by Meg Stone, IMPACT Director
Today I had the opportunity to do outreach for IMPACT at an event sponsored by the Middlesex District Attorney's office. The DA's office brought together a group of wonderful and dedicated people from state agencies, law enforcement, and community groups, and invited us to brainstorm together to identify gaps in the response to abuse and survivors.
It took my group little time to identify gaps in services and even less time to come up with practical ideas for meeting survivors' needs. Everything from volunteer child care providers in court houses to asking hotels to donate empty rooms to women fleeing abusers.
Eventually the conversation turned to survivor safety. One advocate identified the need for resources so that survivors can be safe in their own communities. Someone from another domestic violence organization expressed disagreement, stating that her organization would not shelter a woman who lived in her local community because her abuser could find her and she would be unsafe. I respect everyone's concerns about safety and at the same time I struggle with how easy it is for us as advocates to ask survivors to give up home and community. Does staying safe from abuse really have to mean taking kids out of their school and moving away from familiar surroundings? For immigrants, people of color, LGBT people and others who are not safe in certain parts of the state do we really increase anyone's safety when we ask them to move away from their entire support system?
What can we do to support survivors in being safe in their own communities? For some survivors, IMPACT training gives them the skills and confidence to know they could protect their own physical safety meant they didn't have to hide. They could continue to live in their communities and deal with seeing their abusers. (A police officer made funny faces when he heard me explain that to the group, though I can't tell for sure what he was thinking!) My highest hope for the work we do at IMPACT is that the skills we teach will mean that people have to give up less of themselves and their lives in order to be safe from abusers.
Even so, safety training doesn't go far enough. In most situations our system deprives survivors of freedom. Many leave their jobs and communities while perpetrators lose little. With the exception of abusers who are incarcerated, survivors have few alternatives other than trying to stay safe when their abusers know where they are or giving up everything for safety.
We were asked to think of creative ideas, and the one I'd like to propose is residential programs for abusers. Programs that would enable them to get batterer intervention treatment, work to support their families, but in which security mechanisms were in place to ensure they stayed away from people they'd abused and interacted safely with their children. I hope the next brainstorm session will focus more on how to support survivors in achieving peace and safety without giving up their entire lives.
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