women’s shelter. The reason is clear: they provide a single solution for everyone, regardless of circumstances. That solution is a divorce.
Yes, that is all these much-praised and highly-vaunted programs provide. Some even will give a woman help to find a menial job. They don’t accept women who already have jobs, or single women, or women with male children over the age of 12. Disabled women and lesbian women are often also excluded.
While it is now well-known that divorce causes a horrific number of other problems, these agencies continue to hold fast to their idea that removing a woman from her home environment – and nothing else – will solve any issue of partner abuse.
This approach only works in a few cases. Partner abuse is a complex problem that is never enough the same to allow a single-pointed response. It is not always even domestic violence. Sometimes it is psychological control, with never a fist or weapon being raised.
A federal law, with accompanying agencies and services, cannot begin to approach the totality of the issue. 15 years after VAWA and its regressive, biased, notions were enacted, there is no evidence of any impact on this large, and quite human, issue.
It is an axiom in the social services field that successful programs are well-supported by their communities. I’ve seen this happen myself, in the form of a food bank and a literacy program in my local area that have been able to expand and add new functions, while quite literally changing the definition of the problem they address, to the benefit of the community they serve. They are so successful they haven’t had to issue a press release or any kind of media campaign about imminent closure or financial problems for many years.
This is quite unlike the women’s shelters for domestic violence, who constantly seem to be at risk of closure due to financial reasons. I have a running Google alert for this kind of news, and it seems almost every week there’s one shelter or another somewhere in the US or Canada “at risk.”
If they effectively served their communities, then they wouldn’t be “at risk.” Word gets out. One woman tells another, “don’t go there, they treat you badly.” It only takes one bad experience, widely circulated, for a prospective donor to mail their check elsewhere.
This is not about an awareness issue. Neither is it about an “uncaring populace.” It is about ineffective programs being badly run by people with no training or education in the daily operation of human services agencies. So many directors of local shelters and agencies have nothing but a degree in women’s studies to recommend them, that it is a national disgrace.
These programs are poorly run in their daily operations, and have no interest in their basic mandate – which is serving their communities – that if they were to be closed or forced to run limited operations, their local areas would hardly be affected.
While the scope of this problem is far less than the public has been led to believe, we need to recognize that the misery of those suffering cannot be quantified by such things as gender or circumstances of employment.
We cannot continue to provide help that every American pays for through their tax dollars and then limit that help to a few people who meet criteria based on political ideology.
We have an urgent need to get this issue out of the political arena, and fast. Our difficult economy demands it, as partner abuse escalates in situations of outside stress to a relationship. This is common sense. We don’t need any university study or stack of numbers to let us know that abusive people become more so under stress.
The ugly, backward provisions of VAWA need to be removed from our communities and its proponents sent back to the fringes of society where they belong. Otherwise, almost no one will be helped, and no progress made in new approaches, and we need far more from our tax dollars than that.
