No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us

by Rachel Louise Snyder

Kelly Dunne once told me the “dirty little secret” of shelter was that it was a “ticket to welfare.” If a woman needed shelter and the closest bed was across the state, she had to take it immediately, even if that meant leaving a job or a kid’s school and friends behind.

More and more victims resist staying in shelters, Dunne said.

“The answer to all those questions is no,” Dunne said. “Shelter was this way to get the criminal justice system off the hook. They’d say, ‘If she’s really that afraid, she’ll go into shelter,’ and when women didn’t, we’d surmise that they really weren’t that afraid.” Dorothy taught her how dangerous such an assumption could be.

have worked to better accommodate the needs of abuse victims. Jobs are often encouraged; sophisticated security systems have been installed in shelters that can afford it. Some shelters now allow teenage boys to stay with their mothers and families to bring their pets; others permit contact with friends and family.

And yet even at their best, shelters represent a total disruption. Still, speaking out against shelters has cast advocates like Dunne outside the mainstream. “It’s not a popular opinion to be putting forth in the domestic violence world,” she said. This despite the fact that most shelters remain chronically underfunded, opening and closing at the whim of state or county budgets, and that the evidence suggests that shelters provide victims and their families neither an easy respite nor a long-term solution.

In response to a New Yorker article in which I covered many of these same points, a reader wrote in: As the founder of one of the country’s first shelters, I reject the statement … that shelters are, in effect, a ‘ticket to welfare.’ High Risk Teams are an important innovation, but they reach only a fraction of victims who are already known to law enforcement or service providers. The model is most effective as part of a comprehensive approach to preventing domestic violence that includes shelter. Shelters provide safe housing and trauma support for individuals and families, the vast majority of whom have endured chronic abuse, poverty, and homelessness. It’s the place where survivors report feeling safe for the first time in their lives. Support services emphasize education, employment, and a pathway to stable, affordable housing. Indeed, our High Risk Team, a partnership of more than twenty-five local agencies, has sent families to shelters on numerous occasions, when shelter was truly their only option.2

I cannot argue with this letter writer’s statement. So I must concede that these two realities uneasily coexist: that shelter is necessary and saves lives, but it is also an abysmal fix.

Often shelter can be helpful even just for a night or two to let tempers calm down. But Dunne also characterizes shelters as prisons for women, with strict rules and curfews, and says that children, removed from the familiarity of home and friends, can emerge from them traumatized. Even in the best shelters, like the one I saw in Massachusetts, you’re housing traumatized people with other traumatized people. Families are most often allotted a single large bedroom.

Imagine any other crime where the impetus for change, and the loss of civil liberties, lies with the victim, Dunne said. “Shelters have saved the lives of battered women,” she said. “But it seemed inherently unfair to me, that this was our answer.”

These days, there is a push to try to keep victims in their communities and out of shelter, to build a kind of safety wall around the victim. One of the methods of this is called transitional housing. Transitional housing differs from shelter in that it of...

“Historically, if a victim of domestic violence went to the services in the city to get help or shelter and she would explain that she was homeless because of [domestic violence], they would say, ‘You should go to a domestic violence shelter; we don’t deal with that,’ ” Hacskaylo told me. “And the domestic violence shelter system was so small and lacked so much capacity that … what would happen is that victims would go into domestic violence shelters and when they would time out of those shelters, they would go back to the family intake system to say, ‘Okay, I need housing.’ And the [intake system] would say, ‘Are you at a shelter?’ And the victim would say, ‘Yes.’ So the intake people would say, ‘Okay, then you’re not homeless.’ ” Hacskaylo says to get around this, programs had a practice whereby they’d have to make survivors homeless by basically evicting them from whatever program they were being housed by in order for them to be able to say, legitimately, that they were now homeless and needed housing. For many, this resulted in an endless loop of recurrent homelessness and violence and shelter and homelessness and violence and shelter. Even today, a task force headed by the D.C. Coalition Against Domestic Violence reported that a third of homeless women in the District were homeless directly because of violence in their home.

