Battered Wives Find Help at Women’s Center Clinic

One day recently, Vivian, a 33-year-old middle-class housewife, was sitting in the family’s van--stuffed toys and other children’s items strewn in the back--after she had parked in a front of a quaint, turn-of-the-century two-story house in Golden Hill. She cast a nervous eye at the residence and debated whether to go inside and talk to a stranger about a terrible secret that she had never revealed about her married life.

The slender, attractive, auburn-haired woman has been married to “a generally nice man in the banking business” for nine years. But for most of those nine years, Vivian’s “generally nice” husband has been a wife-beater. After the last beating, Vivian, who did not want to reveal her last name, called the battered women’s hot line at the San Diego Center for Women’s Studies and Services.

A hot line volunteer had made an appointment for Vivian to see a counselor. She had gathered enough courage to drive to the center but now Vivian was having second thoughts about telling her story to a stranger.

She did not want to hurt her husband, she said. What if the police came to the house to arrest him after she talked to the counselor?

She was also afraid. What would he do if he found out that she had talked to someone about the beatings?

In the end, Vivian became one of the battered women who call the center--about 100 of them each month--but decide not to take any action against their husbands.

Perhaps, on this day, Vivian was in what center official Joyce Faidley calls the “honeymoon” stage that follows most wife beatings.

“The batterer brings her flowers and candy and both of them enjoy a heightened period of romance. ‘I’ll never do it again,’ he tells her. And she believes him. Then the cycle starts all over again,” Faidley said.

Vivian and many other San Diego County women who call the center choose to live with the beatings and fail to take action against abusive husbands or domestic partners. But for every 100 women who do nothing about the beatings, another 75 battered women come in and request legal assistance and counseling, center officials say.

Since the advent of women’s shelters in 1964, battered women and their children commonly have been “protected” by being taken out of the home and sheltered from the batterer. But a recent change in the state’s domestic violence laws that made it easier for abused women to seek help has also led to the overcrowding of the few available shelters, say leaders of women’s groups.

With so many women now taking advantage of laws designed to protect them, women’s advocate groups were left looking for alternative solutions to the overcrowded shelters.

In San Diego, the Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) Clinic at the women’s center has instituted a “model alternative solution” with the help of volunteer attorneys and counselors who are helping battered women use the law for their protection while they remain at home.

When the clinic opened three years ago, it was the first of its kind in California. Since then, similar clinics have been opened throughout the state, most of them in the San Francisco area. In San Diego, the clinic and center are located in a house in Golden Hill. Its neatly-kept lawn, splendid porch and pleasing appearance camouflage the trauma and human suffering of the women who seek aid there.

Inside, the hot line phone rings constantly upstairs. Downstairs, the battered women sit quietly in a front room, waiting patiently to talk to a counselor or attorney. Most of them keep their thoughts to themselves. All of them wear the telltale signs of embarrassment or depression as they sit waiting to be called upstairs.

“A key accomplishment in the last decade has been the development of women’s shelters. However, the social service system is taxed to the hilt and there are too few shelters,” said Carol Council, the center’s acting director. “So alternative solutions to temporary shelter have to be found. The project here is a model alternative solution which is based on the premise that instead of uprooting the woman and her children, you can provide refuge in her own home by having the batterer kicked out.”

Before the law was changed this year, police who responded to calls of domestic violence usually took the man aside, walked him around the block to cool him down and then encouraged him to go inside to kiss and make up, Council said.

“But police are now required to submit a written report on every (domestic violence) call they receive,” she said. “They are also required to give victims a list of (women’s) services provided in the area. A lot of our clients are referred to us by police. We are also listed at the front of the phone book (under crisis intervention agencies), and that is generating a lot of calls to the center.”

Today, if San Diego police respond to a domestic violence call where a repeat offender is involved, there is a good chance that the batterer has been banned from his home through a restraining order obtained by the victim with the help of the clinic. If that is the case, police are required by law to take the batterer to jail.

A temporary restraining order restricts a husband from approaching his wife, her place of residence or her work place and is usually good for 30 days. Restraining orders can be extended, and typically such orders prevent a husband from getting closer than 100 yards to his wife, her residence or work place. Some orders also prohibit the husband from approaching his children or going to their schools.

According to FBI statistics, nearly 6 million U.S. women are abused by their husbands every year; a woman is battered every 15 seconds. Other figures released by federal and California law enforcement agencies show that:

- Fifty percent of all California women will be abused by their husbands, lovers or sons at some time in their lives.

