Permanent Homes Give Battered Women Time to Change Their Lives

Cindy’s husband roused their sleeping 12-year-old son at midnight. “You’re the first one that’s going to die,” he said.

That night, Cindy and her three kids left the beatings, the threats, the daily violence of her crazy-jealous husband forever. After 16 years of marriage, of control so complete she lost herself, Cindy found the courage to face freedom.

“I thank God I’m free,” said Cindy, who didn’t want her real name used for fear that her husband will find her. “I’m home, with my kids.”

The two-bedroom apartment they share is an experiment in independence for battered women, believed to be the first of its kind in the nation: permanent homes with social services downstairs. Its official opening was in September.

There are at least 4 million Cindys each year in America, according to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence. Every 15 seconds, a woman is beaten. Every six hours, a woman is murdered by her husband or boyfriend.

Still, women stay with their abusers, because a violent home often seems better than no home at all. And that is the choice.

The sad truth is that battering causes homelessness. A Victim Services Agency study showed that 35% of women living in city homeless shelters were there to escape men who beat them.

“In order to protect yourself and care for yourself, you have to let go of everything: friends, family, furniture, clothing,” said social worker Olosunde Johnson, who is helping these women face the future. “Things that you love, that have emotional value to you. And you have to walk out and leave that. And there’s something wrong with that.”

Cindy left and lived in a shelter for battered women, one of 1,700 serving 20,000 cities nationwide. The National Domestic Violence Hotline receives 108,000 calls a year, about one-third of which request shelter. But the need far outstrips the available space.

A Los Angeles County grand jury found last year that 90% of the battered women and children who sought safety were turned away. In Washington, D.C., eight in 10 women are told there is no room. Advocates believe the situation is similar in New York, Chicago and other big cities.

“And then, after 90 days, you have to be uprooted again. This is victimization after victimization,” Johnson said. “It just keeps eating away at the women and the children. ‘Who am I?’ is a question that comes up. ‘Who am I?’ ”

The victimization stops at the glass doors on a residential street in Brooklyn, the ones that lead to these 16 apartments. Permanent homes, ones the women and their children leave of their own free will and return to, feeling safe.

“This man used to tell me when to go to bed, when to take a bath, when to get up, five minutes to go to the store, and after five minutes, there would have been a beating or a fight,” Cindy, 33, said. “Now it’s just me and the kids. Nobody to say: ‘No, you can’t go, or if you go, I’m going to hit you.’ And it’s wonderful.”

Advocates say this permanent housing, which cost $1.7 million over 18 months to develop, is the logical conclusion in the evolution of services for battered women. In the early ‘70s, people would open their private homes for abused women and their kids. Emergency shelters followed, where women could stay for up to three months.

It soon became clear that it took more than 90 days to reorder a life. So transitional housing was born, which allowed stays of a year or 18 months.

Even that was not enough. The economy was changing; living costs were soaring in big cities like New York, and the result was that during the 1980s, battered women were increasingly returning to the men who abused them simply because they couldn’t afford not to.

“And the thing that was different was housing,” said Lucy Friedman, executive director of Victim Services Agency, the independent, nonprofit group that created the housing with the Urban Coalition. “It got down to going back to an abusive partner or going to a welfare hotel.”

Now these women are home for good. The social services, provided by Johnson, will be here for 18 months. There is a support group for the women and another for their children. Johnson works on getting child care, enrolling the kids and the women in school, helping them achieve their career goals.

Johnson’s desk is in the basement, but her heart is with the women. She has been there, and that helps her maintain her faith that these women will come as far as she has.

“It also helps me in identifying what’s going on with them, even when they’re unable to identify it,” she said. “And it helps me to love them, even when they’re unlovable.”

Sometimes Jennifer gets that way, comes downstairs acting like a fool. Leaves the tidy, three-bedroom apartment she shares with her two daughters and young son, and vents some of the anger and depression that comes of growing up abused with 10 brothers and sisters, then being abused for two years by a crack-addicted husband, and being a crack addict herself.

Jennifer bounced from shelter to shelter for more than a year, her children in tow, fighting urges to smoke crack again, to drink herself into oblivion, to kill herself and be done with it all. She left her husband for her children’s sake, but the injustice of having to walk out that door still galls her.

“I left my own apartment. Not his. Mine! He is the one who had my apartment when I was in the streets, including the nights he put me in the streets,” the 26-year-old said. “Cold, freezing outside with my children. Five or six in the morning.”

She left once and returned once. She left again, almost returned again but thought better of it. Not being involved with the batterer is one of the criteria for renting one of these heavily subsidized apartments. That, and being drug and alcohol-free, and being motivated to move ahead with life. Being willing to learn how to act independently without fear.

Jennifer and Cindy are doing their best.

“When I finally felt safe, that I could sleep and walk the street without somebody yelling or doing something, then I started thinking: ‘I want a home for my children,’ ” Cindy said. “I always told them: ‘I’m going to get you a better home.’

“Thank God I did. Now we have everything.”

The National Domestic Violence Hotline number is 1-(800)-333-SAFE (7233).