it. Back in 2006, Hacskaylo told me, the city had just two shelters, which between them offered forty-eight beds for women and kids only (no men). The police department, meanwhile, got more than thirty-one thousand domestic violence calls a year. (Domestic violence didn’t become a crime in Washington, D.C., until 1991.4) Between D.C.’s two primary agencies—House of Ruth and My Sister’s Place—seventeen hundred victims annually were getting some kind of assistance. The gap between needs and services was gigantic and overwhelming. At the time Hacskaylo had left her role as deputy director of My Sister’s Place and taken a job with the Office of Violence Against Women (OVW). After a coalition of domestic violence groups convinced the D.C. city council of the District’s overwhelming need for shelter, the council allocated a million dollars to anyone willing to create additional safe housing. If funding is the most significant challenge any nonprofit organization has, this seemed like a no-brainer; here was basically a bank account just waiting to be used by someone to address an obvious and huge social need. The recipe was all right there: need plus funding. But no one came forward to apply for the funds. It was an unusual situation, to have a vast pool of funding, and no applicants. Hacskaylo, who knew her way around the D.C. domestic violence community, was tasked with finding out why. She set up a series of focus groups and for four months tried to figure out what the problem...

Hacskaylo did more focus groups that confirmed what she already knew: that many survivors either ended up in the homeless shelter system, or they went back to abusers for lack of housing alternatives. Anywhere from 25 to 80% of homeless women, depending upon which study is cited, have domestic violence histories. And it gets worse. In cities where police can give nuisance citations, domestic violence winds up being a major cause of eviction.

Matthew Desmond writes in his book Evicted how domestic violence nuisance cases surpassed all other forms of nuisance citations combined (things like disorderly conduct or drug charges) in Milwaukee, and that 83% of landlords who were issued such citations either evicted those tenants or threatened to evict them, meaning that victims who were abused became not only less likely to call the police next time, but they were also often victimized a second time through eviction.

Hacskaylo began to realize how siloed the services are for homeless versus domestic violence, how little any of these groups tend to communicate with one another to work together. “What’s happening is that victims are falling through the cracks as a result,” she said, citing a kind of circular inferno that so many victims found themselves in.

While Hacskaylo was busy putting together Cornerstone, she also began looking for scattered site transitional housing; scattered sites are basically units that DASH has negotiated for with landlords to lease to their clients. In the hyper-expensive housing market that is Washington, D.C., these scattered sites are a constant source of need, and DASH has had to go farther and farther beyond the city limits to find affordable housing and willing partners. At the same time, with transitional housing all across the country now offering survivors a pathway to stability, Hacskaylo says the Housing and Urban Development Agency (HUD) is moving away from transitional housing, claiming that it’s overly expensive for what it provides. Instead, HUD is moving toward what it calls “rapid re-housing,” getting domestic violence survivors in and out of a subsidized housing situation in just four or six months. Hacskaylo says for most people, this is simply not enough time. Often, they have significant debt or their credit has been ruined by their abuser, or they haven’t had a job in a long time. Sometimes they want to finish a degree or vocational training. At DASH, their rent is covered for two years. They can sometimes apply to extend that for another six months, and after that, DASH has a project to help with another two years of partially subsidized housing. And even then, Hacskaylo says, it’s sometimes not enough time.

Today, she is working on a national model (NASH—the National Alliance for Safe Housing) based on what she created at DASH. She told me that in 2013, she began a new pilot program that has changed entirely the way she thinks about surviving domestic violence. It’s called the Survivor Resilience Fund and it’s just that: a pool of money to help survivors. “The conventional wisdom is that if a victim wants to get out of a situation, then she must leave her home and uproot her family and start all over again, and that typically means going into a shelter, and then going into some other subsidized long-term housing, finding a new job, new schools, putting their lives back together entirely,” she told me.

has found in this pilot project is that there are many survivors who have the ability to sustain their own housing, but they’re facing a short-term financial crisis. Maybe they don’t have enough money saved for a security deposit and first month’s rent; maybe they don’t have a way to furnish a place they’ve moved into. Maybe they have an abuser who racked up credit card debt in their name. Whatever the situation, the Survivor Resilience Fund is simply a means to get them past that first big financial hurdle and keep them in their own communities.

“For me,” Hacskaylo said, “it’s been this total paradigm shift, because I’ve worked in shelter and transitional housing my whole career.” She says basically, the money they can offer helps a survivor avoid homelessness as a result of private violence. But the resilience fund has proven to Hacskaylo that conventional wisdom isn’t always necessarily true, that survivors don’t want to leave their communities, and many don’t even want to be cut off from their abusers. They want to be safe, but they also want their children to have both parents in their lives, so the fund provides them with a way to establish their own home in their own community and in many cases keeps the criminal ju...

