Catholic Charities In the News
‘One stop shop’ aiding domestic violence victims
November 29, 2008 - The Clarion Herald
By Peter Finney, Jr.
The concept of a providing a “one-stop shop” for customers is a no-brainer: Wal- Mart has become a national retailing giant because of the prices and convenience it offers.
Employing a similar model is the key to helping victims of domestic violence, who often are so traumatized they don’t know where to turn, a San Diego family violence expert told a New Orleans conference Nov. 18.
“We have done focus groups with hundreds of survivors, and not once have we heard a survivor say, ‘I’d like to go to more places for my help,’” said Casey Gwinn, president of the Family Justice Center Alliance and chief executive officer of the YWCA in San Diego County.
Gwinn, a former San Diego prosecutor and founder of the city’s domestic abuse unit, established the San Diego Family Justice Center in 2002 to bring together under a single roof more than two dozen agencies that provide help to domestic abuse victims.
In the U.S. each day, three women are killed as a result of domestic abuse, Gwinn said.
After Hurricane Katrina severely damaged the judicial and law enforcement structure in New Orleans, Gwinn gathered with representatives of the city, the U.S. attorney, Catholic Charities and others to develop the New Orleans Family Justice Center, which opened in August 2007 on Julia Street.
Center has aided 230
In the last 15 months, the center has provided more than 700 services to 230 women, said Mary Claire Landry, director of Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault Services for Catholic Charities Archdiocese of New Orleans.
The center has brought together representatives of Catholic Charities, the New Orleans district attorney’s office, Tulane University and Crescent House, an archdiocesan-run shelter for battered women and children.
The local center has received $3 million in federal funding, which is enough to keep it open through 2010, Landry said.
“Right now we have outgrown our space, but we have a lot of people who are not on site but continue to work with us,” Landry said. “We’re going to continue to engage people to be involved with us and bring their services to survivors. The challenge is how we continue to sustain this after the federal money goes and to really engage the community to support this project.”
Gwinn carried a basketball to the podium to highlight a public awareness poster about domestic violence sponsored by New Orleans Hornets forward David West.
The poster, with the image of the NBA All-Star, says “Don’t Foul Out!” and has contact information on how to get help for domestic violence, child abuse, sexual assault and elder abuse.
Public awareness needed
Public awareness about the prevalence of domestic violence is critical to creating a “critical mass” needed to attack the problem, Gwinn said. He was a domestic violence prosecutor in San Diego in the 1990s, and he believed sufficient protocols had been put in place among police and prosecutors to keep families safe. But that belief was shattered in 1998 when Gwinn watched a man in a pickup truck attacking a female passenger with his fists.
Gwinn boxed the man in with his car and eventually got the man to lie flat on the ground while police responded to the call.
“I asked the woman a series of questions, and she didn’t respond,” Gwinn recalled. “She just kept saying, ‘I can’t believe he hit me in the face. I can’t believe he hit me in the face.’”
But after interviewing the victim, the police officer said the woman recanted and said she had actually sparked the argument. The officer was well-trained, Gwinn said, but he was “burned out because the prosecutor’s office wasn’t doing its job.”
“Virtually every case was getting dropped or plea bargained,” Gwinn said. “In the middle of all of this the officer would see the kids. He’d see the 10-year-old and then (eight years later) see the 18-year-old arrested after joining a gang. So what’s the point? How was he making a difference? I came to see that we needed a much bigger vision. It was going to take a coordinated community response.”
That personal experience prompted Gwinn to push for a comprehensive response that involved “co-located” care – bringing dozens of agencies together under the same roof. It’s the model being used now in New Orleans.
“We’ve spent a lot of money, but we’re spending it at the bottom of the cliff, after the crash, and not at the top of the cliff,” Gwinn said.
Another key is to listen carefully to victims, because when they see a counselor or a police officer they may be holding back telling everything they know.
“We can’t ever forget what the victims have experienced before they came in,” Gwinn said.
The New Orleans Family Justice Center can be contacted at (504) 592-4005.
A 24-hour crisis hotline is answered at (504) 866-9554. The Web site is NewOrleansFamilyJusticeCenter.org.
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