Tuesday, February 23, 2010

The Family Financial Counselor

Last February, almost exactly a year ago, U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said that there was, “a reasonable prospect that the current recession will end in 2009 and that 2010 will be a year of recovery.”

Whoops.

He was right, after a fashion: industrial production, manufacturing, trade and sales have all recovered from their recession nadirs. The problem is that most of us aren’t sharp-featured Randian captains of industry and as such aren’t in charge of industrial production, manufacturing, trade and sales – the only way we normies get a benefit from these recoveries is if they create jobs. And they haven’t. Unemployment is, in fact still on the rise. Even for those Americans who are secure in their jobs, pay cuts are a distinct possibility and any hope of a raise will likely need to be deferred for almost a decade.

Still, things could be worse – and they have been. This might be the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, but it’s still not actually the Great Depression. And anyway, isn’t part of the American character our ability to buckle down, slam our noses into the grindstone, grit our teeth, and shoulder through any adversity that rears its ugly head? Isn’t that what our parents, grandparents or great-grandparents (as the case may be) did during the 30’s? Surely we can do the same under somewhat easier circumstances, right?

Not without help, it turns out. Apparently most of us aren’t the same hard-nosed, leather-skinned, nail chewing paragons of the working class our forebears were, but that’s alright, because help is available in the form of Linda Rath, the Partnership’s Family Financial Counselor. I sat down with Linda recently and asked her a little about what she does with the Partnership.



My primary function is to work with families who are seeking services for the
first time ever in their adult lives. People who have always worked, always
managed to pay the bills, but now some crisis has hit. Because of the recession
they have been downsized or they’re still working at the same company but they
had to take a huge pay cut, or they’ve been living based on overtime and there
is no more overtime. So lots of situations are occurring out there where people
who are still employed are really underemployed and can no longer pay the bills.

It is Linda’s job to fix that last part, because it turns out that a lot of what people do while they’re working and in the weeks and months after they lose their job or take a hit in pay has a huge effect on how hard unemployment hits them. According to Linda, when most people find themselves suddenly unemployed or working for less money than before, they try as hard as they can to maintain the lifestyle they had before – which was just as unhealthy, as you will see below – through credit and high interest loans, assuming that something will come along to get them back where they were within a few weeks or months. I think you can guess how that usually turns out. Add to that, even when working decent paying jobs, financial responsibility is still pretty rare.


Half of all people in the United States actually spend more than they earn each
month – but they don’t really feel like they are in debt or stressed because
there’s always another paycheck coming, which is going to catch it up and
they’re going to be fine.


In addition to living paycheck to paycheck, around half of Americans also have very little to no savings, according to Linda. She says that it is absolutely vital to keep three to six months’ worth of reserve funds set aside at all times in case of an emergency or a bout of unemployment – something I should probably start doing. “It’s virtually impossible to go through your entire life without some period of unemployment,” Linda said.

This stuff should all be expected when it comes to financial troubles though, really. We hear about it in the news all the time. What you don’t hear about as much, and what surprised me, was when Linda told me that:


A number of the clients I’m dealing with have got children between the ages of
eighteen and twenty-two living at home with them contributing nothing to the
household, and they can’t afford to continue to support their children and
that’s part of what is an issue to them. They’re not going to school and they’re
not working.

I mentioned earlier that the reason we cope with economic downturn differently from our forebears is because we are essentially a different sort of people, but that’s not exactly true. We might have been raised with television and fast food, but deep down most of us are still just as proud and stubborn as the Americans of the 30’s – and that’s a problem in this case. One of the biggest obstacles for people seeking help with their money, even when homelessness is imminent, is shame. Once that first call is made, however, many of her clients set their teeth and get to work. “Half of the people I see need just one appointment. They need a wake-up call.”

I mentioned in my first post that part of what the Partnership does is to make sure that people don’t fall through the cracks in the first place, and I think this is an example. Just remember, if you lose your job or find yourself making much less than you did before, there are resources available. Linda told me that she loves her current work and that she wants even more people to call so she can help them. Why not give her a call if you think you could use some help or just your own wake-up call? It is free. The number is 423.421.1367.





