Clinics Volunteer Helping Hand to Domestic Violence Victims

They come in a steady stream every day, searching the impersonal green-yellow hallways of Van Nuys Superior Court for help. Their eyes find me, a young woman working at a computer terminal, her door open, and assume this must be the place.

I can guess why they’ve come as they head toward me, small feet following closely behind.

“Is this room 212?” one seemingly middle-class, confident woman with a nasty black eye leaned in and asked a few weeks ago. Like the others before her, she could not see the sign on the door that said “Los Angeles Times.”

“No, it’s in the cafeteria,” I told her. She thanked me, swiveled about the stroller she was pushing and headed toward the domestic violence clinic, almost certainly to seek a restraining order against the man who gave her the shiner.

What in the world must it be like to work in that clinic, listening to all those awful stories, I wondered.

Not that my job is one you turn off with your computer at the end of the day. Covering the courts and writing about crime often means drawing out personal, painful stories from victims of violence and relatives of the dead. These are not interviews one forgets.

But I rarely write more than one or two articles in a day. For workers at the domestic violence clinic, a day can often bring a dozen stories of abuse and harassment and frustration and anger and fear. And they listen for free.

The clinics, which are run in courthouses across the county by lawyer groups and organizations that provide legal aid for the poor, are staffed almost entirely by volunteers. They are lawyers, paralegals, law students, retirees.

Why do they do it?

“They really want to help people,” said Neal Dudovitz, executive director of the San Fernando Valley Neighborhood Legal Services, which runs three restraining order clinics in the Valley. “This is not something with great rewards other than the rewards of helping people.”

In the words of volunteer Karen Manriquez, 29, of Canoga Park: “I’m blessed. I have a great life and I don’t have to deal with these issues. These people need help.”

There are currently about 50 volunteers in the Van Nuys, San Fernando and Burbank clinics. After a four-hour training class, they work a few hours each week walking victims of domestic violence through the process of filling out and filing a complicated packet of forms.

They help them boil down their problems to a few paragraphs that explain why they are afraid and why they need protection. Then they send the victims where they need to go to get a temporary restraining order against the husband or boyfriend or wife or girlfriend or mother or father or sister or brother who is threatening or abusing them.

They can also refer the victims to shelters.

The Van Nuys clinic in particular is so busy that workers often have to stay until 2 or 3 in the afternoon to help everyone, even though they’re supposed to leave at noon, Dudovitz said.

And for good reason: Van Nuys police officers arrest more people for domestic violence than any other LAPD division, authorities said.

Using volunteers makes the clinics a relatively cheap way to reduce violence in the community, Dudovitz said. He figures it costs his organization about $20 to $35 to help each victim, much of the money coming from government grants.

And they supply a vital service, said Gail Pincus, a longtime advocate who runs the Domestic Abuse Center in Northridge.

“Often it’s the neighbors who call the police, the police who decide to make an arrest and issue emergency protective orders,” she added. “This is probably the first really brave step a woman will take on her own. It’s a moment of recognition and independence.”

There are many barriers to taking that first step, she said. Some are psychological, emotional or financial. Then there are the problems in the system that trip up victims who finally decide to make a clean break.

While the forms needed to get a restraining order were meant to be something anybody can fill out by themselves, Pincus said they aren’t.

“They’re horrible,” she said. “They’re long and cumbersome and complicated. It’s the kind of thing where if you check the wrong box, you’re screwed.”

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When a local bar association opened the first restraining order clinic in downtown Los Angeles in the 1980s, the burden was eased for many victims who lived nearby. With the size of the county, however, getting downtown was a barrier for people in places like the Valley, Pincus said.

In the early 1990s, the first Valley clinic opened in the Van Nuys courthouse, and it was a godsend, Pincus said.

“It’s someplace to go where they know why you’re there and you get good, appropriate, receptive help,” she said. And that means a lot of work for the volunteers who “can’t just chitchat” with the victims. They have a lot of people to help in a limited time, and they’re under a lot of pressure to do it right.

“Sometimes it takes us a very long time to do the order because the victims need to talk to somebody, and we’re it,” said Sharley Allen, one of two paid legal service staff members who work in the Valley clinics. “You feel bad sometimes when you have to tell them to stop. We don’t need to know what happened 10 years ago; we need to know what’s happening now.”

As good as clinic workers feel when victims return to say they’ve gotten away from their abusers, they are equally frustrated when the victims let the orders expire, only to return weeks later after having been beaten again.

Allen estimates that only about half the people who come in will follow through and get a three-year stay-away order. The others will reconcile with their abusers.

And they’ll be back, she said.

“They come back more than we’d like to see,” Allen said. “Twice doesn’t bother me. After that it gets frustrating. I wonder what we’re doing wrong that we can’t get her away.”

“The average is five times that they’ll do something before they actually get strong enough to leave and really make the orders stick,” she added.

“Why would somebody wait until they’ve been hit 50 million times to get out? I have a hard time with those,” said Manriquez, the volunteer. There are times when her gut tells her that the person before her will return to her abuser before the ink on the order is dry.

But she says she’ll work as hard for that person as anyone else.

“If I turn on the news that night and hear that victim was killed, I know I did all I could to help,” she said. “I’ll be able to sleep.”