September 28, 2007

Safe Harbor battered women’s shelter is a crowded house post-Katrina

by Richard A. Webster
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Kim Kirby, executive director of Safe Harbor, a shelter for battered women on the North Shore, recounts a statement she heard from an abuser in an intervention program.

“ ‘I knew when I left work what I was going to do when I got home,’ he said. ‘It didn’t matter if she had done everything right or if when I got home dinner was ready with what I wanted to eat, the kids were in their rooms quiet, the house was clean. She could have done everything right but I knew when I left work what was going to happen when I walked in that door,’ ” Kirby remembers.

Abuse is not about someone losing their temper in a fit of rage, Kirby says. It is calculated and planned.

Between January and August 2005, Safe Harbor sheltered 49 people, an average of 6.1 per month. Between February and December last year, they took in 119 women and children, an average of 10.8 per month.

Safe Harbor serves St. Tammany, Tangipahoa and Washington parishes but takes abused individuals from anywhere in Louisiana.

“We’ve had to send people to other shelters (throughout the state) because we’ve been full,” Kirby says. “And that’s just the people who are calling. There are more out there.”

Founded in 1992, Safe Harbor can house up to 15 battered women and children for up to 45 days, though extensions are awarded depending on the case.

Its location is known only to hospitals and emergency response officials to ensure the safety of the residents.

“Spouses find them occasionally,” Kirby says. “We’ve been in the area since 1992 so word does get out where we are as much as we try not to disclose the location. We haven’t had anyone try to break into the building, though I’ve had some vehicles damaged.”

Power trip

Without Safe Harbor the only other option for battered women would be to go to family, friends or a homeless shelter, Kirby says. And without a safe option many women will choose to stay with their abuser.

“At the same time, we don’t always encourage women to leave because 75 percent of all domestic violence homicides occur after they left,” Kirby says. “Leaving is not always the best option because that’s when the violence escalates. We tell them to follow their gut instinct.”

It typically takes battered women between five and seven attempts to leave their abusers, according to Safe Harbor.

The goal of Safe Harbor, in addition to providing protection, is to help abused women establish lives of their own. Abuse is not so much about violence as it is about power and control, Kirby says, and one of the most effective ways to establish control is to rob an individual of the ability to make decisions.

“A lot of times these men exercise such control and power over these women by never allowing them to get a job or have any finances of their own. They have to ask for every penny that they get,” Kirby says. “So if you’ve got a woman who has never worked and is home with the children and the abuser is put in jail he can’t make money for the family. Her rent is not paid, she doesn’t have food for the children. I’ve heard many times women say, ‘I would rather him living with me than in jail because I can’t support the kids on my own.’ She’s never made a decision in her life and that’s because she’s been controlled.”

Kirby says the injuries post-Katrina have been more brutal in nature than anything they saw before the storm — bite marks covering an entire arm, women beaten with shovels.

“One woman we had to take to Baton Rouge for surgery for an entire week. She needed rods and pins inserted in her arms. Vicious, vicious injuries,” Kirby says. “Not that the hurricane caused domestic violence because it’s always been there but there are more stressors going on — multiple families living in one area, women forced to go back to their abusers after the hurricane because they didn’t have a place to stay afterwards.”

System failure

Not everyone, however, agrees the level of violence has increased post-Katrina. Merni Carter, executive director of the Louisiana Coalition Against Domestic Violence, says the level of violence has always been severe in Louisiana.

“The examples people give supposedly showing that the violence has increased are pretty standard levels of severity,” Carter says.

Louisiana is consistently in the top five in the United States for domestic violence homicides, according to the Violence Policy Center in Washington, D.C. Carter attributes this to lax laws regarding gun ownership.

Nearly one-third of all women murdered in the United States in 1998 were killed by a current or former intimate partner. Guns were used in almost two-thirds of those domestic homicides, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

Carter also says public and private organizations in communities throughout Louisiana have failed to work together to provide protection for battered women.

“You need a safety net in the community,” Carter says. “You need all the people working together on the same page — the police, the courts, the churches, the schools. It takes a whole community to come together and have a consistent approach to protect her and her children. But there are a lot of turf issues involved and people find it hard to admit that they could do things better, and that includes battered women’s programs.”

The Louisiana Coalition Against Domestic Violence has started a statewide fatality review project that will look at when a person is killed in a domestic violence incident to see what went wrong and how that individual could have been better protected.

The laws and penalties against domestic violence are also applied haphazardly throughout the state, Carter says.

“There are good laws but no uniform way of enforcing them,” she says. “Almost all domestic violence arrests in the first place are misdemeanors whether or not there are felonies involved. Nearly 10 times out of 10 they will not go to jail. They’ll be sent to counseling which is an odd response from the justice system because there are few crimes you go to counseling for. But if you strangle your girlfriend or wife, you get a slap on the hand and a fine. We’re still working real hard on changing attitudes that what goes on in your own home is your own business.”

The face of violence

The real problem in tracking domestic abuse is it is difficult to identify an abuser because they don’t fit a specific profile. Abusers are typically not violent in public and know where to hit a person so the wounds won’t show, says Kirby.

Batterers and the abused can appear to be living in domestic bliss and whenever a domestic violence homicide occurs it is not uncommon for the neighbors to describe the couple as “a good, loving family who went to church and never fought,” Kirby says.

“Everybody either knows somebody who is being abused or someone who is the abuser. A lot of times it starts off as isolation before it gets physical. She’s being isolated from friends and family and they do that so no one can tell them this is not how a normal relationship should be. The first woman I helped was 22 and had been with her abuser since she was 12. She had three children with this man and he never allowed her to get a driver’s license. He bought all of her clothes, told her what to wear and when to wear it and she didn’t know any differently. She thought that was a normal relationship. Abusers will try and keep people away from the survivor so they can’t be empowered to take control of their lives.”•

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