MONEY LINKS



annualcreditreport.com - A credit reporting service that is actually free. This website provides, as mandated by the federal government, one free credit report per year.



fdic.gov - A good source for economic and financial news, but this site can also lead to a number of useful resources and tools.



moneychimp.com - A resource for people like me who honestly don't understand a lot about finances on the macro OR the micro scale. It also has a very handy debt calculator that can show you how to make the sorts of payments necessary to actually get out of debt.

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

The Vagina Monologues


WARNING: There are going to be words in this article that you might consider “bad.” These words mostly concern the female anatomy. You have been warned.

Editor's note: This performance of The Vagina Monologues benefited the UTC Women's Center Transformation Project and the Partnership's Sexual Assault Center. The intent of this post is to raise awareness of V-Day and the work of the Women's Center and the Partnership. Some content from the original post has been edited. For the full version, please contact hashley@partnershipfca.com.

I wasn’t looking forward to last weekend. Classes had been intense, the weather had blanketed the whole city in slate gray clouds with no sign of relief, and my legion of neuroses were piling up all at once – but that was par for the course, really. What finally tipped the scales was when I realized Valentine’s Day was coming.

(Is there a person on Earth who actually looks forward to Valentine’s Day? Don’t answer if you do - the rest of us might have to come deal with you.)

What was going to be a weekend spent entirely in my pajamas, curled up with a good video-game while I felt sorry for myself was changed at the last minute when I was asked to go check out the UTC Women’s Center and their production of the Vagina Monologues. Ordinarily I would have been excited to see the show. I consider myself a feminist, or a pro-feminist man, or whatever you want to call it, and I’d heard about Eve Ensler’s opus and missed two of the school’s previous annual performances. Remember that it was Valentine’s weekend however – unlike the rest of the year, I was more interested in moping and sighing than I was in social justice.

I went anyway, of course, because it’s kind of my job and honestly what else was I going to do? It would be a good excuse to get out of the house and be sad instead of being sad at home. It turned out that sitting at home was exactly what I would be doing on Friday night anyway thanks to another of this Winter’s sudden, city paralyzing bursts of snow. The next night, however, I arrived at UTC’s Fine Arts Center two hours early, met up with a group of women decked out in awesome pink shirts that read “Vagina!” and got to work.

Work, as it turned out, made use of the “skills” I picked up at terrible retail jobs that I thought I would never need again. We put out t-shirts from three different years of The Vagina Monologues where everyone could see them, as well as sign-up sheets for the Partnership’s "Walk a Mile in Her Shoes" event, and…nobody took the bait.

“Nobody’s buying any shirts,” Sara Peters, head of UTC’s Women’s Center, lamented.

Well of course they weren’t buying any shirts, we weren’t pushing the product*. It was time to see if I still had that retail magic, so I set to work! No-one who passed by that table was free from my aggressive tactics, not even classmates; the money from these shirts went to the Partnership and the Women’s Action Council after all, so decorum could take a back-seat as far as I was concerned.

“Would you like to take a look at our ‘This is what a feminist looks like’ shirts?” I said to a group of men, holding one up for display. “Use them to demonstrate fifteen dollars’ worth of devotion to gender equality, use them get points with a girlfriend, use them to keep relatives you don’t like from talking to you at reunions, use them to cover your abdomen if you’d like, they’re good for all that and more!”

“If you’re as excited about vaginas as I am after that show,” I said to a crowd of people I’d already tried once before the performance, “why not take another look at these fine shirts?” I waved my hand over our whole selection like Vanna White lighting up vowels and smiled. “All the profits go to causes that support vaginas and the people attached to them!”

I don’t remember exactly how many shirts we sold by the end of the night, but it was an integer greater than zero and we got some direct donations besides from particularly charitable theatre goers. So that was nice.

