Battered Women Find Haven From Hurt in Safety Net

She tidied up the motel room, placing stuffed animals on one of the two double beds with care. Her two daughters, ages 3 and 16 months, sat at a small table, painting with watercolors in a coloring book. Their mother is tiny; she looks more like 15 than 25.

Susan (not her real name) had been at the Orange County motel for three days. She left her husband because he had assaulted her twice in the past week. It scared her, she said, because he usually doesn’t hit her when she is pregnant. This time the beatings began after her pregnancy was confirmed.

She was also worried that her husband might hurt the children. Recently, when the 3-year-old threw a toy that hit him in the face, he lashed out at the 16-month-old. He “backhanded the baby, knocking the wind out of her,” Susan said.

Susan’s husband “just wanted full control of everything,” including money, she said. Susan didn’t have any money or any access to it; she had to ask her husband every time she needed some.

He often refused to give her money and would not buy groceries or antibiotics for the children “to punish me,” she said. Just before she left, she and the children “ate Malto Meal for four days. And me being pregnant, it’s so sick.”

Susan and her children were staying in the motel while waiting to get into a shelter for battered women. Her room and her food were provided by Safety Net, a program that offers immediate emergency shelter in motel rooms to battered women for seven days--until they can get into a shelter or find another place to stay.

The First Night

The first night she left her husband, Susan and her children spent the night in a shelter for the homeless. Twenty-five people slept in a small room that had “no heating, no hot water, a broken sewage pipe and broken glass everywhere,” she said. A man at the shelter harassed her all night, offering her money in exchange for sex, she said.

The next day, she called a battered women’s shelter, but it was full. Then she found out about Safety Net.

When she got to the motel, “I just slept and slept. It was so peaceful and quiet and clean,” Susan said. “I couldn’t handle the streets. If there wasn’t Safety Net, I guess I would have had to stay with my husband.”

Safety Net, a 3-year-old Orange County program, provided temporary food and shelter for about 825 women and children in 1985, according to program manager Judi Naslund. About half of them stay in the motel until the husband is served with a restraining order to leave the house or until they can find a place to stay, Naslund said. The remaining families that use the program are waiting to get into one of three Orange County battered women’s shelters.

Naslund or an assistant will visit the women for an hour each day at the motel--to bring food vouchers (which can be redeemed at a nearby grocery store) and to counsel them on the social and legal services available to them. Families of four or less receive food vouchers worth $15 a day and stay in one of four “moderately priced” motels, Naslund said.

“I don’t use the really low-priced (motels),” Naslund said. “I need cleanliness.” The limit on motel room costs is $42 a night, she said.

This year the budget for the motel rooms and food costs is $65,000. These funds are provided by the Orange County Community Services Agency, which also provides partial support for the three battered women’s shelters in the county, according to administrative analyst Joan Conroy. The budget is up from $40,000 last year, when Safety Net ran low on money and had to turn away about 20 families while limiting services to “high priority” cases, Naslund said.

Safety Net is also supported by the Community Development Council, a nonprofit corporation that has budgeted $75,000 to cover this year’s administrative costs and salaries for Naslund and an assistant, according to John Flores, CDC president.

Finding Safe Shelter

Naslund usually can place a woman in a motel within about an hour, she said. The staffs at the three battered women’s shelters in Orange County also have authorization to place a battered woman in a motel at night and on weekends through Safety Net, she said.

Spokeswomen for the three battered women’s shelters noted that the shelters provide more structure and services than Safety Net. Services at shelters include mandatory individual and group counseling to raise a woman’s self-esteem, said Susan Leibel, executive director of the Women’s Transitional Living Center in north Orange County. Other shelter services may include parenting counseling, assertiveness training, alcoholic support groups, legal aid, career development sessions and information on welfare and other social services, Leibel said.

The maximum stay at the three Orange County shelters is 45 days, and because the shelters are almost

always full, women often are referred to Safety Net, Leibel said.

“I just can’t imagine going back to the days before Safety Net,” said Carol Williams, program director of Interval House, a 34-bed shelter in west Orange County. Sometimes when the shelter is full, staff members will take women into their homes. But there are many times when they have to turn away women calling from hospital emergency rooms or pay phones.

“We couldn’t feel good going home. It was just a nightmare,” Williams said. “If a woman couldn’t get into a shelter, anything could happen, from a beating to a murder.”

Safety Net “has been a real lifesaver for us many times,” said Leibel. The 45-bed shelter in north Orange County is full with a waiting list “a great portion of the time,” she said.