- Twenty-five percent of all battered women are pregnant, and an equal number of suicide attempts by women were preceded by a prior history of battering.

- Police in the United States spend one-third of their time responding to domestic violence calls. About 40% of all police injuries and 20% of police deaths on duty result when officers respond to calls of domestic violence.

- A 1976 Police Foundation national report showed that in 85% of spousal murders studied, police had responded at least once to a call of domestic violence before the homicide. In 54% of the murders, police had previously responded at least five times to calls of domestic violence.

- Locally, in January, 1984, battered women filed a total of 69 restraining orders against their husbands or domestic partners in San Diego County Superior Court. Last month a total of 177 domestic violence-related temporary restraining orders were filed in the same court.

Murray Bloom, director of the Conciliation Court of the San Diego County Superior Court, sees the dramatic increase in the number of restraining orders as an indication that women are becoming more aware of the change in the domestic violence laws and that it shows the effectiveness of the women’s center TRO Clinic.

“I don’t think that domestic violence is necessarily increasing,” Bloom said. “Rather, women are learning that they don’t have to put up with this, and then you have the TRO Clinic that has been very effective in helping battered women obtain kickout orders.”

Clinic officials say they receive about 175 calls a month from battered women, but only 75 actually come in to talk to the three volunteer counselors and 12 women attorneys who donate their services every month. Of the 75 victims who come to the clinic, about 78% usually complete the process of obtaining a restraining order, but in one recent month 91% of the women completed the process, Council said.

Typically, victims are screened and counseled on Mondays and Wednesdays. After the counseling session, clinic officials usually help them obtain a restraining order within 24 hours, on Tuesdays or Thursdays.

“We try for a 24-hour turnaround, which is another reason why we’re unique,” Council said. “The TRO has been shown to be very effective. The act of obtaining the order gives the victim a sense of empowerment. She is taking an action that could change the course of her life . . . Many batterers are otherwise law-abiding men. They are ashamed or feel ostracized by their neighbors who see the marshal’s car arrive and serve them with papers, kicking them out of their own home. Sometimes this is enough to make them stop.”

The clinic’s services are free. If the victim acted on her own, she would be required to pay about a $102 filing fee and a $16 marshal’s fee. If she hired an attorney to do it for her, she could be required to pay an additional fee of up to $500, said Nancy Stassinopoulous, an attorney at the clinic.

While the clinic’s attorneys will not represent the victims in court, clinic representatives will accompany them to give emotional support and will assist the victims in filling out and filing the necessary forms when seeking a restraining order.

According to Bloom, the court sees a domestic violence-related TRO as “almost a life or death situation.” Once the restraining order has been issued, it is but the first step in what could be a painful process to help both parties decide what they want to do with their lives. And if there are children involved, the process is usually more agonizing.

A kickout order is followed by a court date where the victim and the batterer appear before a judge. However, before making the court appearance, both parties are required by law to go through a mediation process that includes counseling through the Conciliation Court.

“The purpose of the mediation is to help both parties make their own decision about what they want to do. But we’re not in the business of keeping people married. Oftentimes in order for our counselors to be successful we have to help both parties recognize that continuing in a sick marriage is not in their best interest or their children’s best interest,” Bloom said.

Domestic violence cases have precedence over others, including child custody cases, in Conciliation Court, Bloom said.

“In cases of domestic violence, we fast-track . . . simply because we know that we have to have some sort of protective device to help the people deal with this rather than having one person seeking the other person out and perpetrating violence again,” Bloom said.

But Bloom sees the restraining order more as an “important tool of the court,” not necessarily an action that by itself will stop the wife beatings.

“Restraining orders are pieces of paper. They (police and the courts) won’t do anything until it’s violated. After it’s violated you can take the batterer back to court. But the victim may be dead after it’s violated,” Bloom said.

“The order for counseling seems to be more meaningful. Why? Mainly because the victim of violence has been trying to do something about if for a long time,” Bloom said. “But nobody would listen to her . . . With this program the court said we are going to make both of you look at this relationship and do something about it.

“You, mister, we’re going to look at why you do things like this, and if you don’t want to look at it, you’re in violation of a court order and you’re going to go to jail. That’s a hell of a motivator for somebody to get involved in a counseling session.”

For a town that has a reputation for being staunchly conservative, San Diego has a national reputation for instituting innovative programs designed to help battered women. The TRO Clinic was among the first of its kind in the nation, while the Conciliation Court’s mandatory counseling requirement was the first of its kind in the United States. The court’s program served as a model for other states and for a law passed by the Assembly in 1979 requiring all county Superior Courts to offer the same services.