The main event was the show, though, and that’s where my weekend went from, “horrible mope-fest,” to “galvanizing reminder of the work left to do.” However, before I talk about UTC’s performance, some history is in order:

Eve Ensler didn’t intend to write a play at all when she took her first step down the road that would lead to the Vagina Monologues – she just wanted to have a dialogue with her friends. As the conversations with friends went on, she realized that these were things women desperately wanted and needed to discuss but felt too ashamed to or were simply prohibited from it in their daily lives. Then the friends started relating anecdotes from their friends, and friends of their own friends. And then the referrals began. By the time all was said and done, Eve had interviewed over 200 women about their vaginas, and so in 1996 the Monologues were born.

At first Eve performed all of the monologues herself, but within two years the show had become such a phenomenon that others wanted to get in on the action. This is how the V-Day event got started; Miss Ensler, who was approached after nearly every performance by women desperate to share their own anxieties and experiences of sexual violence, began working with Willa Shalit to organize a weekend centered around performances of the Monologues and other, similar works nationwide to raise money to benefit female victims of abuse and rape and to pursue an end to those phenomena. Twelve years later the Vagina Monologues and V-Day are still going strong, and have actually grown since their birth – the Monologues have added new sections over the years to reflect the developing concerns of women, and V-Day has spread out of New York to encompass not only the United States but the whole world.

While I knew about the Vagina Monologues before last weekend, I didn’t know about V-Day, which was tragic because it was exactly what I needed. I think it was what even more women needed, too. Valentine’s Day might be something that everybody cringes and mopes over, but a movement that seeks to co-opt the date in pursuit of social justice and freedom of women from violence? If you can’t get a little excited about that then I don’t really know what to say. Some people apparently criticize V-Day for being misandrist, or for trying to remind people of gender and sex-based injustice at a time when the sexes are supposed to be coming together in love, but I don’t think they get the point. Or maybe they’re the people who’ve never had trouble getting dates in February.

Anyway, back to the show! It started with three of the performers coming out to tell us a little about vaginas; namely, what they’re called all over this great nation of ours. This checklist got everyone laughing, and I think that might be part of the purpose of the show, to take us all back to that simple, childish state where people’s bodies simply existed, some were different from others, and we all had a good-natured giggle over how funny some of the words were before getting back to the important business of torturing our parents.

One of the monologues was a newer addition written by Eve Ensler about her witnessing the birth of her grandchild. It was remarkable to me for the same reason I imagine the experience it was based on was remarkable to her: I forgot that women can do that, and even when I think about it now the logistical and mechanical concerns are so great that I get dizzy. The whole process really is miraculous.

The monologues reflected the experiences of real women with their sexuality and their bodies, so while many of them tempered their grievances with humor, wit and whimsy some of them showed, just like the lives of many women in the world today, a history of the most gut-wrenching sorts of tragedy or oppression without much relief to speak of. There was the story of the Bosnian girl who fell victim to the systematic rape of the women in her country as a tactic of war, whose words still make my hands shake with grief. There was the Congolese girl who told the audience, through the frame of her two years as a sex slave, the eight rules necessary to survive such an ordeal. There was the story of the woman in the burqa, which is of course at the center a very complicated debate, but which reminded us that however we might feel about Islam and the dress and behaviors that sometimes follow from it, it is a religious choice and we are a nation that prides itself on religious tolerance. The problem, we were told, is that for a great many women the burqa and things like it are not a choice, and if the monologue was any indication of reality under those circumstances then my heart goes out to those women.

Look, the piece is controversial. It’s not politically correct. And I assume
people are going to have responses to it. I interviewed women, and I told
their stories. I didn’t make them up. People are going to have problems with
people’s stories.


For the record, I agree with Eve. Really you should see the show anyway, but that’s neither here nor there.



I still didn’t have a date for Valentine’s Day, but you know what? Who cares! I got to take part, even if it was a tiny little inconsequential part, in an even better V-letter event that made me happier than I’ve ever been on Valentine’s Day, even with a date. I think I’ve found my February holiday of choice from now on!



