SOUTH BAY / COVER STORY : In the Shadow of Violence : At One of 3 Local Shelters for Victims of Domestic Abuse, Women and Children Find a Haven and a Place to Start Over

The telephone rings at 12:10 a.m., 1:02 a.m. and again at 3 a.m. Each time, shelter worker Maria Sanchez crawls out of bed to reach for the receiver and hears the voice of a terrified woman.

One caller blurts out that she is trapped behind locked doors in her home, frightened that her abusive boyfriend is waiting in his car outside. She wants to slip away tonight and drive to safety.

So Sanchez carries her bedding to a sofa next to the shelter’s front door where she will be sure to wake up when she hears a knock.

The woman still has not arrived when daylight streams through the lace-curtained windo w s. A sleepy-eyed Sanchez sips coffee and dials the number she was given during the night. The phone rings. There is no answer.

*

The nights can be long and unsettling for those who serve as sentries at the Rainbow Services battered women’s shelter.

During the daytime, this crowded three-bedroom house in the South Bay resounds with the sounds of spirited conversation, meals being cooked, television game-show music, and boisterous children chasing each other from room to room.

But late at night, with the sound of a ringing phone, the shelter’s purpose comes into stark focus.

To those who pick up the receiver, it must seem as if countless women throughout Southern California are trapped in some sordid shadow world where they are threatened, stalked, beaten and bruised by their husbands or boyfriends. Some of the callers speak in whispers and some cry outright as they describe being taunted with guns, hit by flying dishes, slapped repeatedly in front of a child.

When they call the Rainbow Services hot line, day or night, they make contact with a worker usually seated in a cozy, well-lit office at a house tucked away on a residential street.

This house is a way station on an underground railroad of sorts, one of 17 shelters in Los Angeles County offering sanctuary to victims of domestic violence. Shelter counselors work together in hopes of providing emergency housing and other aid for 30 to 45 days for victims--primarily women and their children--who have fled abusive relationships.

Like most such shelters, the one run by Rainbow Services is in an undisclosed site to protect the safety of victims. Secrecy is paramount. It is, in fact, a misdemeanor to disclose the location of a battered women’s shelter.

“Shelters have worked hard not to be visible,” said Cheryl Majka, Rainbow’s services director.

Unbeknown to many, three shelters now operate in the South Bay: the Rainbow shelter and two run by the 1736 Family Crisis Center, an agency based in Redondo Beach and Hermosa Beach. Between them, the agencies provide 45 shelter beds for women and children, which workers report is far too few to serve the need in the South Bay.

The same shortage plagues the entire Los Angeles region. A total of only 390 shelter beds--including portable cribs for infants--are available in all of Los Angeles County, where law enforcement officials last year received more than 67,000 domestic violence calls.

The Rainbow hot line received 3,800 calls last year, and its shelter housed 82 women and 146 children. An average of 60 victims a month sought such services as individual and group counseling, child counseling, and legal advice on such matters as how to obtain a restraining order.

Facing such numbers, shelter workers can sometimes feel overwhelmed.

A chart tacked on a wall at the Rainbow shelter showed that, as of Monday, the agency had been forced to turn down 65 requests for shelter since July 6 for lack of space. An informal survey this month by the Los Angeles County Domestic Violence Council found that the county’s shelter network may be turning away four out of every five families requesting shelter because of lack of space and other factors.

Pressure on that network has burgeoned in recent weeks, following the arrest of O.J. Simpson on charges of murdering his ex-wife and her friend. Reports that the Simpson marriage was marred by abuse have focused unprecedented attention on domestic violence.

The number of calls to local hot lines has surged, and the Rainbow shelter is at capacity, with 18 women and children on a recent weekend sleeping in three upstairs rooms furnished with dormitory-style bunk beds.

Many women who call have been listening to television talk shows, recognizing in themselves some of the classic signs of being battered. Now, some seem more willing to make a break for it, to leave an abusive partner for a shelter.

One such woman is 29-year-old Janet (not her real name), who says she endured years of physical abuse from her husband, even leaving the state with her four children in a futile effort to hide from him.

The recently released tapes of Nicole Brown Simpson’s desperate 911 call to a police dispatcher resonated in Janet’s brain, stirring memories of her own calls to authorities when her husband would explode with rage and hit her.

She had been in hiding at a relative’s home, where, one day this month, her husband suddenly showed up on the doorstep. She dodged him long enough to call the Rainbow hot line. And within minutes, she was on the freeway with her four children in the car, speeding toward the South Bay.