Besides providing immediate shelter when the center is full, “we also use Safety Net when the husband finds out (the wife) is here,” Leibel said. It is the shelter’s policy to immediately move a woman after the husband or boyfriend learns the location of the shelter, Leibel said, “because that jeopardizes the safety of every person here. We never know how violent the person is or what he is going to do.”

A Great Resource

Safety Net “is a great resource,” said Sherry Helton, a counselor at Human Options, a 16-bed shelter in south Orange County. Helton said she places about three families a week in the Safety Net program because the shelter is almost always full.

“Without Safety Net, what we could do (for battered women) is to tell them to call the police,” Helton said. “Depending on the community, the police department is sometimes not supportive. Sometimes they come out; sometimes they won’t.”

Another alternative is to counsel the woman over the phone, Helton said, but to “have to leave her in that situation, it feels so devastating. It feels so wrong.”

In San Diego County, the two battered women’s shelters provide emergency housing in motel rooms when they’re full, according to Ashley Walker-Hooper, director of battered women’s services for the YWCA in San Diego. “We very seldom have the problem of (a battered woman with) nowhere else to go,” she said.

There are 17 battered women’s shelters in Los Angeles County and “oftentimes all the shelters are full,” according to Catlin Fullwood, executive director of the Southern California Coalition on Domestic Violence. “There is no coordinated county service as there is in Orange County.”

Fullwood said a program such as Safety Net would be beneficial in Los Angeles if it didn’t drain county money away from the shelters already in existence. Some of the 17 shelters have emergency funds to place a woman in a motel until a space opens up, but some don’t, Fullwood said. The only other alternative is a shelter for the homeless, she said.

Not Enough Space

“At this point, San Francisco doesn’t have enough space for battered women,” said Daphne Beletsis, a volunteer advocate for Women Inc., a battered women’s hot line. She said that the two battered women’s shelters in San Francisco usually are full by 4 p.m. and that she has often referred women to a shelter for the homeless.

But homeless shelters “can be very scary for women with young children,” she said. And in San Francisco, the homeless shelters can get full at night. Beletsis said she has told women to spend the night in hospital lobbies, bus stations and all-night diners, “anything that is going to be lit and warm,” because there was nowhere else to go.

Angela’s left eye is cut and bruised. She sits on a bed in a motel room, talking in a voice that often wavers. “This is the worst I have ever felt in my life,” she said. “Even when my mother passed (away), I didn’t feel this bad.”

Angela, who is divorced, and her two sons, ages 8 and 10, came to Orange County from the Midwest after her boyfriend got a job in the area, she said. Angela and the boys were living with her boyfriend’s family until he attacked her. She has no friends, no family in the area and no money to get home.

It wasn’t the first time Ron had physically abused her, she said, although “he never hit me in the face before. He might have just punched me in my arm.” This time he threw her on the ground, punched her in the face and “twisted my foot all around.” He attacked her, Angela said, because he thought she had said something “disrespectful” to him in front of his brother, who stood there and watched the attack.

Angela said that she had tried to get a job in Orange County but that her boyfriend’s family refused to help her with transportation to job interviews. She said she knew only one street in Orange County, the street that his family lived on, adding that in her hometown, she could get by without transportation. In California, “if you walk somewhere, you’ve got two or three miles to walk.”

He Hit Her With Phone

After her boyfriend assaulted her, she and her sons went to a laundromat down the street. Her boyfriend and his brother followed her there, and when she tried to call her family from a pay phone, he grabbed the phone away from her and hit her with it, she said.

Because she was afraid he would hit her again, “I was just agreeing with everything he said. Then a few people came in the laundry and I knew he wouldn’t hit me. I said: ‘Why don’t you just leave me alone.’ ”

The next morning, after spending part of the night in the laundromat, she called one of the battered women’s shelters and found out about Safety Net.

Moving into the motel room “felt real good,” Angela said. “I was like, ‘Thank God.’ I thought I was going to have to sleep in a laundromat. That’s a rotten feeling, when you don’t have anywhere to go.”

Angela hopes to get into a shelter soon, and then to make some money so she can go back home, she said. “If I can get in there (a shelter), I know I can get a job. I’m willing to do damn near any kind of work.”

Most of the women who use Safety Net are from low-income families, Naslund said. “Most of the women who have money will get their own hotel room,” she said.

Women who do have cash available are obligated to pay a small fee, depending on their circumstances, she said. For example, the fee schedule states that a woman without children and $550 in cash would be charged $3 a day, and a woman with two children and $833 would pay the same amount.

However, because most of the women who use the program have no money, “I’ve never had any women pay anything,” she said. “Although I have had women send donations later.”

