Timing is Right for Valley’s Haven for Battered Women

It was 1977 and domestic violence just didn’t exist in the San Fernando Valley. Or so Jacquie Gordon and Cheryl Cornell were told repeatedly before they opened Haven Hills, the San Fernando Valley’s first emergency shelter for battered women.

“Nobody talked about it,” Gordon said. “The mind-set was that it was happening in poverty areas. Nobody really believed that it could happen in an affluent area because the women would have money and they could just leave.

“It was quite a shock to find it was the woman next door or the woman at the office who really didn’t fall down those stairs--or the Cub Scout leader.”

While few people talked about domestic violence in 1977, they certainly are now.

Police officers in the Van Nuys division took the most reports of any division in the city--1,005--in the past three months. From January to March, Van Nuys police took 829 such reports.

And the underlying domestic violence issues in the O.J. Simpson murder case have caused crisis hot lines to jump off the hook. Patricia Giggans, the executive director of the Los Angeles Commission on Assaults Against Women, said their hot line calls skyrocketed from about 1,300 calls a month to about 3,000 during the month of June. “We were off the map,” Giggans said.

Against that backdrop, Haven Hills, the Valley’s first and only shelter, is embarking on an ambitious plan to open a 25-unit housing complex for battered women and their children. The so-called transitional housing complex received its first big financial boost last week when Gov. Pete Wilson included $100,000 in his budget for Haven Hills.

Officials said the long-term housing would be the first of its kind in Los Angeles county--where emergency shelter beds are in woefully short supply and stays are often limited to 30 to 45 days. At the proposed new complex, women and their children could stay as long as 18 months.

“The timing is right for this,” said Betty Fisher, the executive director at Haven Hills. “We’ve just hit this crest at the right time. We’ve done everything including jumping up and down and screaming (for funding and recognition), but we always knew it would take something like this.”

And “something like this” might just help Haven Hills avoid any potential problems with neighbors in the residential area where the complex is being proposed. Haven Hills officials, who have been developing the plans for two years, say the focus on domestic violence might make residents in the area more receptive to it. Haven Hills officials, who are in escrow on the property, requested that the location of the proposed complex be kept confidential.

City Councilman Joel Wachs, whose district includes the proposed complex, said he believes the residents will go along with the plans as long as the design of the 25-unit project is compatible with the rest of the neighborhood. “I can’t picture people opposing the nature of the project,” Wachs said. “It’s a matter of building it in a way that the design fits in with the area.”

Haven Hills officials estimate that the project could cost between $1.5 million and $2 million and that--for the first time--the money will not be hard to raise. The shelter had to cut back on services three years ago but officials now say there is no shortage of grants and federal and local agencies with money available.

State Assemblywoman Barbara Friedman (D-North Hollywood), who maneuvered behind the scenes to get Wilson to retain the $100,000 in his budget, said the low-cost housing is long-needed both in the Valley and throughout the city. “The need is everywhere and it is immediate,” she said.

Just ask Cathy, who is staying at the Haven Hills shelter with her young son. Cathy says she will stay at the “safe house” for the maximum time allowed--30 days. Then, she says, she might be forced to go live with her parents--where her husband of two years will probably find her.

“I really don’t want to move from shelter to shelter but if I go back to my parents, he’ll be able to find me,” she said. “When there’s somewhere they can find you, it makes it very hard to stay away. I have to figure out a way to get a place to live and a job in a pretty quick amount of time.”

She’s not alone. More than half of the 362 women and children who stayed at the shelter last year returned to relatives or friends, almost all saying they had no other choice. About 7% of the women went directly back to their abuser, all but one saying it was because they were concerned about housing and didn’t believe they could make it on their own.

In a survey of the women at the Haven Hills shelter last year, more than 80% said that 30 days was not enough time to do all the work--emotionally, legally and otherwise--that must be done to eliminate the violence from their lives.

“It’s been extremely frustrating to us,” said Gordon, who was president of the Canoga Park Women’s Club when she founded Haven Hills with Cornell. “To have a place where women could feel safe for some length of time--with child care--has been our dream.”

Cathy says she decided to call the Haven Hills hot line after a particularly frightening episode in which her husband, who was drunk, started screaming at her, pulled her out of bed, threw her on the floor and began hitting her. Cathy is three months pregnant.

“He was abusive, violent,” she said. “When he fell asleep, I left.”

Cathy says she has left between 10 and 20 times, only to return again. “He calls and calls and calls until we’re so worn down,” she said. “And then you just give up.”

Across the city, domestic violence counselors and shelter administrators say they can’t do enough for these victims of intensely private wars. While there are fewer than 300 shelter beds in Los Angeles County, there are just 30 in the San Fernando Valley at Haven Hills.

Without adequate funding and unable to compete with other high-profile charities and nonprofit groups, the providers say they have been unable to expand. Haven House in Pasadena, which was the first shelter in the county and is not affiliated with the Valley’s Haven Hills, turns away at least 55 women and their children a month due to a lack of space.

“It’s outrageous,” said Sheila Halfon, the executive director. “The economy has really made it hard to expand. It’s difficult enough to get the funds to operate without asking for more.”

Haven Hills, in the Valley, has an annual budget of about $560,000, which includes counseling programs, the hot line and the shelter.

Shelter life is anything but easy. Most women are required to quit their jobs and pull their children out of school so they can’t be followed by their abusers back to the shelters. Some will not accept teen-age boys and most require that the women stay at the shelter for the first 72 hours without any outside contacts.

But while the conditions might appear to be harsh and tough to meet, they are all intended to protect the abused women and their children. “It’s not Club Med,” said Giggans, of the Commission on Assaults Against Women. “It’s really for people who are escaping to save their lives.”

Haven Hills has gone one step further than most of the emergency shelters: It has a one-room schoolhouse complete with a credentialed teacher and an aide. The walls are brightly adorned with childrens’ paintings and drawings and boxes of toys sit in the corners.

On one wall a child has drawn a picture of a house and written: “I will miss Haven Hills.”

Because so many children pass through Haven Hills, officials decided to open the classroom. While admitting that the focus isn’t entirely academic, officials say they want the children to continue reading and writing and drawing.

Nestled in a business and residential neighborhood, the shelter has six small apartments that sleep five--plus cribs, if needed. Haven Hills provides food, and each unit has a kitchen. A small playground sits in the center of the complex, where two young children sat on top of a slide on a recent afternoon.

It’s well hidden from the street with a locked security gate and the address is not publicized to protect the women’s safety.

The long-term housing complex would be similar but there would also be on-site child care, individual and group counseling and job training.

While the majority of the 25 units would have two bedrooms, four apartments with three and four bedrooms would be available for larger families.

“The dream would be to open more emergency shelters but then be able to move the women and the families to longer-term, transitional housing where they can get some stability,” said Giggans.

“The issue is when you go to a shelter, you are really changing your life. Thirty days is awfully short to do that.”