What Janet found at Rainbow does not conform to the stereotype of a battered women’s shelter: a gloomy building where women with bruised faces gather in a circle to dissect their emotions.

She instead found a large, rambling house brimming with friendly adults and playful children. The women are assigned chores, such as cooking dinner, scouring the bathrooms, tidying the yard. They watch television together and gossip over coffee. One woman ambles down the stairs in early morning with curlers in her hair.

Although Janet had never attended college, this fits her image of a campus sorority house.

She feels comfortable talking to the other women, and she notices that her four children seem less tense. “They like it,” she says. “I think that when we have to leave, they’ll cry.”

Children outnumber adults in this household, last week ranging in age from 3 months to 10 years old. Keeping them occupied is a key mission of shelter residents. Two women have begun taking their children on outings to McDonalds, where their 2-year-olds can clamber over the elaborate play set while the adults eat and talk.

Despite such relaxed moments, shelter life has a dreary side.

Some women arrive here with only the clothing on their backs, and they are given free vouchers that they can exchange for clothes at the Rainbow thrift shop.

Some leave behind not only their husbands but their jobs. Women entering the shelter are strongly advised to quit their jobs or--if possible--to ask their employers for leaves of absence because their abusers could easily trace them if they return to work.

Many newcomers must take a bus to a nearby office to apply for welfare, some for the first time.

Some women decide to leave the shelter after only a few days, often returning to their husbands or boyfriends. Studies have shown that abused women may leave a relationship and return to it five, six, eight times.

If a woman decides to go home to her abuser, she is still welcomed at Rainbow’s outreach support groups, but she generally cannot return to the shelter because Rainbow officials worry that she may have alerted her partner to its location. They tell the story of one departing woman seen getting into her abuser’s car right outside the house.

If such women contact Rainbow again, counselors will help guide them to another shelter, another station on this underground railroad.

One evening, an overflow crowd shows up for Rainbow’s regular Thursday support group, with 16 women squeezing into the cluster of sofas.

Tonight’s topic is “helplessness,” and the personal stories come spilling out. One woman recounts how her husband beat her in front of her 3-year-old. Another describes being thrown repeatedly against a wall.

After all that, one woman wonders aloud, why is it so hard to leave her abuser?

Yet, as time passes and the bruises fade, she finds herself rationalizing that the beatings didn’t happen all the time.

“And now I want to forgive him again, because I don’t have this anymore”--she points at her eye--”or makeup’s covering it.”

Says another woman: ‘After he hit me, I’d think, ‘Is it really that bad?”

As the session finishes, the therapist asks how many in the room have left their abusers. Only half the women raise their hands.

*

Not until her boyfriend threw the glass at their 3-week-old baby did Susan decide the relationship was over.

He had erupted in anger that night as he had before, kicking and stomping her, dragging her across the floor by her hair, threatening to kill her and bury her in the back yard.

But it was seeing that glass hurtling toward her baby that stopped her short. She reached out fast and managed to catch the glass, but the water spilled all over her and the infant.

So she left him that night for the third time--the last time, she says. She looked through the telephone book and found Rainbow Services.

During her three weeks in this rambling house, she has begun to relax.

“Now and again, I’ll hear a truck that sounds like his, and I’ll think, ‘Oh, my God.’ ” But instead of nervously pacing the floor, she is sleeping through the night.

Her 2-year-old son, Joey, seems calmer too, she says. She had worried in recent months when he began copying his father, waiting until the beatings were done and then hitting her with his own small fists.

“It’s monkey see, monkey do, at that age,” she says.

Now, she must start planning her next move--probably to a transitional shelter where she can stay for several months. In time, she would like to go to nursing school.

Nothing will induce her to return to her boyfriend, she says. Not even brute force.

On this lazy July afternoon, she sits talking in the shelter’s back yard as the baby dozes and Joey plays with a toy truck. She watches as Joey wanders over to the baby carrier, and, unprompted, kisses his sister on the forehead.

*

Advocates believe that women such as Susan and Janet need more help than can be offered during 30 days of sanctuary. In response, the shroud of secrecy shielding the battered women’s network is lifting ever so slightly with spinoff programs reaching beyond the shelter.

Responding to this trend, Rainbow Services last month moved its outreach center to larger quarters in San Pedro so that it can expand its counseling and legal advocacy work. Rainbow also has forged an unusual partnership with the Los Angeles Police Department’s San Pedro-based Harbor Division.