*I feel like every boss I ever hated just typing those words out.



THE VAGINA LINKS



Random House's Vagina Monologues Page
VDay.org

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

La Amiga

The program I am going to tell you about has recently been nominated to receive a "People's Choice Award" by WTCI's Be More Awards. To vote for Partnership please go to this link and vote for them for the People’s Choice Award! Read on to learn more.

Imagine for a moment that you are an immigrant in another country, a stranger in a strange land. You arrive, perhaps in the company of the man you married back home or perhaps to live with your new native husband. You’re probably poor, but your husband might have money. You don’t know anyone in this new place except your husband and possibly his family, and you don’t speak or understand a word of the language. For all intents and purposes, you are deaf and mute and invisible to everyone but your husband in this new place, utterly dependent on him with nowhere else to go, no-one else to turn to, and no way to communicate even if you did.

You might have married a good man, in which case you will be encouraged to learn the language of your new home, to make friends, to drive or find work if that is what you choose. He will make sure that your immigration is certified as soon as possible so that you are both citizens by law. Your children will go to school and grow up happy in your new life. Things don’t always work out this way though, and you didn’t marry a good man. Perhaps you come from a culture that arranges marriages or you simply had to cling to this man out of poverty or fear of trying to survive on your own, but he is anything but good. He hits you. He screams. He threatens, terrorizes, and demeans. He rapes you. If he is a legal citizen of your new home himself, he tells you that he could have you put in prison or deported if you make him angry or deny him anything he wants. If you have a child he might repeat all of these abuses on the child on top of promising that if you cross him or defy him at all he will make sure you and your child are separated forever. You are utterly alone, because he has done everything he could to keep your immigration status in limbo, he has isolated you so that you can’t learn the language of your new home, he has instilled a fear of everyone who could help you in your heart and, worst of all, depending on the culture you come from you might not even recognize that, at least in your new home, the things this man is doing to you are illegal and reprehensible.

There are resources and shelters out there for women in this situation, but they’re much more difficult to access; the already crippling obstacles that keep native women from reaching out for aid in abusive situations are compounded by language, cultural, and perceived legal barriers. But there is hope, in the form of La Amiga and the FVSS. La Amiga is an initiative within the Partnership to provide better, more thorough services for immigrant and non-English speaking women suffering from abuse, and since it began two years ago it has improved the lives of over 100 women who otherwise would have fallen through the cracks. The program received funding from the Community Foundation of Greater Chattanooga, and for that we thank them.

The services La Amiga provides seem like common sense when you think about them. At the core, all La Amiga really does is act as a combination of translator and caseworker for non-English speaking and especially Latina victims, but there is really more to it than that. She is familiar with the culture of the women she speaks with as much as she is with their language, and this does wonders when it comes to helping them. In addition, she has done things like put out Partnership fliers in Spanish so that Latinas can actually understand what is written on the ads and know how to get help*, created a video in Spanish that carefully walks women through the process of arriving at a shelter if they come at night or during another time when La Amiga or a translator isn’t present, and she makes sure that immigrant women trying to escape from abusive relationships understand that their husbands’ threats of deportation and separation from their children are not true as well as providing them with the resources to achieve full citizenship.


All of this appears to have worked. Before La Amiga nine out of every ten English speaking women who came to a shelter remained and made the transition to independence, whereas fewer than five in ten Spanish-speaking women did the same. Only seventeen Latinas sought any help at all in Shelters in 2007-2008. In 2008-2009 however, more than one hundred Latinas and other non-English speaking women (and don’t be fooled, she is as much a Chingu or a Mitr as she is una Amiga) sought assistance and nearly eighty-six percent of those women didn’t return to their abusers.

