Lifting the veil of secrecy on women’s shelters – Part Three

June 18, 8:22 AMDomestic Violence ExaminerTrudy Schuett

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Evidencing the Need

Numbers and statistics play a big part in the programs’ constant fundraising and PR efforts. You may have seen in a newspaper or on TV that shelters in your state or city or county turn away X number of women and children each year, including the statement, “mostly due to lack of space.” There will be a large number in the tens or hundreds of thousands, depending on the population of the area.

That word, “mostly” is important here, because it can obscure the reality. Lack of space is a factor, but not the only factor in operation when they deny services.

It may help to get a bit of understanding on the way non-profits determine their numbers, so we’ll provide a little primer here. Non-profits generally calculate their amounts of service provided based on what is called a service unit. In the case of a shelter, this would be one night, in one bed. A year then would be 365 service units. A shelter at full capacity with ten beds would provide 3650 service units per year.

This may not equal 3650 people, however. A woman staying multiple nights will use  multiple service units. She will be represented in the total multiple times, according to the length of her stay.

When they want to get an accurate count of the number of people they’ve served in a given length of time, regardless of the number of nights, they call it a number of unduplicated individuals. Still, for fundraising/publicity purposes, non-profits will often use their number of service units, and call it people, even though that’s not strictly true.

So every time we hear the statement about people being turned away, or the number of people they’ve “served” over a period of time, it always raises a question: how do they arrive at those numbers? Are these unduplicated individuals?

In the case where we’re considering a group of different agencies reporting a number of people being turned away, the picture becomes even more confused. Was the same family turned away by more than one agency? How many different times during the year does this same family show up in the accounting? How many families are turned away by one agency, yet are accepted by another on the same day? There’s no way to know.

Further, and this is the big question here: how many were turned away not due to lack of space, but simply because they were men, or employed women, or women with older male children? There’s no way to know that, either.

What we do know is that these big numbers keep getting tossed around. The public usually believes them, and responds in kind, with more private donations, more funding from government sources.

If any other agency attempted to engage in these kinds of practices in the same way, they would soon lose all public credibility. Certainly their funding would be affected, as granting agencies insist on transparency and disclosure from applicants in order to determine their effectiveness and ultimate value to the community. Yet shelter programs have been allowed to mislead, prevaricate, and misrepresent for decades without question.

It is that same sense of “let the experts handle it,” emerging yet again. The women’s shelter movement has claimed they know the problem and the solution. We are content to allow them to deal with it, so we don’t have to concern ourselves with it too much. We want to believe they are providing a crucial and effective service, yet the more we know about them and the ways they work, the more we can sense that these services as they function are neither as effective or as important as we are led to believe.

This culture of secrecy and misrepresentation has led to a skewed and partial concept of both the scope and nature of the problem. While we as a society have been congratulating ourselves on our enlightened approach, secure in the knowledge that we are making progress to “end domestic violence,” the reality is that almost nothing has changed for victims. Many working women, and mothers of boys might argue that things have gotten worse, not better. Meanwhile, American taxpayers are supporting through their tax dollars, programs that most of them are not allowed to use.

Programs from top to bottom

The shelter in your community is most likely a more-or-less independent unit. Many are also divisions of larger helping organizations, such as Catholic Charities, which provide a number of human services through a variety of programs. While we will refer to the network of programs, there is not a single agency overseeing operations, owning and operating at all locations. The thing that links them all is government funding. The federal government, states, and municipalities all provide some funding to shelters and other programs.

At the top of the chain, the federal level, is the  Office on Violence Against Women, established by the Violence Against Women Act of 1994. They describe themselves like this:

Since its inception in 1995, the Violence Against Women Office, now the Office on Violence Against Women (OVW) has handled the Department’s legal and policy issues regarding violence against women, coordinated Departmental efforts, provided national and international leadership, received international visitors interested in learning about the federal government’s role in addressing violence against women, and responded to requests for information regarding violence against women. The Office works closely with components of the Office of Justice Programs, the Office of Legal Policy, the Office of Legislative Affairs, the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, the Immigration and Naturalization Office, the Executive Office for United States Attorneys, U.S. Attorneys’ Offices, and state, tribal and local jurisdictions to implement the mandates of the Violence Against Women Act and subsequent legislation.

