Joint Efforts Help Families Fight Abuse

Jose’s third-grade teacher noticed bruising up and down his arms and notified the county Department of Family and Children’s Services. The diagnosis seemed obvious: child abuse.

But after some cajoling, Jose revealed to a pediatrician and a social worker how it happened: His father had hit him with a broom when he tried to stop him from beating his mother.

Jose’s mother, Maria, 23, said she had repeatedly tried to leave her violent husband, only to return again and again, trapped by fear and financial dependence.

In the past, the standard response from child abuse workers would have been to put Jose in a foster home. Child protection professionals were simply not equipped to help mothers escape abuse. They also instinctively distrusted mothers who appeared to have failed to protect their children, said one of the boy’s doctors, Astrid Heger.

In this case, however, Jose and his mother were the beneficiaries of an emerging trend in family-violence prevention: dealing simultaneously with the twin ravages of child abuse and domestic violence.

Staffers took Maria to a shelter and enrolled her in one of the treatment center’s counseling programs, along with Jose and her three other children. (Names of victims in this story have been changed for their protection.) Meanwhile, a deal was brokered with social workers to allow Maria to keep the children rather than have them placed in a foster home.

Experts have long highlighted the coexistence of domestic violence and child abuse in families. By most estimates, in 45% to 70% of families where women are being beaten, their children are being beaten as well. Other studies have estimated that as many as 40% of child abuse cases also involve domestic violence.

Moreover, a growing body of research has shed light on the emotional toll inflicted upon children who merely witness such violence and the likelihood they will grow up to be batterers or victims.

But children’s advocates and battered women’s advocates have rarely worked together. In fact, their conflicting missions have often placed them at odds.

“We have a significant number of child abuse programs and a significant number of battered women’s programs, but very few communities have brought them together,” said Esta Soler, executive director of the Violence Prevention Fund in San Francisco.

The roots of the division lie in an inherent distrust between the two sides and narrowly drawn missions, she said.

That is beginning to change. Massachusetts several years ago became the first state in the country to integrate a special domestic violence unit into its child protection services, now a national model.

Last September in Los Angeles, nearly 1,000 representatives from law enforcement, mental health, medicine and social services attended a conference on the effects of family violence on children. The event was intended as an opportunity for children’s advocates and battered women’s advocates to discuss ways they might cooperate, said Deanne Tilton, executive director of the Interagency Council on Child Abuse and Neglect, one of the meeting’s sponsors.

The case of 8-year-old Jose and his mother illustrated these dynamics.

Maria had been exposed to chronic domestic violence growing up and was raped by her father. She was forced to marry her husband at age 15. Soon after, her husband began to beat her regularly. Jose and his siblings, Elizabeth, Manual and Ana, were born in rapid succession, and the circle of violence expanded to include them.

“Often, when you peel the onion away, you find another very damaged person,” said Jose’s doctor, Heger, director of the Violence Intervention Program that helped Jose and his mother. The program, based at County-USC Medical Center, was originally a child abuse center; it expanded its services three years ago to include domestic violence and sexual assault.

A little more than a year ago, Children’s Institute International, a nonprofit children’s advocacy organization based in Los Angeles, established a partnership with the LAPD’s Wilshire Division to provide a round-the-clock team of trained counselors who could accompany police officers on all domestic violence calls.

At the scene, counselors provide crisis services to both the woman and her children. They also assist the mother in finding shelter, securing restraining orders and building job skills to help break her dependency on the batterer. The program is expanding into the neighboring Rampart Division as well.

The institute is one of a dozen organizations in California that received a grant from the state’s Office of Child Abuse Prevention to set up programs that bridge the gap between child welfare and domestic violence agencies.

Dr. Becky Gaba, the program’s director, said studies show the effects on children who witness violence are similar to those who are physically abused. Symptoms, akin to post-traumatic stress disorder, range from anxiety and sleeplessness to depression and aggression.

At Harbour Communities, a transitional women’s shelter in the San Fernando Valley, another state grant has allowed for a team of children’s counselors from the Domestic Abuse Center in Northridge to implement an extended emotional trauma program, hand-tailored for the shelter’s children.

In the past, tight budgets and a woman-focused philosophy prevented shelters from doing much more than simple day care for children. But as the battered women’s movement has matured, activists have realized children have their own unique issues, said program director Gretchen Lampert.

On a recent afternoon, Joseph, 8, tells the squirming kids in his group how he came to the shelter. Three months ago, he saw his father back over his mother in a car as he came to pick them up for a prearranged visit.

“When my dad backed up, she fell down,” said Joseph, matter-of-factly. “My mom had a broken leg. She ended up in a hospital.”

While stories of children like Joseph are tragic, their age gives domestic violence and child abuse workers hope that the violence might end with them.

“There’s so much hope because they’re really young,” Lampert said. “They’re so fixable. The bigger fear is . . . that the system isn’t going to protect them.”

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Facts on Domestic Violence

* Almost 4 million American women were physically abused by their husbands or boyfriends in the last year.

* Forty-two percent of murdered women are killed by their male partners. * According to a national survey of 6,000 families, 50% of men who frequently assault their wives also frequently abuse their children.

* Child abuse is 15 times more likely to occur in families where domestic violence occurs than in those where it does not.

* More than 3 million children witness parental violence each year.

* Men who witnessed their parents’ domestic violence are three times more likely to abuse their own wives.

* In Los Angeles, up to 200 minors a year witness the slaying of a parent, often in the context of abusive relationships.

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Sources: Family Violence Prevention Fund, Times files