Sept. 13 marked the 20th anniversary of the signing of the Violence Against Women Act, a congressional bill that aims to decrease the rate of domestic violence across the United States.
Since the adoption of VAWA in 1994, the whitehouse.gov website reports that the rate of intimate partner violence dropped 67 percent between 1993 and 2010. The same report also states that more victims are reporting domestic violence.
There has been an 18.5 percent increase in patient referrals to domestic violence services by healthcare providers since the enactment of the Affordable Care Act.
While those statistics are encouraging, domestic violence, or intimate partner violence as it is referred to in academia, is still a pervasive issue.
In 2013 a peer-reviewed metastudy was published in Science, an academic journal. This study found that in 2010, 30 percent of women over the age of 15 have experienced physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence at some point in their lives.
These figures are reinforced by the World Health Organization’s estimate in 2013 that nearly a third of all women have experienced intimate partner violence of a physical or sexual nature.
In 2013, the government sequestration imposed funding cuts of 5 percent evenly across congressional non-defense discretionary spending programs, which is the budget that provides grants through the VAWA and the Family Violence Prevention and Services Act. The FVPSA is the main source of funding to emergency shelters for domestic violence victims.
A report prepared by Sen. Tom Harkins (D-Iowa) in 2012 provided a comprehensive analysis of sequestration cuts to federally funded programs. It found that nearly $9 million in funding would be eliminated from FVPSA, leaving 112,190 domestic violence victims without resources across the United States and its territories, and over 230,000 calls to domestic violence hotlines unanswered.
Fiscal year 2014 has seen some restoration to sequester cuts, but funding for VAWA’s Legal Assistance for Victims, Rural programs, and Transitional Housing programs experienced additional cuts.
“Plainly, the ongoing funding crisis means that victims must be turned away when they are at their most vulnerable,” Kim Gandy, CEO of NNEDV, said in a statement. “While service providers work with each victim who comes to them to find safety, they cannot create shelter beds out of the air, hire case managers on a promise, or build affordable housing with a magic wand. They need funding to provide help and refuge for victims.”
The lack of resources for domestic violence victims is especially troubling when you combine it with the realities that these victims face.
Each year in September the National Network to End Domestic Violence conducts a 24-hour census of all identified domestic violence programs in the United States, documenting the number of adults and children seeking domestic violence services and the types of services that are provided during that period.
The 2013 Domestic Violence Counts: Census 2013 Report compiled data from all 1,649 recognized domestic violence service providers in the United States that chose to participate on September 17, 2013.
In this single 24-hour period, 66,581 victims of domestic violence were provided with an array of services. Individual support or advocacy was provided to 98 percent of all victims served and children’s support or advocacy was given to 84 percent of victims. Emergency shelter was found for 77 percent of all victims.
All 32 of Tennessee’s recognized domestic violence programs participated in the census. These programs provided services to 836 victims, 100 percent of them receiving individual support or advocacy and 91 percent were placed in emergency shelters.
In that same 24-hour period, 9,641 requests for services, 60 percent of those for housing, were unable to be met across the nation. The most common reason given for the inability to meet requests for help was reduced government funding, reported by 27 percent of programs.
Unmet requests for services occurred 73 times in Tennessee, 64 of those for housing. Tennessee reported understaffing as the most common cause of unmet requests for help.
The census also found that 5 percent of staff positions were eliminated across the county in the past year, most of them direct services such as shelter or legal advocates.
Of the programs participating in the census, 60 percent report that victims go back to their abuser, 27 percent report that victims end up homeless, and 11 percent report that victims live in their cars when they are unable to receive assistance. The census recognizes that many of these domestic violence programs do not always know where victims end up when they must be turned away.
Ashley Theuring is a Cincinnati, Ohio native and a current Ph. D. candidate at Boston University. She has worked with domestic violence victims since 2009.
“On average, someone in an abusive relationship will leave and return to that abusive relationship seven times,” she said.
At a time when resources may not be available to victims, friends and family members can play a vital role as supporters.
Theuring said it is important to give a positive reaction of support no matter what the other person is telling you and no matter what your inner voice may be telling you. You may not be getting the whole story, but you are getting what the victim is ready to talk about.
“You want to make sure that you’re having a very positive response back and that you’re opening yourself up to be a support system,” she said.
It is also important not to tell a victim to leave.
“The most dangerous time in abusive relationships is when a person it trying to leave it,” Theuring said.
It is vital that before a victim tries to leave a safety plan is in place, especially if an abuser has shown escalating levels of violence, like strangulation.
“That’s a big red flag it shows that violence is getting big enough that it could cause fatality,” she said.
One of the best ways to offer support to a victim is still providing them with resources, Theuring said. Going online and getting a list of providers can give victims avenues for getting out when they are ready and able. Domestic Violence organizations have trained staff that can advocate for victims in the legal system, offer counseling, locate temporary housing, and connect them with law enforcement resources to keep the process as safe as possible.
Counseling services are offered free of charge to students at the University of Memphis through The Counseling Center.
“We think the most important resource that we have is the psychologists and therapists that we have here who can provide individual one to one support,” Dr. Kim Collins, a staff psychologist at The Counseling Center said. “The emphasis for us is helping the individual student as they take that journey of deciding what it is that they want to do and then helping them be as safe as possible as they go through that process.”
