I will never forget the phone call I received one night when I was working at the Evanston Shelter for Battered Women.
It was great to hear Susan’s voice. A delightful woman, she had come to the shelter three months earlier with her sad-eyed 11-year-old daughter. She was determined to get away from her physically abusive husband and get counseling and support to begin a new life.
Through the shelter’s programs Susan received medical assistance and legal aid to obtain a court order of protection from her husband. She applied for welfare, found a job, saved money for an apartment and arranged for her daughter’s schooling. Furniture and household necessities were scraped together and stored for moving day. She did this all in two months. And she did it while sharing a bedroom with another family, a living room and a kitchen with 26 women and children in a shelter.
When I asked Susan how things were going, she shakily replied: “I can’t make it.”
Susan was bringing home $525 a month working alternating shifts at a nursing home. Her rent was $350 a month. Public transportation, food and school costs for her daughter left her with pennies to spare at the end of the month.
It became clear that I had been asking myself the wrong question. It wasn’t “Why do women stay with abusive men?” but rather “How do women get out of abusive relationships and then make it on their own?”
Although there are about 20 shelters for animals in the Chicago area, there are only eight for battered women and their children, totaling fewer than 150 beds.
The shelters serve an area bounded by Waukegan on the north, Tinley Park on the south and Elgin to the west, with a population of more than 7 million.
There is no typical shelter because no two serve the same population. The state requires these shelters to be open and staffed 24 hours, year-round. At Rainbow House on the South Side, one of the larger shelters, there are 25 beds with 35 full-time staffers, about 30 of whom staff the hot line. The shelter has a ’93 budget of about $800,000, most of which comes from public funding. Staffers answer the hot line, act as counselors, run children’s and parenting programs, take care of maintenance and provide referrals for legal and medical assistance.
Domestic violence cases in Cook County alone more than doubled between 1986 and 1990, to 20,301 cases. Even though the U.S. surgeon general’s office found domestic violence to be the leading cause of injury to women in this country (a woman is beaten every 14 seconds), foundations devoted only 1 percent of their human-services funding to support domestic-violence programs in 1990. Every week more than 400 women and their children are turned away from area shelters for lack of space.
Demand for the services of battered women shelters has outpaced the supply, even though the number of women receiving assistance from the Illinois shelter system grew by almost 500 percent from 1985 to 1990.
What about the Susans who make it out of violent relationships?
Do they receive child support? Typically, absent fathers (financially comfortable or not) contribute little or nothing, even with court orders to do so. Only half of the 5.8 million U.S. women owed child support in 1990 collected fully. A quarter of them received nothing. In Illinois, only 49 percent of all child support due was collected in 1990.
The first step out of a violent domestic relationship is often an emergency room, police station or courthouse. With no resources to spare, shelters in Chicago formed a coalition, the Chicago Metropolitan Battered Women’s Network. The network lobbies for stronger laws, educates police about the laws and how to respond more effectively to domestic-violence calls. It trains hospital emergency-room staff to better identify battered women and get them into shelter programs and it helped establish a model court, Domestic Violence Court in Chicago, where only domestic violence cases are heard.
So why does it feel like open season on women? Because all of the efforts of shelters, police, hospitals and courts are aimed at cleaning up the mess afterward-at intervention, not prevention. Three women were stalked and murdered in the Chicago area in one recent month.
As we divide up the work, we must insist the men in our lives become part of the solution.
Together we must focus on the most basic of human rights-physical safety-and ask: “How are we raising our sons and daughters?”
