Domestic Violence: A New Level of Awareness This October

From the outside looking in, and to hear the media tell it, America has maintained the illusion that every thing in the power of this country is being done to help victims of domestic violence. Tougher laws have been touted by legislators. President Bush declared October as National Domestic Violence Awareness Month. The television stations run short blips about the National Domestic Violence Hotline, flashing a number across the screen. Vice-Presidential hopeful Joe Biden even penned famous Violence Against Women Act, the manifesto of the American judicial system. Advocates put up fliers, detailing what would-be victims of domestic violence need to know and do about their situation, reiterating the importance of a Safety Plan for when they decide to leave. Websites post charts outlining The Cycle of Abuse and statistics, promising the victims that there is help out there if they would just ask for it.

That's what they want you to believe - but here's the truth.

If a woman decides to leave her abuser and seek shelter at a domestic violence shelter as a last resort, there's no guarantee she will be taken in. According to an article on www.seattlepi.com, 90 percent of women in that city alone, who seek shelter at domestic violence shelters, are turned away because they are full. Further, of thirty nine cities of equal size, only eleven of them said they had a zero percent turn away rate for victims. That equates to one in four. Three out of four times in major cities in America that a victim of domestic violence seeks help from a shelter, she will be turned away. According to The Colorado Commission Against Domestic Violence, in 2006, 5881 women were turned away from the shelters due to no vacancy. This scenario plays out again and again in towns across the country, year after year.

So if not shelter, what other services can 'shelters' offer? That depends on the funding that's available and, more often than not, there isn't any.

Counseling is the service that most shelters push the most often. Counseling to cope. Counseling to make a plan. Counseling to realize it's not your fault. Counseling for your kids. The reason counseling is pushed most often is because, you guessed it, it doesn't cost the shelter anything. The counselors are already paid staffers so why not have them talk to people while they're getting paid - again, keeping up with the illusion to doing something beneficial for the victims. It's a nice sentiment, but what about the people who already know it's not their fault, who have already come to terms with the situation, and have no need for this kind of service?

Transitional housing is another fund-pending service shelters provide. Some of them have apartments available to residents to rent on a sliding scale so they can be on their way to becoming self-sufficient. Most of these are and will remain full and are really moot points at this juncture in a victim's journey. Help with applying for government housing is also available, but going this route doesn't give you any special consideration for the waiting lists, which in most places in Texas alone, is several years long.

Some of the services shelters offer are nothing more than a series of Catch 22s. Childcare is the most popular fund-pending service that the shelters offer. While most shelters do not issue vouchers for child care themselves, they refer you to agencies who do. They sign you up for a waiting list with other agencies, which is months - sometimes a year or more, long. And the criteria for getting on the waiting list is that you either be working or enrolled in school. Hey, that's do-able, right? Yeah - if you had childcare. Which means you wouldn't need to be on their waiting list in the first place. Additionally, shelters can also help you apply for government assistance such as TANF, which is a monthly cash payment that caps out around $230 per month in Texas. However, to qualify for this assistance, you have to be enrolled in school, working, or actively searching for a job at one of the state's job recruiting centers. No problem, right? Right. If you were a single person without kids in need of childcare.

Training programs are also available through the shelters to help victims of domestic violence find jobs. These aren't programs to learn a trade, but to learn how to write resumes, the interview process, and other common sense kinds of things. This would be great for a person who has never worked in their lives, but to a person who, for instance, types upward of fifty words a minute, is a published author, and speaks two languages - it's really a waste of time.

And what of the victims who have their own homes, but just need help with childcare or utilities or car repair or other tangible assistance to keep things going? Are there programs out there for them, to help them remain self-sufficient and keep them from ending up in a shelter - assuming there was a bed to be had?

In a word, no.

Recently, I asked the director of the local womens' shelter in Beaumont, Texas if she's ever seen it happen that women were forced to return to their abusive situations due to lack of resources available to them. She answered, "Every day" - and that she sees more women returning than she has ever seen leave.

And if this is the kind of stark reality and bleak outlook that the advocates themselves have, what kind of hope can we, the victims of domestic violence, expect to find?