{"id":54054,"date":"2022-11-01T11:32:55","date_gmt":"2022-11-01T18:32:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=54054"},"modified":"2022-11-21T15:53:07","modified_gmt":"2022-11-21T23:53:07","slug":"domestic-violence-is-healable-and-preventable","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=54054","title":{"rendered":"Domestic Violence is \u2018Healable and Preventable\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"
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By<\/span>Peter White<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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\"DV<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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And while there has been encouraging progress, advocates say much more needs to be done to prevent abuse.<\/em><\/h3>\n

As a freshman at University of Texas at Austin Deborah Tucker did not find campus life an extension of the safe and loving home she grew up in.<\/p>\n

Some creepy guy harassed Tucker and her two roommates. He stalked them and kept trying to break into their apartment, so they reported him. The police couldn\u2019t catch him but they surveilled their place for a week. The stalker was watching.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs soon as the cops were pulled off, the guy broke in again. And unfortunately, we had a friend staying with us that particular weekend, and he assaulted her,\u201d Tucker said during an\u00a0October 28 media briefing<\/a>\u00a0organized by Ethnic Media Services.<\/p>\n

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(Clockwise: Jenna Lane, Communications Officer, Blue Shield Foundation of California;\u00a0Pallavi Dhawan, Director of Domestic Violence Policy, Los Angeles City Attorney\u2019s Office; EMS Health Editor Sunita Sohrabji; Deborah Tucker, president of the Board of Directors, the National Center on Domestic and Sexual Violence; and Eria Olsen, Director of the Safety Net program, National Network to End Domestic Violence.)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Tucker has been advocating against the use of violence against women ever since. She founded the Austin Rape Crisis Center, the Austin Center for Battered Women and is current president of the\u00a0National Center on Domestic and Sexual Violence<\/a>\u00a0(NCDSV).<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve pretty much earned every one of these bright white hairs doing this work,\u201d Tucker says.<\/p>\n

Domestic and sexual violence occur across the world in every culture, including in California, where \u201cmore than half of have up close and personal experience\u201d with it, says Jenna Lane, communications officer with the Blue Shield of California Foundation. \u201cIt is truly everywhere, which is troubling.\u201d<\/p>\n

When you think about battered women you think about their physical injuries. But domestic violence (DV) includes a lot of abusive behaviors that cause other injuries.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt can also be emotional. It can be financial, like controlling someone\u2019s money or getting them fired from their job\u2026. It can be legal, like threatening to call immigration on someone,\u201d Lane says. The big question is \u201cWhat to do about it?\u201d<\/p>\n

October is Domestic Violence Awareness month, and the foundation just launched a new website,\u00a0Let\u2019s End Domestic Violence<\/a>, which offers information on prevention, healing and other resources.<\/p>\n

\u201cDV is everywhere; it is healable: it is preventable,\u201d Lane says.<\/p>\n

Tucker, who co-founded the\u00a0National Domestic Violence Hotline in 1996<\/a>, went to Washington in 1974 to help then Senator Joe Biden work on the first rendition of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). It has been reauthorized a few times, most recently in March 2022.<\/p>\n

The law authorizes an\u00a0array of supportive services<\/a>, including funding for different DV programs, giving victims the choice to go to court instead of mandatory arbitration, and increasing services and support for survivors from underserved and marginalized communities\u2014including for LGBTQ+ survivors of domestic violence.<\/p>\n

Good statistics on DV are hard to come by. A lot of DV occurs between intimate partners and is often not reported.<\/p>\n

States also define DV differently, an issue that exists even between various state-level agencies within a single state. For example, in California courts have a penal code for criminal cases, a family code that controls family court, and civil code for civil court.<\/p>\n

\u201cDomestic violence isn\u2019t even uniformly defined across those codes in the same state,\u201d says Pallavi Dhawan.<\/p>\n

Dhawan was a prosecutor in the Family Violence Unit of the Los Angeles District Attorney\u2019s office. \u201cI spent 13 years handling really horrific cases of murders and rapes and attempted murders,\u201d she says. And Dhawan was good at it. In 2019 she received the L.A. County Bar Association award for Prosecutor of the Year.<\/p>\n

Dhawan now works out of the City Attorney\u2019s office, which sponsored California Senate Bill 1141, legislation that adds\u00a0coercive control<\/a>\u00a0to the definition of domestic violence within the Family Code.<\/p>\n

The bill relied on research that estimated between 60% and 80% of female domestic abuse survivors have experienced coercive control.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was tired of hearing people say that domestic violence requires physical abuse and bruising. And I heard that in court a lot, and I heard it from jurors and judges, \u201c Dhawan says.<\/p>\n

Victims of this form of abuse can now seek restraining orders\u00a0prohibiting coercive control<\/a>\u00a0and requiring courts to consider evidence of coercive control in child custody determination.<\/p>\n

Common forms of coercive control include isolation, deprivation of resources, monitoring a person\u2019s movements and behavior. It\u2019s all of those things that strip away a person\u2019s autonomy and reduce them to a shadow of their former self, Dhawan says.<\/p>\n

Erica Olsen is the Safety Net Project Director at the National Network to End Domestic Violence (NNEDV), an umbrella for nearly 2000 local domestic violence programs nationwide. She focuses on the role of technology in DV cases.<\/p>\n

\u201cAbusers will misuse any kind of technology as a tool of abuse,\u201d says Olsen. \u201cSome abusers may install a hidden app or monitoring software on a partner\u2019s device without their knowledge. Some may misuse social media sites or smart devices in the home as a way to harass or stalk.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tactics include tracking someone\u2019s location without their knowledge, or hijacking financial or social accounts to commit fraud or impersonation, distributing intimate images without consent or posting threats or harassing content online. For LGBTQ survivors, their abusers may specifically threaten to out them online. \u201cThat\u2019s a very common tactic,\u201d says Olsen.<\/p>\n

A piece of the new VAWA includes a provision for Civil Action for Nonconsensual Image Sharing, which gives survivors an option to go to court to recover monetary damages and access to protection orders.<\/p>\n

The Department of Justice says rape arrests from 1980 to 2015 dropped from 26,000 to 15,000. That indicates the efforts to combat DV are working. To end it, advocates say more must be done proactively on the prevention side with victims and their abusers.<\/p>\n

\u201cHere in Texas, we did a huge study a few years ago of everyone who was in prison for having committed murder or a serious violent crime, and the 80% rule came out,\u201d says Tucker, in reference to life-changing events that predict abusive behavior. According to her findings, 80% of inmates included in the study grew up in families where domestic violence was used.<\/p>\n

Whenever Tucker works with lawmakers she reminds them \u201cthat 80% of the people that we lock up for murder grew up and had to deal with the use of violence against themselves or someone they loved very, very early in life.\u201d<\/p>\n

When it comes to improving legislation, she adds, \u201cIf we want to stop the worst of the violence\u2026 we gotta stop domestic and sexual violence. It\u2019s all interconnected,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n