La Amiga’s name is Lydia Salva, and I sat down to speak with her recently about her work with the Partnership. Ms. Salva is an amazing, vivacious woman who has seen more of the world than most of us ever will. She is also remarkably humble for someone who has done so much to help so many people, but she explained to me that she doesn’t really do as much of the work as you might think. All she does for the women she helps is provide support and resources for them to use.

“The mission of the Partnership is, ‘Empowering people to build better lives,’ and I like that,” she said. “I think that’s good. The Partnership is an amazing team. They’re always training you, and they empower you to empower others.”

She told me a lot about the special concerns and threats facing immigrant women and especially Latinas that make them so vulnerable. “Statistically, the Latin American woman is the most abused woman in the United States, whether she’s married to an American or she’s married to a Latino,” she said. “Those three countries that have the highest rates of domestic violence are right here in Hamilton County.” The statistics back this up: the World Health Organization reports that nearly one in two women in Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras is a victim of domestic violence and that the most abused of all foreigners living in the U.S. are Latinas born abroad. Lydia was adamant, however, that domestic violence and abuse can’t be laid at the feet of race or culture or nationality and used as a scapegoat. “Domestic violence is not limited to a culture to a language or to a social status. It’s the same, and the pain is just as bad.” She mused that all sorts of things could contribute to the higher rates of violence in Latin America, from Catholic veneration of Mary encouraging women to suffer silently with dignity as part and parcel to motherhood to the pretty much constant oppression and abuse of native peoples and those descended from natives by Spanish colonists and their white descendants. She did mention that a lot of abuse is tied to unemployment and joblessness and that as we see unemployment rise in the U.S. we are seeing a rise in domestic abuse as well. “It’s not an excuse. None of this excuses it, but they are explanations,” she said.

I asked her about the men who do the abusing, about what she thinks feeds into it and what, if anything, can be done to help teach them to break the cycle of violence themselves. “A lot of these guys that are abusing, they were probably victims themselves. They saw their mom, their grandmother get beaten and they never got help. So, I’m not excusing it but I’m also looking at that. Hopefully we can help them. You have to somehow educate the woman but also educate men,” she said. “One day, when I was doing a presentation, there was a group of about fifty and there were only like ten women and most of these were Guatemalans. So, when I was talking about domestic violence some of these guys, their eyes just got bigger and bigger when I explained it to them. And I remember I asked these guys, ‘Imagine you are a kid, and your daddy is beating your mom. What do you feel? What did you feel if that did happen to you? Did you feel pain? What was going through your heart?’ And I said to open your eyes, and in a lot of these guys I saw some tears. And I said, ‘Imagine what your children are feeling’ and a lot of them bowed their heads. I said, ‘If there was a program that could offer to show you how to handle your anger would you go?’, and so many of their heads nodded. A lot of these guys, they know something’s wrong, but they don’t know how to handle it. No one has told them how to, or what to do.”


After we had talked for a few minutes about her work and her experiences, Lydia introduced me to three of the women she has helped. Their names have been changed for their safety and privacy, but they were more than happy to speak with me about their experiences with La Amiga and the Partnership.

The first person I sat down with, who we’ll call Emerald, was a quiet Asian woman who apologized for her English frequently as we spoke. All three of the women apologized for their English this way, but I assured each of them as best I could that there was no need. I’ve been led to believe that English is one of the more difficult of the commonly studied languages to learn, and none of these women had even been studying it for more than three years yet were conversational. Emerald’s story from before she began her work with the Partnership can be found

here as well as a little bit on her life afterward, but the focus of my talks with each of these women was their lives now, what they are doing to reach independence and wholeness, and I think that falls more in line with the goals of the Partnership and its shelters than a preoccupation with the way they were victimized - these are survivors, not victims.

So what has Emerald been up to? She has learned enough English to get by in day to day life. She has recently gotten her Nurse’s Assistant Certification, which was a very big deal for her since she was told by her teacher not to take the test at all because of her English. She, like the other two women, had come too far and done too much to be held back by something so trivial however, and she not only took the test but was one of only seven out of a group of fourteen to pass it. She has a fourteen year old daughter who is not only enrolled in my old high school, but who makes better grades there than I ever did. She is also Sylvia’s longest-running case – her citizenship is going to come through soon, she is working as a nurse’s assistant, and what she wants more than ever now is to go back to school to be a nurse so that she can do even more to help others.

