To help stop the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic and to assist overwhelmed hospitals, the federal government executed stay-at-home orders in late March. While the physical distancing provided an effective mechanism to reduce the anticipated spike in cases, there were many families that felt added stress due to the isolation. With people confined to their homes and layoffs placing families in financial turmoil, many advocates have stressed concerns for an ongoing increase in domestic violence. Intimate partner violence is a systematic issue that effects 1 in 4 women whether it’s sexual abuse, physical abuse, financial abuse, or any other form of psychological aggression. UN Women, a global champion for gender equality, have called this increase the “shadow pandemic” and have noticed that the instability disproportionally effects marginalized groups. During a period of social distancing and lockdowns, it’s easier for the abuser to isolate their victim and working from home allows the abuser to closely monitor activities. There was almost relief in late March, when the National Domestic Violence Hotline reported that their daily call volume declined by more than 50%. Though, experts reinterpreted this as a sign that victims were unable to connect with existing resources or they simply didn’t want to leave in the chaotic environment. To leave an abuser, a victim needs a reasonable alternative that is safe and sustainable. How can we help abused loved ones in a climate that requires distancing and what are the keys to help victims leave their abusers? I’ve reached out to Krista Fultz, the Director of Advocacy and Education at Genesis Women’s Shelter & Support. At Genesis, Ms. Fultz supervises both the residential and non-residential advocacy programs. Additionally, she oversees all community education efforts and accompaniment programs. She also participates in multiple coordinated community response teams on behalf of the agency. Prior to Genesis, Ms. Fultz worked at Haven House, a domestic violence shelter in Buffalo, NY, as a justice courts victim advocate and children’s counselor.
The CDC’s National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey estimates that over 43 million women have experienced psychological aggression from a sexual partner. What signs can friends and family look for to determine if abuse is occurring?
I’m really glad that one of the first questions you ask is not about physical violence, because I think that’s what most people think of domestic violence. It can look like strangulation and homicide, but a lot of it is also that psychological expression and verbal abuse, which can be as dangerous and threatening. And if you think about it too, it’s not illegal. So there’s not as many places, like avenues to seek out help or seek out accountability to the police, calling the police, filing for… If I’m looking for a family violence finding if I’m filing for custody in court if there hasn’t been physical abuse, a lot of times you get laughed out of the police department or whatever. So I want to say thank you for that question because we see that in, I would dare say a hundred percent of our clients, is there is psychological abuse going on. I would say kind of three red flags that I always like to talk about are jealousy, extreme jealousy from a partner is a big red flag that people can look out for, that he’s jealous of the time that she’s spending with other people or spending, especially with other men. Let me give that caveat too that domestic violence can occur in heterosexual and homosexual relationships. So I tend to fall back on issues because most of my clients, but please don’t hear me say that all abusers are a male in that too. But what we see is if somebody’s really jealous and so jealous of time and it could be spending time with her girlfriends, right?
So sending her text messages while she’s out with the girls, “Oh, I miss you. I’m lonely, I’m bored”, all this stuff. Actually this kind of falls under both of those, that jealousy piece. He’s jealous of this time she’s spending with other people but also the isolation piece too. He wants her all to himself. And so jealousy is definitely something we can look out for. Abusers across the board are always, are you cheating on me? Are you seeing somebody else? Why are you talking to that guy? We hear that a lot. So that extreme jealousy piece, and there’s a healthy amount of jealousy that can occur in a relationship and there’s the unhealthy jealousy. And then extreme jealousy is what we see with domestic violence is definitely a red flag that isolation piece too is a big one and it could look like he moves her across the country or across the world where she doesn’t speak the language, she’s isolated from support systems or family or friends or work. It could be that, but it could also be in the same community. An example we always give is if there’s a family event that she’s going to, say they have family dinner every Sunday and he’s been going with her to a family dinner. It might three or four weeks into going to family dinner, he starts saying, Hey, what if you and I just spend time together as a couple, which right on its head sounds like a really romantic thing. Sure I want to spend time with my partner, right, just the two of us and that my partner just wants to spend time with me.
That’s not necessarily an abusive statement, but after a few weeks they don’t want to go back to the dinner, and so then it’s this isolating. So he’s isolating her physically from her family and friends, the time and the dinners. And then that’s also doing damage to relationships. He’s isolating her from those relationships because a lot of times you hear families say, “Well, Chris is not coming around to dinner anymore, why doesn’t she want to spend time with us? She just wants to go be with that man.” So it’s causing this isolation there relationally between that friendship, that family, and then also, maybe he started saying too, well, your sister always side-eye’s me when I’m there or always gives him this look or I don’t think your family likes me, and so he’s planting those thoughts too. So it’s that isolation there. So they’re in the same city, they haven’t moved anywhere out, but they can be completely isolated. We can also see that with financial abuse. And a lot of times it’s not a month in, he says, you can’t work, you’re not allowed to work anymore, but it’s I make enough money to be able to pay the bills, how about you stay home or childcare is really, really expensive, you stay home. And again, in that, if it’s a healthy relationship, that’s not abusive, but then maybe the lease, the apartment is in her name and he stops paying their rent and now they’re evicted from that apartment and that eviction history is on her record.
