Well, volunteer, although they did offer me a part time job. I have volunteered at a DV safe house (serving women and children) for ten months. I “work” there on Tuesdays, and have also helped covering other shifts and doing fundraiser/outreach activities.
The safe house is, yes, secret - although plenty of people know where it is. It is on an upper floor in a high-rise building with a lot of security, and nobody gets on or off the floor without a key or permission. it is located in Flint, Michigan. The organization offers temporary lodging for women and children who are victims of DV, as well as counseling, some free legal services and some group counseling. The focus for residents is to help them with whatever they need to get strong, self-sufficient and safe.
What I do when there: Answer the crisis line. There are a lot of calls. Not all of them from people in crisis; many people call with questions or just to talk. The main number rings through to the crisis line so a lot of the calls are procedural/non-crisis and get transfered elsewhere. Also, Flint is a poor city and there are a lot of homeless people looking for somewhere safe and warm - we refer a lot of calls to homeless shelters. So, the phone rings a lot.
Do paperwork. Lots of paperwork. Everything has to be logged and monitored and recorded, right down to handing out towels and checking off whether resident rooms are clean every day. Most of the money comes from grants and charitable/corporate donations - people want to know exactly how the money is being spent.
Mostly, play “dorm monitor.” Get residents and their kids whatever they need - diapers, personal care stuff, (lay) counseling, hugs, resolving disputes, dispensing meds, handing out bus passes, unstopping leaky toilets, helping them with paperwork for various government or NGO resources, letting people on and off the floor for smoke breaks, the list goes on.
How is this possible? Does everyone who is told the location by a safe house worker have to swear to secrecy with actual legal (civil? criminal?) penalties for disclosing the location?
What happens if someone starts telling others where it is, or if people just start bumping in to it casually and start making inquiries?
How do you qualify the people who come in looking for help? You mention a lot of homeless folks - how do you decide who stays there and who gets referred out? What about people who never lived in your area? If someone ran away from an abusive home in another city could you still help them?
No legal or otherwise-mandated penalities for disclosing the location…that would be impossible to enforce, anyhow.
Really, it wouldn’t matter if the location were well-known (I’m sure it is already, really.) It is virtually impossible for anyone to access it without permission. Staff maintains an updated description list of abusers/assailants. The place is under 24/7 video surveillance and there are security guards in place after hours. Plus we have a “code” message that goes out over the intercom system if anyone suspicious breaches security and gets access to the building.
Truthfully - an abusive partner who is determined enough can and will breach all legal and physical barriers. Luckily, IME, most aren’t that determined or smart.
Is this a government operation, or private? If it’s run by a religious organization, are there attempts to convince the people seeking shelter to convert?
Are the residents required to attend certain programs, such as counseling, or can they pick and choose what they think they need most?
All research indicates that you can’t make generalizations based on income, race, etc. I have an IRL friend who is in a high socio-economic bracket (doctor estranged husband) who I worry about and is dealing with stalking and weird behaviour with her ex. Domestic abuse, from what I understand, crosses all barriers.
I will say that the women who use the services of the non-profit I volunteer with are overwhelmingly poor/unskilled and also African American (not surprising, since Flint is over 60% AA.) Women with resources - money, supportive families, jobs, etc generally don’t contact DV shelters only because they don’t need to. That said - some are really quite accomplished and together, but their plans got derailed by horrible relationships and they need temporary help.
I haven’t actually taken a call like this. If I did, I’d maybe refer him to the YMCA. I’d put him on hold and ask some of the senior staff members/legal dept if they know of anywhere that can help in the county (or whatever county he’s in.) Maybe legal aid, places to help him get a PPO, references to shelters if he needs a place to stay temporarily, and so on.
That is tricky. Many people are repeat callers who know the system, and can concoct plausible stories of DV. One of the questions we ask (there’s a form we fill out for each call) is whether the person has used our services before - we can pull up names quickly.
Sadly, there is way more need than space (32 beds here) and most of the time, even if I really WANT to help someone, I can’t because we have no room. So I rattle off numbers and contact info for other county shelters, ask if they can leave the county (most can’t) so I can give them out of county resources - yes, we can refer people to other cvounties or states no problem.
Really, as to the “qualifying” part - it’s part gut intsinct, part comes out when we ask all the questions on the contact sheet, part is just the sympathies of whoever takes the call. Quite a few of the calls we get come from police departments, social service agencies and other shelters.
Personally I just about tear up when I get a call from someobne who is clearly upset and emotional, that’s difficult, especially if they have kids! Unfortunately it’s a moot point: most of the time we have no space anyway so all I can do is suggest other resources. That sucks though.
Nominally a religious organization, but nothing I have seen in my time there is even remotely religious - they make a big point of being acceoting of everyone. I haven’t detected a hint of religiosity in any of the staff olr other volunteers, it was never mentioned during the 4-week orientation, nobody I’ve met there (staff or volunteers) has given any hint of religious leaning or bias, or even discussed religion. Disclaimer: I have no direct experience with any other YWCA branch, but from what I’ve seen they make an effort to stay secular and open to all religions at the same time.
