When Alternatives to Family Violence in Adams County started in 1978, frightened women and children would take refuge in board members’ homes. Services were piecemeal and referrals depended largely on word of mouth.
Twenty-seven years later, the organization that began with a goal of someday putting an end to domestic violence has grown into an agency that fields 4,500 calls a year and provides support, counseling and housing for approximately 300 desperate families.
The 21-bed safehouse doesn’t begin to meet the demand for shelter for victims fleeing abusers, but for the women and children who arrive on the doorstep with little more than the clothes they are wearing, it is the beginning of a new life.
“The women who come here are from all across the economic spectrum,” said Velma Howard, director of the safehouse. “We have very poor women and we have college-educated women.”
“The stereotypes aren’t accurate,” she said. Domestic violence knows no geographic, economic or social boundaries. “There is no typical battered woman.”
In fact, 20 percent of the women who have sought shelter at the safehouse have a bachelor’s degree or higher.
The women all have one thing in common, however. Through their tremendous ability to adapt and rationalize, they have tolerated the intolerable.
“The one thing they all experience is the awareness piece after they get here,” Howard said. “They come together to talk and suddenly become aware of what has happened to them. They finally say: ‘Yes, this is domestic violence and it’s not right.”‘
One woman, a mother of four, agreed to talk about her experience on the condition that we would not reveal her name or any information that might help her husband locate her.
She came to the safehouse in July, she said. Her husband had become “very violent, very abusive,” and the effect the violence was having on the children finally prompted her to leave him.
She needed everything – food, clothing, a place to sleep – but “the thing I appreciated most was the counseling,” she said, “that and feeling that we were safe.”
Like so many others, she hadn’t realized the toll it had taken on her and her children to live in fear.
Last month she moved into an apartment and at 38, she is eager to take control of her life at last. She is doing community outreach work for Alternatives and plans to look for a job and go to school part time.
Her divorce is expected to be final in January.
“I was happy here,” she said. “It helped a lot.”
Alternatives to Family Violence is one of the many community organizations applying for funding through the Post-News Season to Share campaign.
Development director Julie Banta said the agency receives financial support from federal agencies and local governments, but it depends on private donations for 35 percent of its $700,000 annual budget.
It operates a round-the-clock crisis hotline, provides shelter for women and children in the four-bedroom safehouse, and maintains outreach, counseling and referral services for domestic violence victims in the community.
Hotel vouchers also are provided for women in crisis when no beds are available at Alternatives or the other safehouses in the area, a situation that happens depressingly often.
“Their needs are great,” Howard said. “One woman arrived here barefoot. She literally ran away from home and didn’t have time to get her shoes.”
Many women need medical attention for bruises, broken bones, knife wounds or other injuries. Often they arrive with no money, no clothes for themselves or their children, not even a toothbrush. They leave their homes in such a hurry that there’s no time to get prescriptions, medical insurance cards, driver’s licenses. Without the children’s birth certificates, it’s difficult to enroll them in school.
“We spend a lot of time at first helping them get these things,” Howard said. But the big issue is their psychological needs. All of them have been traumatized by their experiences.
The safehouse provides a high level of security, with an alarm system, cameras monitoring the perimeter and an 8-foot privacy fence to protect the children’s play area in the backyard.
The most important thing is that they feel safe, Howard said. Only then can they begin to work on the problems that drove them to seek refuge.
Through counseling and group therapy, most reach the point where they can live on their own, and then Alternatives helps them find affordable housing, furniture, jobs, child care and other necessities.
“They’re remarkably strong women,” Banta said. “They’re incredible survivors.”