A report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics indicates that black women are four times more likely than white women to be killed as a result of domestic violence, but are significantly less likely to involve police. What factors lead to this disproportionate effect amongst margalized groups and what can be done to make women more confident to report?
What the domestic violence movement has said, since its conception and has really put a lot of emphasis on, is that domestic violence is an equal opportunity epidemic. It doesn’t matter race, socioeconomic background, education, or age. It happens all over the world to any person and that is true. And they’ve put a lot of emphasis on that to say that there… It would be great if I could walk down the street and say, that is an abuser, that is a victim, but there is no way to just call somebody out and say that. And so they’ve put a lot of emphasis on it and that’s been really important. What has happened with that, like you said, is that women of color are at greater risk of more severe types of abuse and that’s what we see. And I think a lot of that is around the idea of systems. If I’m afraid of systems, I’m not going to reach out. If I am a black woman and I am scared that if I call the police that maybe they’re going to kill my husband. I just want the violence to stop, so I’m not going to reach out because I have a mistrust of the police or I have a mistrust of the medical system. I’m not going to go in because I’m afraid of… I’ve seen what has happened to black people in the hospital system and medical clinics, that they’re not taken seriously or there’s some horrendous abuses around studies or that they’re not listened to. So maybe I don’t trust medical professionals. I don’t trust the police.
Genesis is a system in of itself. I don’t want to be a system, but we are a system too. So maybe I don’t trust the system, that they’re not going to understand what my experience is, and maybe they’re going to say, well, you need to call the police and I don’t feel comfortable calling the police. And so I have a mistrust of systems, so I don’t reach out. And so what we see with domestic violence is that there is an escalation of violence. There’s an escalation that doesn’t happen generally, the first date. I was talking about like it’s a… How do you boil a frog? If you put a frog in a pot of boiling water, it’s going to jump out. But if you put a frog in a pot of cold water and you turn up the heat, it’s going to boil alive, same thing here. So violence will escalate, and if I don’t trust systems and the violence is escalating, we know that there’s a cap on this spectrum violence and that’s murder. So if I don’t reach out to a system, the higher in the spectrum, it’s going to go because I’m not reaching out for help. And I can’t blame anybody for not wanting to reach out either. I think there’s a lot of the black community specifically, I would say a lot of mistrust in systems and racism in these systems. I would say in Latina communities too, especially if I’m undocumented, maybe I don’t want to reach out. Maybe I’m undocumented and I am scared that a system is going to call ICE. I’ve heard from clients of agencies that have reported them which is horrendous.
Almost 80% of women who have experienced domestic violence report that they were under coercive control. With COVID-19 making it easier for abusers to monitor activities, how can friends and families gain contact to see what is happening in their situation?
A bit if it is taking that hint from the survivor. We definitely believe in this empowerment model, which can be really tricky. Outside of the situation, we can see it sometimes a little bit clearer that something is off here. I don’t like how he’s acting here, and you hate to cause a Romeo and Juliet effect. Like no, the world is against us, so it drives the couple together more. So there’s always this kind of caution there. I always advise people, especially friends and family to continue to reach out, especially if they’re nervous that something is happening to try to keep that relationship open, because we see that isolation. So the abuser is going to try to isolate the survivor from that family, friend’s support system, work and stuff like that, and so it can be really difficult to just continue to reach out and foster this relationship. So keep that door open, that relationship open so that when… So maybe she’s not ready. So this is maybe before maybe she’s disclosed or has said something before the survivor has really said something to friends or family. If you notice it, being able to point out that we know what he said, made this comment, it made me uncomfortable, how are things going with you guys? Pointing stuff out. If she’s like, it’s fine and brushing it off, continuing to keep that door open and not get frustrated and walk away sometimes. Keeping that relationship open so that maybe when it hits a certain point or it hits a threshold, she knows, I can go talk to my sister about this and she’s not going to say, I told you so.