“Many women have money in a bank account,” Naslund said, but the account often is in the man’s name, even in cases where the women work. “These men try to put them in a dependent position, so they don’t have the means to leave them. Or they’ll have joint accounts, and they are afraid to take money out because ‘he’ll get mad and want revenge.’ ”

There have been some middle-to-high-income clients, Naslund said. “They may have it (money), but no access to it.”

One of the program’s clients was a woman with a 4-month-old baby who had been staying with her husband in a $100-a-night Newport Beach hotel, waiting for their custom-built ocean-front home to be completed, Naslund said. The man beat her and threw her and the baby out, but not before taking her credit cards, her bank books and all of her identification, including her driver’s license and Social Security card. When she arrived at a Safety Net motel, “she had nothing but herself, the baby, the shoes on her feet and the clothes on her back,” Naslund said.

Naslund said Safety Net also has sheltered two battered men in its three-year history. She said she thinks that there are a lot of battered men but that “they can’t admit that a woman beats them.”

On the average, the program shelters 33 families a month, with an average of 2.3 children per woman, Naslund said. She has had as many as 12 families stay in different motels in one night and has sheltered families with as many as eight members, she said. With families of more than four, Naslund said, she can sometimes get permission from the county to provide two adjoining motel rooms and more money for food.

The average stay is five days, she said, adding that seven days is “generally plenty of time” to get a woman placed at a shelter. “In February and March a couple of years ago, the shelters were so overloaded, we weren’t able to move people fast enough,” Naslund said. When that happened, she said, women were placed in a shelter for the homeless until the battered

women’s shelters opened up.

The busiest time of the year for battered women’s shelters is the winter, after the holidays, according to Naslund. “Tensions aren’t any less at home, but the women try to hold it together because they want to have a nice Christmas.” After the holidays, the situation is more likely to explode, she said.

Sara has long brown hair and green eyes that fill up with tears when she talks about leaving Frank, her boyfriend. A student at a junior college in Orange County, Sara had just come back from taking a final examination. This semester she is getting mostly Cs, she said, adding: “It’s the worst I’ve ever done.” She is staying with a girlfriend after leaving Frank a few weeks ago. She used the Safety Net program because she had plans to visit her family in another state for the Christmas holidays and “none of the shelters could accept me for a short-term period.” When she comes back from visiting her parents, she will move into a shelter, she said.

Sara and Frank (not their real names) lived together for four years, and he is the only boyfriend she ever had, she said. Sara was 17 when she met Frank at Disneyland, she said.

She has left him before, “for short periods,” she said. But, she added, this time she left for good because on the same day he told her he wouldn’t hurt her again, he had broken his promise.

On a Friday night a couple of weeks ago, they had an argument because Frank had started dealing marijuana again, Sara said. “I just blew up. I told him I didn’t like this living situation,” she said.

And so the abuse began, she said. “He doesn’t hit me. He just kind of throws me down and throws me around and squeezes me,” Sara said. After he abused her, she left him and drove around for a while, but then, having nowhere to go, she went back.

Sara said she thought that it was safe to go back because “afterward he’s always real nice. The house is perfectly clean. Whatever I want . . . ,” she said. And Frank promised her “no hassles,” she said.

But he began abusing her again the next morning, she said. “He got me on my chest and my arm. He grabbed my face and just squeezed it. He slapped me a couple times,” she said. “It was scary. It was real scary. . . . I just laid there. Normally I try to defend myself. I just laid there and let him slap me and squeeze me.”

She said she did not have the energy to leave Frank and probably would have stayed if her boss hadn’t called from work. Sara told him what had happened, and he took her to a doctor to look at her bruises and then put her in contact with Safety Net.

Although she said she is grateful she had somewhere to go, Sara didn’t like being alone in a motel room. She said being alone and not having very many friends made her miss Frank.

Sara said she wants to be independent, but she still loves Frank and wishes things could be different so she could go back.

“I probably spend about 70% of my time helping families who are going to go back to the same situation,” Naslund said. The women she sees usually are emotionally and financially dependent on their husbands or boyfriends.

The money is a big part of it, she said. “In the shelters, we are seeing them going back to their husbands just because they can’t afford the rent. Welfare isn’t enough. And just try to get child care (while earning) $5 an hour.” Sara’s complaint of loneliness is a common one, Naslund said. But, she added, Safety Net isn’t meant to take the place of the counseling and structure provided in a battered women’s shelter.

Safety Net “is the net that catches the families who would not have been caught by the shelters because they are too full,” she said. “It’s just the beginning of what these women are going to have to plod through.”