The next person I spoke with was an Indian woman we’ll call Shelly. Shelly has only been in America for a year and has only been with the Partnership for 85 days out of that, but from what I saw her life is in the process of pulling a complete 180. Her English wasn’t fantastic but it was enough to understand one another most of the time if we spoke carefully, and it’s important to remember that she has reached this level of mastery after only three months! Shelly reminded me, more than anything else, of Virginia Woolf. I don’t think she’s a writer, but a lot of what she said centered on how amazing it was to have a place of her own, where she can make her own decisions about her life and that of her son, and that this is something she has never had before. She also told me that she is learning to drive, which is another amazing experience for her because before she came to the Partnership she didn’t know how to use buses or even how to read signs to get from place to place on foot and, since Hindi isn’t nearly as common a language in America as Spanish, she didn’t even have the resources of translators or an immigrant community to help her – she was mute and paralyzed without her husband, but now she is learning to speak and to move. “I stay in home, you know? And I don’t know anything – how I go, how I speak, how I go on the bus, but in 3 months I learn too much about this,” she said.

She also echoed what Lydia told me about how many women, whether it’s because they’ve never known a life that wasn’t abusive or because they come from a more strictly patriarchal culture, simply aren’t cognizant that their situations are abusive or wrong. “In our culture, I’m talking about only Indian people, they didn’t respect women this much. I learned here that women deserve respect, because she is everything, you know? She can do everything as a mother, wife, sister, and what men can do also.”

The thing that struck me most about my talk with her, and what has informed my thoughts on all the other women, was when I asked her about her experience as a Hindi speaker alone in America. She said the quote above about being alone in the home, and when I asked her what it was like to now know English she thought for a moment.

“I can speak now,” she said finally.

The final person I spoke with was a woman from El Salvador who we’ll call Emily. The first thing you notice about Emily is her ready smile and her sense of humor, two things Sylvia tells me she has only recently reclaimed. Like many of the Hispanic women the Partnership has helped since La Amiga began, what Emily told me about her experience had less to do with shelter and material assistance, and much more to do with advice and education. What the Partnership taught her, she told me, was how to spot a person who would be abusive to her, what to look out for. They taught her that she deserves better than a man who will beat her and her daughter does as well, and she has learned to make better choices in who she wants to be and in the people she chooses to be with.

Since Lydia had been so humble for most of the hour I tried to get some praise from Emily. “She doesn’t really want to brag, Emily, so brag for her if you could,” I said. They both laughed and exchanged a few words in Spanish, and then Emily took a moment to find the correct words before settling finally on something simple.

“She helps,” Emily said.

Honestly, I couldn’t think of a better way to describe or to compliment Lydia and the rest of the Partnership. They help.

*Without being able to understand the writing, a lot of fliers and ads for women’s shelters honestly look like ads for depression medication.

To show your appreciation for the Partnership and the work of La Amiga, please go to this link and vote for them for the People’s Choice Award!

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

I Spent All Morning Surrounded by Police Officers

It’s sometimes difficult for me to think of police officers as heroes. Perhaps this is due to the media I’ve grown up with, where there is a Wire or Shield for every Law & Order or Castle on television and a story of corruption and brutality for every report of valor and courage in the news. Perhaps the feeling just goes hand-in-hand with being young, liberal and idealistic, and some of you are sagely clucking your tongues right now as you remember your own youthful misconceptions. Whatever the cause for this outlook, it was put to the test last Monday morning when I sat in on a domestic violence training course sponsored by the Partnership in cooperation with the Chattanooga Police Department.