So having that healthy relationship there I think is a huge piece and it can be really hard, and one of the best pieces of advice I heard from somebody was it’s like taking medicine sometimes. I don’t want to take my vitamins every day, I don’t want to take these meds every day, but it’s how I keep myself healthy. And so thinking about it as a way of, just sometimes it’s kind of annoying to continue to reach out and foster this friendship, this relationship, but keeping those doors open in case somebody wants to disclose and so maybe later too, after the survivor has disclosed, these things are happening and I’m uncomfortable, I might need some help instead of just saying runaway, get out cause that’s not always the safest thing. Maybe having some code words or something to be able to talk through. I talked with a client about this with one of her kids, actually just recently. We talked about the idea of talking about nail Polish color. So, “How are things going? I want to paint my nails,” maybe is a code of I need to talk to you or whatever. So we could say red is things aren’t going well. Or maybe if I say, I want red nail Polish means call the police or green nail Polish means things are okay, and you have to have an agreed upon because if I started talking about nail Polish and we’ve never discussed, it’s not going to work out, but maybe we have some code words about red means call the police, green means things are okay, yellow means things are rough, but you’ve got some kind of a color system because can I go to CVS and get nail Polish.
It’s going to be in a text message or anything it’s not going to cause a lot of alarm, depending. You got to make sure that whatever that is, isn’t out of the realm of something the person would ask. And so having some kind of code there because we see that monitoring is huge, especially technology right now. We see a lot of abusers monitoring text messages, monitoring social media emails, and so it might not be safe to say, are you safe right now, are things okay? It might not be easy for people to say that, but if there’s some kind of code word that’s agreed upon with both parties of being able how to check in and then respecting boundaries too, because what we know about domestic violence is that it’s a cycle and that there’s that honeymoon phase too and that can be really, really confusing. And we know that abuse is still happening, that the honeymoon phase is one of the most abusive stages, but it does cause a lot of confusion. So maybe the abuser is being real sweet and really kind and buying gifts and being really apologetic. “Baby, I’m so sorry. I’m going to go to counseling. Baby, I’m so sorry. I’m going to get help. I’ll never do it again. Let’s go on vacation. Let me buy you gifts.”
So that can be really confusing and hard for family and friends too, to say last week he strangled you and now you guys are getting matching tattoos, what are you talking about? It can be very, very confusing with that. And so it’s not getting angry and leaving the friendship and it’s so hard. Our clients go through the same thing, and we can talk about it, but it’s really hard. So maintaining that relationship is really big, going through that and knowing that it’s a really long process and it’s a really confusing process to go through and to watch somebody that you care about and love. At Genesis, we are about to start a friends and family group. We’re going to announce it in a little bit, so hopefully… Maybe don’t post that one yet, but we’re about to roll that out publicly, I think, in the next week or so, but because it’s confusing and it’s to be able to support friends and family with, what do I do when somebody that I love is experiencing this and I don’t know what to do.
With companies like Amazon, Capital One, and Starbucks declaring a reduction in their commercial offices, it’s becoming clear that a larger percentage of the workforce will be remote moving forward. Are you optimistic or pessimistic in domestic violence trends moving forward and what key factors will contribute to that trend?
It’s a hard one because like you said, there weren’t hotlines and we weren’t really talking about domestic violence in the sixties. The domestic violence movement, like the feminist movement is so young and so we weren’t talking about what is domestic violence. It was a family issue. You don’t bring it up kind of thing for such a long time and so what it kind of looked like in the grand scheme of things is that the numbers continue to rise, but I can’t tell you it’s a trick. Are the numbers rising because we’re getting the information out, defining what domestic violence is, and people are reaching out to systems? Are people feeling more comfortable to reach out and disclose that this is happening, and are seeking out help? Or is it something about our society that is causing domestic violence to rise? So that one is a tricky one for me to answer. I want to hope that we’ll kind of get to a cap of where eventually we’ll reach so many people and then it we start to see a decline because we’ve reached everybody, but I’m still surprised and I do community education, I do speaking engagements all the time and people are like, I didn’t know this was happening.
So I still feel like we have ways to go to educate everybody about what’s domestic violence. We haven’t reached that goal yet of everybody knowing what it is and knowing how to seek out help. So, the numbers in the US are one in four women will experience domestic violence and last I saw the numbers are one and three in Texas. I can’t tell you why the numbers are a little higher here, but the worldwide average is one in three. The worldwide number is one in three women will experience domestic violence. So I think just the Texas number models that worldwide number. I’m very curious to see what’s going to happen on the other side of COVID. People working remotely, this limited access to being able to call hotlines, being able to come in might be even more difficult. We see that in financial abuse and just people not having access to Wi-Fi having access to the internet. So maybe somebody… What’s been really great is we’ve been able to offer our services via telehealth now, which we haven’t been able to before. But if I don’t have access to Wi-Fi at home because it’s expensive to have Wi-Fi or if he’s there all the time, I need to go somewhere else and so talking through, can you say you’re going to Starbucks, can you say you’re going to the grocery store sit in the car and call us, which is uncomfortable, also not like a great place. I don’t really want to do therapy in my car but maybe that’s the only option that I have right now. So is that going to be more of the norm where people are coming in, but then they’re also in their cars.
