In four days, Esta Soler, 52, traveled to three cities to speak at four events, and that’s a light week.
In fact, ever since Soler founded the Family Violence Prevention Fund in 1980, she’s been cruising in fifth gear to educate the public, business and government agencies about domestic violence. Under Soler’s direction, the fund laid the foundation for programs and policies that have become models in law enforcement, health and public education. Still, 4 million women a year are victims of domestic abuse.
“We have come a long way,” Soler says. “I mean, it wasn’t very long ago in this country that a police officer summoned to the home of a woman being beaten would just tell the abuser to take a long walk around the block.”
In the past, violence in the home was considered a private matter. Even Soler, who sits on the Violence Against Women Advisory Committee with U.S. Atty. Gen. Janet Reno and Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala, was not aware of the magnitude of domestic violence until the late 1970s.
Soler had recently moved to San Francisco from her native Bridgeport, Conn., and was working on a California Department of Health study to improve programs for women addicted to drugs and alcohol. During her research, Soler visited several women’s shelters, where she listened to the women tell about being beaten by their husbands or lovers.
Moved by their harrowing tales, Soler joined forces with an influential group of lawyers, authors, community activists and members of the San Francisco board of supervisors and formed the Coalition for Justice for Battered Women. Their goal was to change the way police respond to domestic violence.
Like the other women in the coalition, Soler was no stranger to tackling social issues. After getting a master’s degree in social work from the University of Connecticut in 1971, Soler headed an agency offering assistance to inner-city youth and families in crisis.
She later chaired the San Francisco Human Rights Commission, overseeing the enactment of landmark AIDS discrimination laws and helping develop legislation to improve economic opportunities for women and minorities.
Soler says being an organizer and activist has always been second nature to her.
“I grew up in a home where social issues were very, very important. My family was very active in the local community and synagogue. My parents once took me to hear Martin Luther King Jr. speak when I was in high school, so I grew up instilled with the belief that the best thing you could do is volunteer in your community, especially when dealing with social issues.”
Ever since the day her substance-abuse research took her into the women’s shelter, Soler has held that domestic violence is fundamentally a human-rights issue because it “robs people of dignity and freedom and even their lives.”
San Francisco author Del Martin, who wrote “Battered Wives,” a ground-breaking 1976 book that led to the creation of women’s shelters, was a member of the coalition with Soler.
“We came up with a citywide model of how to deal with domestic violence in the police department,” Martin says. “Then we received a grant from the federal government which designated San Francisco one of nine model cities to reform the national justice system.”
In 1980, Soler was chosen to head the program, the Family Violence Project, which in 1989 became the non-profit Family Violence Prevention Fund.
“She really put together a diverse team,” Martin recalls. “Esta is a different kind of leader: very low profile, yet very dynamic and effective. Her group was a very collective, committed group. Some of the original staff are still with her today, and believe me, that’s rare!”
Working out of a tiny space in the district attorney’s office, Soler and staff of three wrote a policy for the prosecution of domestic abuse that became standard. They also implemented a training program and an education curriculum for judges.
At the time, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) was mayor of San Francisco, and Soler recalls her support of the issue was very valuable.
“She gave a very clear message to her police department that the old practice was wrong and so in some ways, we really had a jump start because we had the chief executive officer telling her police chief that this issue needs to be taken seriously,” Soler says. “Even though it took us a couple of years to negotiate a new policy, every time we hit a roadblock we had the leverage of the mayor telling everyone to take this issue seriously — the old practice is not a good one.”
The citywide policy soon became state law and was adopted in jurisdictions across the country.
“The most important thing about this policy was it legislated if police went to a house and domestic violence had occurred, the police treat it as a serious crime,” Soler says. “So the big change wasn’t a penal-code change, the big change was taking the issue seriously. Our mantra for the first four years was that domestic violence has to be treated as a crime if elements of a crime exist, because before they said this is a family matter, not a serious matter.”
Now with a staff of 30 in a comfortable converted warehouse in the Potrero Hill section of San Francisco, the Family Violence Prevention Fund is still working to get this point across using a multi-system approach.
“We realized early on that we couldn’t just focus on reforming one system, we have to look at the culture and how to change the norms, and we have to look at the institutions that people come in contact with,” Soler says. “Domestic violence exists because, by and large, the attitudes out there are such that people still excuse it. I mean, it’s a complex social problem, but that’s the primary reason. So we look at all points of intervention, but we also want to make sure we have a conversation with the public.”
The fund has developed a health-care initiative, a public-education campaign and is working on the child-welfare system. Two years ago it started to deal with domestic violence in the workplace.
“One of our newest initiatives is to get employers to deal with this issue both in terms of providing public education as well as policies,” Soler says. “What we’re asking employers and unions to do is two things: to create a safe workplace by putting up messages that say we’re a workplace that takes this issue seriously and the other, to train supervisors and human-resource programs on this issue, because once you create safety in the workplace, people are going to come forward.”
To do this, the fund helped establish a “Work To End Domestic Violence Day.” The campaign reached 1 million employees the first year and 4 million in 1997.
Public education appears to be working. According to the fund’s literature, a 1991 poll found about half the American public thought domestic violence was a problem. That number jumped to a whopping 97 percent in 1994 after chilling reports of domestic abuse surfaced during the high-profile murder trial of former football star O.J. Simpson, who was accused and later acquitted of murdering ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman.
“That doesn’t mean the public is still not excusing it or tolerating it in a way that I think we still have to challenge, but it is shifting,” Soler says.
If enough people rally together against domestic violence, Soler predicts, the next 20 years may see a significant change.
“It’s not obviously around the corner, but it’s only been about 20 years since people have really even acknowledged this as a problem. Just look at how long it took drunk driving to become an issue. People had been worried about alcohol for years before people really got upset about drunk driving.”
As a mother of a 10-year-old girl, Soler says, she has an incentive to keep up her work.
“I just believe my daughter, everyone, has a right to live in a safe home and has a right to be treated well,” Soler says. “My goal is to see a significant reduction in domestic violence. How we go about doing it, I think, is the way we’ve begun to do it: large scale, coordinated, saturated public-education campaigns that say over and over again that this is not acceptable. I truly believe in my heart of hearts that we can make a difference.”