I’m not sure what I expected, my only previous real life experience with the police amounting to traffic tickets and stern looks discouraging shoplifting* when I was a teenager. Whatever I actually expected, the reality of police officers turned out to be much more pedestrian. Officers from every department in the region filtered in as 9:00 rolled around, some in uniform and some in street clothes, some carrying a weapon and some unarmed, some old and some young, male and female, black white and Hispanic, some in fighting trim and some…well, still in much better shape than me. Before class started they sat around talking about, well, exactly the sorts of things everyone talks about with their coworkers: how much sleep newborns were costing them, what movies they’d seen, how a weekend trip had gone. It was almost as if – and I know this is shocking - they were regular people doing a job and trying to get by, just like you and me.

I was still dubious of course, but the seed of doubt had been planted. Then the class started and the first order of business was for everyone to introduce themselves and say a little bit about why they were there and what their experience with domestic abuse was. There were one or two answers that made me cringe and a handful of admissions that an officer was only there because they had to be, but they were outweighed by the heartfelt responses that – and here’s what finally started to turn me – many of these officers felt frustrated that there was nothing they could do to help the women and the small handful of men they encountered in domestic violence cases, often over and over, besides arresting an abusive spouse or intimate partner who would only later be let go and allowed to redouble his abuse once he got back home. I had always imagined the police the same way a teenager thinks of his parents – here were people whose only goal in life was to punish people every chance they got, for no reason other than that it was fun. The realization that none of them were rabid authoritarian fascists and that many if not most of them were just as concerned with protecting the innocent as punishing the guilty was about as shocking as finally realizing that my parents no more enjoyed grounding me than I enjoyed being grounded. It humanized them and gave me a sense of respect that had been missing before.

Sadly though, a desire to help and an understanding of how to do so, especially without also causing harm, are not the same thing, which is why Jack Parks and the Partnership were involved. There was actually a dedicated domestic violence task force in Tennessee between 1996 and 2000 that took the annual domestic violence related murder rate down from the twenties to the low single digits for its entire run before sadly running out of funding and the Partnership, the Police Department and the state of Tennessee want to try and repeat that success. In fact Chris Chambers, one of the veteran officers of the original task force, was the one teaching the class. The Partnership’s role in all this is providing the officers with a framework for learning and access to the sort of resources and services they can use to help victims and survivors of abuse, as well as writing and overseeing the grant to make sure that a lack of funding doesn’t stop lives from being saved later on this time.

But what did they actually cover in the class? I was only there for one morning out of the whole week of speeches from survivors of domestic abuse, role-playing and tests, mind you, but in the span of just a few hours I was exposed to a lot. First of all, it turns out that I’m not the only person who’s had trouble trusting the police, and that for all their good intentions some of this mistrust on the part of domestic violence victims is justified. Apparently it’s not uncommon for an officer to arrest the victim of domestic abuse as well as the abuser, usually because the victim is hysterical and uncooperative when they arrive compared to the abuser, who – as you can read about in the links below – is often such a consummate manipulator or bully that he is calm and composed by that time, granting him an air of legitimacy that throws the victim in a bad light. The officers in class defended this behavior at first, mostly on the grounds that the victims often seemed to pose a danger to themselves or got in the way of arresting the abuser. When Officer Chambers told them that arresting the victim, who will then be reluctant to contact the police again, increases that person’s odds of being murdered by their abuser by something like 75%, more than a few eyes went wide and no-one else spoke up.

Another issue of police mistrust, and one I was genuinely surprised was brought up, had to do with domestic abuse in same-sex relationships. Officer Chambers made a point to mention that not only does this abuse happen and make sure it was treated with the respect it deserved, he also drove home that when it does happen, whether it’s in a lesbian or gay couple, the rates of serious injury and murder are much higher. He didn’t have an answer when one officer asked why, but I think this quote from aardvark.org sheds some light on the issue:


Facing a system which is often oppressive and hostile towards those who identify as anything other than "straight", those involved in same-gender battering frequently report being afraid of revealing their sexual orientation or the nature of their relationship. Additionally, even those who attempt to report violence in their alterative relationship run into obstacles. Police officers, prosecutors, judges and others to whom a GLBT victim may turn to for help may have difficulty in providing the same level of service as to a heterosexual victim. Not only might personal attitudes towards the GLBT community come into play, but these providers may have inadequate levels of experience and training to work with GLBT victims and flimsy or non-existant laws to enforce on behalf of the victim.