When the abuser’s home all the time, it’s just harder to make up excuses. Say, I’m going to go to the grocery store and pick up food, or I’m going to go to Starbucks, I need to come back with proof because I’m an abuser, I don’t believe anything that a survivor says to me and my victim says to me, so okay, you said you’re going to the grocery store, where are the groceries? So I need to have grocery money, I need to spend money at the grocery store, I need to bring back food or a receipt. I’m going to Starbucks, I need to bring a cup back or receipt back that says I did this because that jealousy, that isolation, I’m going to track everything and I control everything that you do. So there’s so much more planning and that’s so exhausting. If I have to plan out my fake grocery store run, and then also go to counseling, I mean, that’s exhausting. And so I am worried about what that’s going to look like going forward. It’s going to be much easier to isolate and control somebody if I’m always home and much more exhausting to be able to juggle all of these things. I’ve had survivors talk to me about, he siphons the gas out of my car, so I can’t… Even if you wanted to come in, there’s all these things, controlling her access to get to us, her ability to get to us physically. If she doesn’t have the gas to get to us and she doesn’t have Wi-Fi and he’s working from home or she has Wi-Fi, but he’s working from home, how am I going to reach out?
Is there any key resources that you think deserve more investment and is there any local Dallas-Fort Worth shoutouts you want to give?
The two that come to mind instantly are legal resources and housing resources, like long-term affordable housing. It’s funny that I say this as I’m literally sitting in our shelter right now, but I’ll tell you that the shelter is not always the best solution. At the beginning of the movement, we were thinking “let’s hide people away and get them physically safe and that will always be true”. We will always need shelters, but our emergency shelter stay is eight weeks. I could not give up drinking coffee in eight weeks. It is a very short amount of time to ask a lot of a survivor of domestic violence that you need to get the finances together. If I need to rent an apartment, I need first month’s rent, a security deposit, the ability to pay for the move, and the furniture for the building. Feasibility, to get all of that together in eight weeks is near impossible to ask that we’re telling somebody. We talked about financial abuse too, or her ability to work if she’s able to get a job or she hasn’t had a job for a long time, so it’s interviewing. So we will always need shelters. We will always need, unfortunately, a place when an abuser gets out of jail or he’s threatened to kill her or he assaulted her last night. We’re going to need a place for her to go to get safe.
I’m the director of advocacy. So what my advocates do, we talk about the physical needs of a client and I loosely use physical needs. Sometimes that’s her housing needs. So we’re talking about her budget. How can we safely plan for you for six months to a year where you can squirrel some money away or you start working and we put these things in place so that when you leave, you can be more stable? It’s that financial abuse component, and so affordable housing is a huge block in our program. So we are always searching those out because finding a place that can help support her for 6 to 12 months to help her save some money so that she can get back on her feet is huge. And also I love programs that understand Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. I totally understand why some require somebody to have a job before they apply for a program, but if we think about Maslow’s again, if I don’t have a safe place to stay, it’s harder for me to look for a job. Housing programs that understand that not everybody who needs housing has a job or an income right now are my absolute favorite ones, because just get someone stable, let them have a safe place they can sleep and take a shower and their clothes live there.
Then there’s also the legal needs, legal needs of our clients. I worked in the field for a really long time and I still am confused and I still get intimidated when I walk into a courthouse and it’s not even my case, it doesn’t affect my life at all and it’s overwhelming. A lot of our calls are about legal assistance. I need an attorney to help me get custody of my kids or defiled this. It’s very, very confusing to represent yourself in court and very intimidating and abusers again are the worst and make the whole process awful and so I’d say it’s legal and family court. Sometimes it’s legal for housing, because he won’t leave the house. It’s this housing piece or a lot of our stimulus checks right now they might go to an abuser and so maybe they have separated, but he takes the stimulus checks. She has kids and she’s taking care of the kids, so she should have been able to get that money to pay for her children, but it goes into his account. She doesn’t have access to that. So it’s, can I talk to an attorney about how do I get that money so I can use it for the children, which I’m supposed to, that’s what it’s for and so we see legal yeah, IRS, that he’s still claiming her on our taxes or the kids on their taxes. And so we see a lot of or even on the criminal side too, that he’s made a false allegation about her that she’s abused him and now there’s a case out, and so she needs representation in court or the police come out and they arrest the wrong party. We see that sometimes too. I want to also note too that some of our clients are not this meek, mild, skinny white lady stereotype. Sometimes they have criminal backgrounds and sometimes they have addiction history. But that does not make it okay to abuse somebody and they also need help too. We also see a lot of abusers will intentionally get somebody addicted to drugs or sell so that she has a criminal history or force her to do sex work, and now she’s got a criminal history and then he uses that against her in filing for custody. So people who understand those systems, don’t judge and don’t shame somebody or even don’t judge or shame somebody for the only work I could get was sex work, and that’s how I pay my rent.
