New Hospital Program Will Fight Abuse That Runs in the Family

Battered women and children from the same families will gethelp breaking the cycle of abuse through a program being started Jan. 1 by Children’s Hospital and Health Center.

The Family Violence Project will match mothers with advocates--women who have personal or professional experience with battered women and who can provide positive role models and emotional support. The advocates will also accompany victims to court and locate housing for them and their children if necessary.

“The primary objective of the program is to improve the mother’s ability to protect her child and herself from further abuse and to minimize the necessity of foster care placement,” said Sandy Miller, the program’s co-founder and a nurse who will become the project’s director.

About a quarter of the 1,500 physically abused children seen each year at Children’s Hospital and Health Center are the offspring of abused women, according to Dr. David Chadwick, director for the hospital’s Center for Child Protection.

Although participating agencies such as the hospital, the YWCA’s Battered Women’s Services program, the domestic violence unit of the city attorney’s office and the county’s Department of Social Services all deal with spouse or child abuse, they have only recently begun to address the relationship between the two abuses and the effect of family violence on children, a hospital spokesman said.

“I don’t know of another program like it anywhere in the United States,” Chadwick said. “I know there’s nothing like it anywhere in California.”

Advocates will help women find alternatives to returning to an abusive spouse, said Ashley Walker-Hooper, who helps oversee the YWCA’s Battered Women’s Services.

“Most of the time, because the woman is cajoled into going back (to her husband), we blame her because she was unable to protect her child, when in essence she was unable to protect herself,” Walker-Hooper said.

“The time when a woman is most likely to make changes in a violent relationship is when her child is hurt,” she added.

Under a $209,000 grant from the Stuart Foundations of San Francisco, five full-time advocates will handle a total case load of 75 to 80 families next year, Chadwick said.