Central to that effort is the Emergency Response Team, Rainbow volunteers who are called in by the LAPD after domestic violence-related arrests. Volunteers offer crisis counseling, arriving equipped with pamphlets, hot line phone numbers, tissues, and even hotel and taxi vouchers.

The experiment has started slowly, with the team only being called out about a dozen times since April. Still, supporters hope it can turn into a citywide model, inspiring other LAPD divisions to launch similar programs with shelters in their own neighborhoods.

“It’s helpful to us, and it’s helpful to them,” said Detective Julie Nelson, who reports that the division gets about 200 domestic violence-related calls monthly.

It was this same desire to reach beyond shelter work that brought Rainbow Executive Director Connie McFall to San Pedro Peninsula Hospital one recent morning to address a roomful of emergency room nurses who are all too familiar with the ravages of domestic violence.

“You know from your experience many of these women never call the police,” said McFall, who encouraged the nurses to call Rainbow if a victim needs more help than the hospital staff can provide.

Rainbow hopes to open a satellite office in Wilmington this fall and to hire a caseworker to assist women after they leave the shelter.

A formal program to aid such women is available at the 1736 Family Crisis Center’s Second Step Shelter, designed for battered women and their children who have already been in a short-term shelter but who need more sustained help. Through the program, these women may learn how to write a resume, dress for a job interview and balance a household budget. The agency plans to open two more Second Step shelters in the Los Angeles area later this year.

Nonetheless, more services are needed on all fronts, experts agree. The outpouring of calls unleashed by the Simpson case publicity, they say, helps dramatize the insidious nature of domestic abuse.

*

One quiet evening, Janet and Susan lounge in the shelter living room and talk about the curious nature of this house they now call home.

These two women are like travelers waiting in a train station--Janet will be leaving the shelter within the week, whereas Susan has barely arrived--but they already have struck up a friendship.

The conversation drifts as the two women describe the men they have left, the episodes of violence. They remember the sea change that swept over their old partners before the men began attacking.

“Their faces change so much,” Janet remembers.

“They look totally different,” Susan agrees. “Their shoulders tense up. He used to get a tick, and I knew then not to mess with him.”

Such images seem oddly jarring in this lace-curtained room as Janet’s 2-year-old son stretches across her lap, struggling to keep his eyes open.

He looks so much like his father, says Janet as she strokes his head. She worries about the resemblance, troubled that the propensity toward violence also could be hereditary. And she doesn’t want her daughters to grow up thinking that it’s all right to have someone hit them.

In the next few weeks, she will wrestle with decisions about where she and her children will go next. For now, she seems content to sit here watching her son, joking with Susan.

“I’m so happy,” she says.

Warning Signs of Violence

Some patterns of behavior by a partner could hint at the potential for violence in a relationship, according to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence:

* Growing up in a violent family, perhaps being abused or seeing one parent beat the other.

* Using violence to solve problems, displaying a quick temper, overreacting to frustrations such as not finding a parking place, punching walls or throwing things when angered, being cruel to animals.

* Having a poor or negative self-image.

* Maintaining rigid ideas about the roles of men and women, such as believing a woman should stay home and follow orders. Getting angry if a partner does not follow orders or anticipate wishes.

* Exhibiting jealousy of a partner’s family and friends; wanting to know where the partner is at all times.

* Abusing alcohol or other drugs.

* Playing with guns, knives or other weapons and threatening to use them against others.

* Experiencing extreme highs and lows, acting extremely kind and then becoming cruel.

* Treating a partner roughly, by hitting or physically forcing someone to do things against his or her will.

Source: National Coalition Against Domestic Violence

Help for Battered Women

Two South Bay agencies run shelters for battered women and their children:

Rainbow Services is a San Pedro-based agency that assists victims of domestic violence. In addition to its emergency shelter, it offers counseling, support groups, legal advocacy, food distribution, children’s programs and other services.

Office: (310) 548-5450. Hot line (Spanish and English, available 24 hours): (310) 547-9343.

1736 Family Crisis Center, based in Hermosa Beach and Redondo Beach, operates an emergency shelter as well as its long-term “Second Step Shelter” that offers job training and other help. The center also offers counseling, support group meetings, children’s programs, and food and furnishings.

Office: (310) 372-4674. Hot line (available 24 hours): (310) 379-3620.

Two groups offer legal assistance:

Domestic Violence Clinic of South Bay, at the Torrance Courthouse, helps victims of domestic violence fill out forms and obtain restraining orders, which are legal documents intended to keep the abuser away from the victim.

Phone: (310) 222-1713.

New Life Advocacy also assists victims through the legal system.

Phone: (310) 316-4035.