Before we finish, Hacskaylo takes me on a short tour of Cornerstone. It finally opened to clients in 2010, and today has forty-three studio and one-bedroom units; DASH covers rent for two years—long enough, Hacskaylo says, for survivors to get their finances together, pay off debts and hopefully save some money, to address whatever other needs they may have, like substance abuse, and to get their children situated in school. There is a small fitness room with a television in one of the units and two communal play areas for kids—one for younger kids and one for older, plus the playground outside. Twice a week they have volunteers trained on children’s trauma come in to play, and two former students of the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design have a nonprofit to work on art therapy with the kids. The basement has walls lined with children’s art that’s been professionally mounted, and she says they do community art shows regularly where the kids are the docents. The units have hardwood floors with newly renovated efficiency kitchens and large windows overlooking the neighborhood, where sunlight streams in on this muggy summer day. What Cornerstone offers is immediate: it’s not a ...

empowerment comes with so...

“I would think the exception would be the Tarasoff warning,” Dunne says, finally. She is referring to a warning required of mental health professionals when there is a credible danger to a victim. It’s sometimes called, simply, the “duty to warn.”

When the officer drove away, he circled back—it’s a common stalking tactic for abusers to be watching for a police drive-by and then show up just as the officer rounds the corner. But the police in this part of the country are well aware of this tactic from the High Risk Team. So the officer drove around the block, circled back to the house two minutes after he left, and found the abuser there, just getting out of his car.

“If you care about the long-term health of a victim, not having them killed is not enough,” Dunne says. “When that offender goes to jail, her physical safety may be okay, but her life might unravel [with] the loss of support. You have to restore that victim back to the state they were in before that violence occurred.”

Victims often come with their own set of issues. Addiction, poverty, unemployment. Dunne is not trying to fix every aspect of someone’s life. She’s trying to get them out of danger to a space where they may be able to think through solutions to more systemic problems—like employment or addiction. To maybe give them the emotional and physical and mental space to address some of these other issues.

“The key with domestic violence,” says Dunne, “is addressing it in misdemeanor phase.” One of the more challenging elements of domestic violence is that ideally you want to stop abuse from escalating. But for that to happen, misdemeanors need to be taken far more...

And many perpetrators like Ramirez go straight from a misdemeanor to a murder. But for the judiciary, the challenge is what to charge an offender with and how much the court can and will respond in an attempt to stop the behavior.

One of the most effective tools for the High Risk Team is a Massachusetts bail statute called a 58A, or dangerousness hearing. A standard bail hearing is meant to determine an offender’s flight risk, whereas a 58A can be requested by the district attorney and allows defendants, even those with clean records, to be held in the misdemeanor phase without bail until trial if they are deemed a sufficient threat to an individual or community.

In Massachusetts, offenders can be held for 180 days. “A lot of violence happens between arraignment and disposition,” Dunne says. “We contain the offender so the victim doesn’t have to be contained.” Few states have such a clear dangerousness statute, and in her trainings now Dunne encourages advocates to search their states’ bail statutes for something similar. Many advocates simply don’t know to look, though even when they do go back and research their own states’ bail statutes, they’re almost sure to be disappointed. In April 2018, Pennsylvania became only the second state to pass such a statute allowing a judge to take into consideration, specifically, the dangerousness of a domestic violence abuser.1

The 58A belongs to a category of bail statutes known as preventive detention,

“Many states have preventive detention statutes,” said Cherise Fanno Burdeen, the chief executive officer of the Pretrial Justice Institute, an advocacy group that works with communities on effective bail practices. “But they are sorely underused. The systems use work-arounds which unfortunately don’t always work, meaning dangerous people leave jails every day, unsupervised.” Preventive detention statutes emerged from federal legislation called the Bail Reform Act of 1984, which allows a defendant to be held pretrial if he or she is deemed dangerous enough to another person or to a community. A determination of dangerousness includes factors like the nature of the crime, the evidence against the defendant, and the history of criminal activity, among others; most often, these statutes have been used in gang or drug cases, though Massachusetts has seen a marked increase in their use for domestic violence.