Protective Agency Threatened With Extinction : A Domestic Violence Crisis

The case began like any of thousands that filter through the legal system each year. A frightened woman, beaten by her husband, went to court and got a protective order to keep him at bay.

It wasn’t until the next morning that J.E.T. Rutter, the now-retired Superior Court judge who signed that order several years ago, heard about the case’s tragic outcome: the woman, unaware that she could get police to serve the order on her husband, had her sister do it.

Angered, the husband drew a gun and shot the sister, and later his wife.

“I thought we better get some help around here,” Rutter remembered. “Two dead bodies were enough.”

Today, such help exists. One new program, Domestic Violence Assistance Services, offers threatened and battered family members protection and legal assistance in the courts and the home.

But the unique program is threatened with extinction after June 30, when emergency funding from the county runs out.

With that target date in mind, members of a new county task force on domestic violence visited Superior Court in Santa Ana on Friday to witness the problem firsthand and begin the task of raising $100,000 from the business community to keep the program alive.

The half-dozen task force members who attended the session all said that sitting through a day’s proceedings in the always-busy Family Court helped to give life and emotion to the often flat statistics that they had surveyed on domestic violence.

“We get the real world in here, don’t we?” Family Court Commissioner Richard G. Vogl said to task force members during a break.

The real world was, for the most part Friday, made up of several dozen young women who came before Commissioner Jane D. Myers to seek legal protection against abusive husbands or boyfriends.

But a surprising number of appeals did not fit the common image of victims of battering.

There was, for instance, the case of an elderly Fountain Valley man who came before Myers to get a restraining order against his 34-year-old son. The man said that his jobless son would often come to his house drunk, become abusive with his parents and beat his sickly, elderly mother. Police had been summoned a few times and detained the son, but he soon returned.

Now, the man wanted--and got--an order he could present to police that would keep his son off the property altogether.

Echoing a theme that could have fit any of the nearly 50 people who came before Myers on Friday, the elderly man wrote the judge in his request for a restraining order: “I believe it’s better to do something now before it’s too late.”

That is where the new Domestic Violence Assistance Services, created just 4 months ago, enters the picture.

The program offers emergency assistance such as food, shelter and financial aid to several thousand victims of domestic violence each year.

And in perhaps its most vital role, program workers inform the ever-growing number of battered spouses and children of their legal rights and lead them through the myriad legal paper-work and maneuverings needed to secure and execute protective orders and seek other aid in the family courts.

Barbara Phillips, who oversees the domestic violence program, pointed out that the temporary restraining orders “are only a piece of paper--they don’t stop bullets, and they don’t stop knives.”

But for many women and battered family members who have nowhere else to turn, she said, the legal protection and home assistance offered through the program represents a more powerful remedy than they could find on their own.

Said Commissioner Myers: “We couldn’t function without the program.”

The county had been able to offer such legal aid since 1982 under a state grant administered by the county’s Victim/Witness Assistance Program.

But a surge in the number of people seeking temporary restraining orders for domestic abuse--a 622% increase in Orange County over 6 years--forced a cutoff in state funding late last year.

State officials felt that the burden of providing such legal aid--a service not mandated by law--was siphoning off valuable time and money from other state-required programs that help victims, according to Phillips, director of the victim-witness program, which includes the domestic violence unit.

The county picked up the slack for the new domestic violence unit late last year, providing a $55,000 emergency authorization for assistance at home and in the courtroom for family victims. In its first 4 months, the program has produced protective orders for 1,027 children in the county.

But county leaders now are seeking a new funding source--the private sector.

Program directors estimate that they need $100,000 to keep the domestic violence protection unit running for another year after present funding runs out June 30.

The fund-raising effort began in earnest Friday. William G. Steiner, a member of the county’s domestic violence task force and the executive director of the Orangewood Children’s Foundation, announced during the court visit that the foundation would match the first $10,000 raised in donations.

But the search for private support is still in its infancy. Orange County Supervisor Harriett M. Wieder, who helped create the task force and took part in Friday’s court tour, said the rise of domestic violence as seen in the courts demands a constant source of funding.

“The challenge is to go out and sell that to the community, to the private sector,” Wieder told task force members.

But eventually, Wieder said, she hopes the success of the county’s unique domestic violence program will lead to permanent state funding. “The end of the line needs to be in Sacramento,” she said.

And if the needed money cannot be raised from the private sector by this spring, would the county then be willing to continue its funding?

“At that time, the board would have to make that decision,” Wieder said. “But with the budget-priority decisions we have to make, I don’t think this would fare well,” she predicted.