It’s sad but true that we have a long way to go when it comes to protecting every member of our society equally, but the effort is still being made by good people of all political stripes, and I think that’s really all we can ask for now. The officers seemed to take the information seriously, which I hope speaks to their interactions with GLBT individuals in our community.

Racial and economic demographics were also brought up, and the information was startling – it turns out that one of the most underreported groups victimized by domestic abuse, and by extension one of the most vulnerable, is upper-middle class and professional women, since they often feel they have more to lose in leaving their abusers and those same abusers have more resources, social and economic, to bring to bear in keeping their victims silent, helpless and compliant. This came as a potent reminder that abuse and victimization of women pays only lip service to race, creed, nationality and class.

One of the important topics that tied back specifically into the Partnership was making sure that the officers know about and know how to utilize the resources and programs the Partnership provides. The most frequently mentioned frustrations in the classroom were that the officers had no real power besides arrest over the fates of victims in their cases and that even when they did get someone help they felt cut off from them, even though the victim is often still in danger if their abuser is released from custody; Sadly, one of the more common ways for an abuser to stay out of prison is for their victim to refuse to testify in court, either from embarrassment or a very understandable sense of fear. For the first complaint, it was made clear to the officers that not only is their assistance encouraged, but that a referral from a law enforcement officer to the Partnership is always taken seriously and dealt with immediately. As to the second complaint, they were assured that not only will the Partnership help keep them in touch with the people they’re trying to protect, but that the digital cameras they were provided as part of the class would prove to be potent tools for gathering evidence at the scene of the crime while it was still fresh, which would prove vital to keeping a dangerous abuser away from his victim even if the victim doesn’t testify in court.

Finally, Officer Chambers covered more about domestic abuse than just violence. He reminded everyone that it's only in the last few years that forced sex within marriage has been classified as rape, and that sexual assault and forced pregnancy are still often used as a means of controlling a victim. He also discussed psychological, emotional, and financial abuse, none of which are things I imagine the officers could help with directly, but knowledge of which will help them know what to look for when they're called as well as what evidence to gather for when a case comes to court.

So how has my opinion of the police changed after sitting in on this class? I still don’t think of them as heroes, really, but it’s probably better just to know that they’re regular people with a desire to do good and protect people who can’t protect themselves. All other things aside though, if I had to choose anyone to protect the women (and some of the men) in my life if, God forbid, they’re ever in an abusive relationship, I can’t think of anyone I would welcome more than the police and the Partnership.

*I never shoplifted, I just looked like I would have so I guess I don’t blame them.

Note: If you are currently in a relationship which you feel is unsafe or abusive, please be aware that there is no way to safely browse a computer if someone is dedicated to invading your privacy or monitoring your actions. This includes text messaging, e-mail, and instant messaging. If you feel you are in imminent danger or would be if your spouse or significant other discovered you researching this topic or reaching out for help, please go to the police, one of the Partnership's shelters, a computer at the library or a school, or even just a friend or relative’s house before you do anything else. You have options, you don’t have to deal with it alone, you DO NOT have to tolerate any kind of abuse one moment longer than you already have. Please be safe.

Important Domestic Abuse Links:
The Partnership's Sexual Assault Crisis and Resource Center
The Partnership's Family Violence Center
The Partnership's Emergency Shelter for Families
Aardvarc.org: A collection of important information and resources provided by survivors of relationship and domestic abuse and violance.
Nnedv.org: A guide on how to safely use the internet and computers if you are currently in an abusive relationship.
Helpguide.org: An article on the signs that you are in an abusive relationship or that someone you know is trapped in an abusive situation.