Residents or anyone utilizing servives are absolutely not expected to or required to attend religious services (they don’t offer any anyhow), the counseling is absolutely secular.
Thirty days coming in, but women have stayed more than 90 days - really, as long as someone is playing by the rules and trying to move forward, they’ll let them stay as long as it takes to find safe housing.
There’s a small commercial-type kitchen and dining room. Residents sign up for a roster of cooking/cleaning duties, and the responsible resident cooks the meals (breakfasts are more flexible since there’s several moms, people with jobs, and so on.). Staff or volunteers do a daily inventory of what is needed in the kitchen and bring up food as needed from the cold storage/freezer room on the first floor.
Food is either bought with safe house funds, or donated.
There’s a separate “boy’s bathroom” on the floor for any boys/young men who want to use it for bathroom privacy or showering. They do have to ask staff to let them in or out, however. (There is at least one staff member on the floor 24/7.)
In my 10 or so months there, I can only think of one boy over the age ot ten or 11 on the floor. Most moms either have little kids, or have family members who can take care of the older kids.
I sort of make a deal out of handing little boys the bathroom keys and high-fiving them for handling the bathroom duties by themselves. It is by definition a very female-centric environment, and the boys in particular seem to act out or try to be aggressive and protector-ish. So I try to give them some healthy control when I can.
Are all the workers female? Are there policies that would forbid a man from working or volunteering there?
What happens if a woman seeking shelter is both a victim and an abuser? E.g. if they have been abused by a husband or father, but she herself has been abusing a child or sibling? E.g. Mary (19) is being abused by her father, but Mary is abusing her little sister Jane (18). Is Mary turned away (e.g. ad hominem tu quoque), or would you just ensure that Mary and Jane go to different shelters?
The majority of the staff and volunteers are female. When I first started, a man was on permanent staff and had been for a while - funding for his position was cut a few months ago, so they had to let him go. Many of the volunteers are interns from local colleges and the uni - there have been a couple of male interns in the last year.
No policies that I am aware of to dissuade men - but this is a field that attracts mostly female staff and volunteers so yeah, that’s the majority.
(They do have a full-time staff of maintenance people and at least one security guard who are male, though.)
Someone who is abused is…well, given whatever recources abused women/children have available to them here. One resident to my knowledghe was also charged as an abuser during her stay here (allegedly abused her adult male partner) but since there was documentation she was also a victim, she was treated as such. She was also getting help from the legal department but I was not privy to those details.
Staff and volunteers will work with Child Protective Services and other agencies if there’s suspected child abuse or neglect. They don’t protect the mother at the expense of children. That has happened since I’ve been there actually - a resident had her children removed by CPS.
As to your Mary and Jane scenario - I don’t know. Almost all the calls we get involve male partners and female victims. Occasionally abusive family members but that is rare. I can’t attest to actual statistics - being the YWCA, most people who call, by an overwhelming majority, are women being abused/beaten/victimized/stalked by a male partner.
It would probably depend on what sort of legal/criminal history there was on the parties involved - as an FYI, when there’s abuse or stalking going on, having police reports and PPOs (restraining orders) lends a lot of credibility. Recources are extremely slim, so the chances that person A goes to one shelter while person B goes to another are very slight. AWAG - on any given day in that city, there may be six available beds city-wide and 300 callers trying to get in. So there’s not much in the way of picking and choosing going on.
How do you turn away someone in true need? ‘Sorry no more beds!’? Even when you know she’s in danger and her children? What if they didn’t call and just turned up, possibly bloodied, on the door step? Could you still turn them away?
That would shatter me. (I’d be taking them to my house, truly!)
How do you avoid coming home feeling bad, about those you turned away, rather than, those you supported?
The protocol for when we have no space (which is most of the calls) is to: assess risk, then give the caller as many other resources as possible - which may include police and legal aid resources, homeless shelters in and out of the county, other DV hotline and shelter numbers.
Police 911, if it’s a dire situation. Honestly, if someone were to show up bloodied and imperiled - we’d pull out all the stops to get them help but truly the YWCA cannot house more people than it has room for, legally and insurance-wise. We provide temporary housing and help - medical, legal and police intervention are outside the purview but we have all of these numbers on hand.
To be honest, very few calls are so dire that the only hope is emergency response. I have felt impelled to help someone out personally a few times, but only after I’ve gotten to know and trust them as tesidents. Doing this type of work really sharpens your BS detector! A lot of people try to scam the system.
That said - yes, I wish I could house almost every person I talk to. No, I don’t want to take them home. Even though I see most of the ladies just once a week, I about jump for joy when I come in and find out someone has found housing and moved out. Last Tuesday, two women who’d been long-term residents with kids were on the cusp of getting housing and moving on, so this coming Tuesday I’ll miss them and their kids but will be happy they’re gone!
How often do you guys get calls from men, more or less? From people in same-sex relationships? Children calling on their own behalf, or on behalf of a parent?
In Spain these questions are linked to what to call the problem, which in turn modifies how it’s reported, how statistics are collected, how money is alloted, etc. It’s pretty amazing what a difference a name can make (“domestic violence” vs. “gender/machista violence”).
So there’s not much in the way of picking and choosing going on.