Under the violence against women grant programs administered by the Department of Justice, the Office has awarded more than $1 billion in grant funds, making over 1,250 discretionary grants and over 350 STOP (Services, Training, Officers, Prosecutors) formula grants to the states and territories. These grant programs help state, tribal, and local governments and community-based agencies to train personnel, establish specialized domestic violence and sexual assault units, assist victims of violence, and hold perpetrators accountable. More than 6,500 STOP subgrants have supported community partnerships among police, prosecutors, victim advocates, and others to address violence against women.

At the state level, there is a coalition, alliance, or some similarly titled organization in each of the 50 states that provides “education” and training in their state for law enforcement, courts, shelters and other agencies concerned with the issue of domestic violence. While these coalitions do not administer funds directly, membership in a coalition is often a requirement or prerequisite to application for many grants. Until the reauthorization of VAWA in 2005, which contains language that now allows for services for male victims, any agency serving men was excluded from these coalitions simply on the basis that VAWA was about women and women alone.

These coalitions also devote a significant amount of their time lobbying for federal, state, and local legislation that has been either written by them or deemed appropriate for their constituency. While they also maintain the fictions that equal services for all are available and equally evasive about the actual kinds of help offered, they may be quite open about their philosophies and guiding principles. Websites for the various coalitions will demonstrate varying degrees of hysteria, depending on the personal views of their webmaster. Yet the men-are-pigs-and-women-are-idiots point of view is easily recognized.

Across the country, in isolated instances, there are shelters and programs that will take a more-realistic approach, but these are often very quiet about their activities, for fear of losing their standing with their state’s coalitions, and thus important sources of funding. One organization that provides truly equal services, as well as alternatives to the shelter culture, is A New Leaf (formerly Prehab of Arizona). They quite publicly withdrew from the AZ coalition in 2003, stating that they didn’t feel the Arizona Coalition Against Domestic Violence had the best interest of their clientele in mind.  However, domestic violence programs are only a small part of  New Leaf’s many human services programs, and they could probably afford to risk the displeasure of the AZCADV.

It is a sad commentary on the state of domestic violence services today that those who want to provide an egalitarian, rational approach, based in practical help for clients, must either hide their actions or face consequences.

Where are the success stories?

In October 2004, (Domestic Violence Awareness Month,) I began monitoring news stories on a daily basis from all over the country about the issue. I also began enlisting the help of the readers of my blog of the time in writing their local newspapers and other media outlets to correct the many misconceptions and errors of fact reported. What was striking was not so much the factoids and urban legends propagated, as we were used to those, as the lack of actual successes reported by shelter programs to the media.

At fundraising time, non-profits everywhere, of all kinds, make an effort to locate individuals who have used their services in the past, and found them helpful. They are persuaded to participate in media coverage, and tell the community how the agency has helped them. It is not terribly difficult to find people to go along with this, even though it may reveal uncomfortable facts about a person or family. The draw of being on TV or having their picture in the paper seems to overcome any concern they may have about disclosure.

It would appear this is another instance where shelter programs are different than others, for most often their “poster person” for the cycle tends to be someone currently staying at the shelter with big plans for the future. We have never seen someone appear promoting a shelter who is a past resident, with those big plans realized and life on track. We have also never seen any of those statistics they’re so fond of, relating to the number of women who’ve successfully been helped by a shelter in a given year, or any other time period. Letting the public know how many people they’ve helped is one of the more-enjoyable aspects of non-profit work, as well as  being profitable in terms of continued support for the agency. Agencies do this whenever they can, as communities are more likely to support successful programs. So this omission is remarkable.

A few years ago, an administrator at AZCADV claimed their agencies had a 70% success rate. It wasn’t until later we realized this number didn’t reflect a number of women in safe, emotionally healthy lives, but a number of women who’d divorced or left their designated abuser. Guess that’s not really something to celebrate.

In fall of 2005, when Senate hearings on VAWA were upcoming, the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence put out a call for victims who would come forward and testify to the Senate on why this act needed reauthorization to keep their programs running. When we saw the congressional record later, after the hearings, we expected to see the names of a number of women who’d been through shelter programs show up to say how they had been helped. Yet the list of those speaking included only employees of agencies who would directly benefit financially from VAWA grants, and an actress with a movie to promote. (Note: the same thing appears to be happening this time around.)

Is it possible there are no successes to report?

Part One

Part Two