How to Address Domestic Violence in a Collective Way

 

The number of people abused by intimate partners has not gone down over decades. There continues to be a lack of public demand for culture changes that might prevent household violence from happening in the first place. In our new “Where Do We Go From Here?” series, we are discussing a few topics that require sustained community discussions about solutions. This story is one of a series of conversation starters about age- and gender-based trauma that exist in all communities. The goal: Identify what local leaders, community members, and advocates can do together to help survivors feel that they have options. For this conversation, we talked with three advocates.

Frustrations

Amirthini Keefe, executive director of the Domestic Abuse Project (DAP): I feel like there’s been a scarcity model in the domestic violence community. We have been working so hard to keep our pay competitive so that we can keep our team rooted at the organization, because that impacts the quality of work that we provide and the way that we can innovate. It takes time to develop skills, to hold people accountable, and to get comfortable having certain kinds of conversations. By the time folks develop that skill, and get their clinical license, they get paid more money to do the work somewhere else. It’s hard to compete, not only with other nonprofits, but with hospital systems and private practices. Usually about 50 percent of the folks that do this work are survivors themselves and are still trying to pay for the lost wages and other expenses as a result of their DV experience.

Shannon Wussow, executive director of the Relationship Safety Alliance in Brainerd: Every person on our team is aware of what our budget is, what our funding sources are, where we are needing to pull back, because it’s a big part of our daily reality. We have an amazing team. They are great at what they do. They are not short for ideas. I’ve got a wish list on my computer that I’ve been keeping track of since December 2016, when I walked in the door for the first time as director. We’ve had funding challenges since then. If we could focus on services and prevention, that would have a huge ripple effect in our community. There is so much more we could do if we weren’t having to worry about losing funding.

Sometimes we also have to educate the public simply on what we do. Some people thought we were providing abortions at our shelter.

Nikki Engel, systems change senior manager at Violence Free Minnesota (VFMN): I’ve never met more creative people than advocates. As a society, there’s a lot of lip service given to interrupting and ending violence, and yet if even one agency had the time and the money to implement its ideas in their community, it could reduce advocate burnout and have a huge impact on the community.

Advocates tell me it’s not the work with survivors that is hard or overwhelming; it’s the fact that we see so many things wrong, and all those systems and the culture are resistant to the changes that we want to implement.

Whether it’s the bureaucracy of a system that must go through a million steps to change a form that would make something easier for a survivor, or the attitudes of folks in those systems, or the systems not being trauma-informed — those are the things that are like butting your head against brick walls. It is a part of what makes the work so hard and increases the difficulty of sustaining advocates in the field on top of the pay issues. It’s the immovability of the systems and the culture to implement the changes that we think need to happen to end intimate partner violence.

Funding and Community Support

Wussow: We have a lot of community support for our work in Brainerd and Region 5+. But we have been here since 1978, and I think many people just assume that we’re always going to be here. Yet it is impossible to make the numbers work. Our office needs and program needs are not fully funded.

Keefe: Twenty percent of our funding comes through federal dollars. After we lost United Way funding a few years ago, we moved toward diversifying funding. We started billing insurance companies for mental health services to offset some of the cost, which is not great because of infrastructure and client experiences with insurance companies. Some of the new federal requirements say that we can’t talk about domestic violence as a social justice issue; it can only be talked about as an individual crime. Yet from a healing perspective, for survivors and folks who use violence, and from an accountability perspective, it is a social justice and systemic issue. All this work to get funding takes away from being able to focus on what matters.

Engel: We have had amazing champions at the legislature going to bat for us each year to increase funding for crime victim services, but it’s never enough, because we’re trying to backfill years with no increase to keep pace with the rising costs. We are never in a place where we can be comfortable.

There have been some creative funding solutions brought to the legislature these past few years, including the creation of a state VOCA [Victims of Crime Act] fund, which passed this year. The passage of the MRRA [Minnesota Rehabilitation and Reinvestment Act] in 2023 mandated that 50 percent of the resulting cost savings are intended to go to victim services. These could be incredibly beneficial for victims services in Minnesota, but it’s going to take time until those dollars trickle down to our programs in a way that’s meaningful.

Wussow: This is a predominantly female field, which I think also impacts the pay scales. It also can be difficult to accept government money, because that might come with strings attached. That means we have to make decisions about whether to accept funding that might come with strings, which could ultimately impact the quality of the services that we provide to survivors.

Collective Movement Building

Wussow: Having access to safe, affordable housing is an absolute issue in our community, and it has created longer stays at our shelter. We’re designed to be a 30-day crisis facility, and we’re seeing stays go anywhere from three to four months. But if the only thing standing in between a survivor and safety is a grant deadline or a budget vote, then we have completely failed as a society.

Keefe: I do think a challenge for the domestic violence community to figure out is what sharing and collaborating and innovating together looks like. We are absolutely going to be challenged, especially given the way that this administration is attacking marginalized communities. Will mainstream organizations stand up for culturally specific or identity-specific organizations as everyone attempts to survive?

Similarly to the people we work with, we have to cut power dynamics out. We are always in competition with each other. That is the world and the environment that we live in. We need to support each other. The director calls that we’re on have wonderful conversations, but that is one hour out of our month.

I feel like we are pitted against each other to fight for scraps, and we have to figure out how to get out of that.

Preventive Work

Wussow: Preventative activities generally are not a permissible expense for our Office of Justice Programs grant. We have made some progress recently with getting back into the school system to talk with students about healthy relationships and bullying. We also have a good partnership with Crow Wing County Community Corrections in co-facilitating the men’s nonviolence program. There also are a few other programs that have been offered by for-profit mental health agencies that help educate abusers.

Keefe: Early intervention is really where it’s at. When men who have used violence are done with programming, one of the most common things they say is that they wish they would have gotten this information when they were in high school, or before they got married, or when they were starting their relationship. Going into schools is so valuable.

When I was a social work student, part of my job was to do good-touch/bad-touch presentations with kindergarten through sixth graders. Being South Asian, my parents were mortified at the idea that I was talking to children in kindergarten about these things. But the reality is that kids are aware of what’s happening in their environment, and they are already impacted by it. There are ways that we can have these conversations.

Knowledge is power. Helping folks in community understand what abuse is, and having access to resources, and reducing shame, and actually getting connected to those resources, is the best way that we can engage in change.

At DAP, we do a lot of systems change work. Right now, that involves bringing different system partners together to talk about what the collective response to domestic violence looks like, and what that means for folks in the community.

Engel: A few years ago, VFMN was excited to be working on a grant project that allowed us to explore what a non-law-enforcement-based response to domestic violence could look like in Minnesota. However, under the current federal administration, developing alternatives for survivors — not eliminating the criminal justice path, but making more paths — is a nonstarter. The administration is tying federal funding to work that understands domestic violence as a crime of individuals, and nothing else.

When VAWA passed in 1994, federal funding was heavily tied to work within the criminal justice system. It has only been in the last few years, through the work of countless advocates, that we were starting to see federal funding open to other possibilities, such as restorative practices. My fear is that we are going backward right now.

To receive a discussion guide about this story, reach out to community@womenspress.com

 

 

 

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