Judge Sees Other Domestic Abuse Victims: Children

What did you do, the boy was asked from the witness stand, when you heard your father beating your mother?

What I always do when it happens, said the boy: Turn up the volume on the television. To drown out his own pain.

For Superior Court Judge Pamela L. Iles, that youth’s testimony a few months back at the Justice Center in Laguna Niguel was her breaking point.

“I was so tired of seeing traumatized children on the witness stand,” she explained. “Parents think it’s their own fight. They’re so self-focused, they don’t have a clue what they’re doing to their children.”

So the judge began calling everyone she could think of to meet with her. Social services officials. Health care experts. Prosecutors. Public defenders. Probation officers. The sheriff. They’ve been meeting with her for months.

Next Tuesday, the Iles attack begins.

Officially, it’s called the justice center’s Domestic Violence Project. But you won’t hear that term much. To Iles, it’s “the Project.” To her it underlies what being a judge is all about--using your power to correct community ills.

On Tuesday, her new team formally meets to begin the first review of pending domestic violence cases. It will choose the most serious cases involving children in the home to be included in the Project. Then the team will come up with a plan to do what’s best for the children involved, whether it’s therapy, drug or alcohol treatment for the parent, or, in extreme cases, removal from the home.

In most of these cases, Iles will make adherence to the team’s plan a condition of the defendant’s probation. In cases in which a defendant is sent to prison or a lengthy jail term, the team will devise a plan to assist the victims in the inmate’s absence.

Many of these women and children are already being helped. But Tuey Lee, a program manager representing the county Social Services Agency on the team, said this will be the first “coordinated effort, where all of us are working together on behalf of the family.”

That’s one of the problems Iles has seen from the bench.

“We’re all working for the same cause, but we don’t talk to each other,” she said. “So a lot of children who are victims wind up falling through the cracks.”

South Justice Center’s domestic violence calendar gets about 2,500 to 3,000 cases a year, Iles said. A high majority of those involve children. She envisions about half of such cases being included in her project.

Deputy Dist. Atty. David Himelson, who now handles domestic violence felonies, is enthusiastic about the Iles approach because the focus is not on the defendant.

“This is not a diversion or a giveaway program, where the defendant can avoid a sentence by agreeing to this,” Himelson said. “It’s just a chance to focus on victims.”

We don’t know yet whether Iles’ new approach will work. But it certainly seems worth trying.

One reason why: In most spousal abuse cases--Himelson said as high as 80%--the defendant and the primary victim wind up together again. So the standard pay-your-fine and do-your-sentence approach works only for the short term.

“What we want to do is at least heighten the awareness among these couples that it’s their children who are suffering,” Iles said. “Maybe when they do reunite, they’ll understand that better.”

Lee believes the team approach can give abuse victims and their children confidence needed to cooperate with follow-up therapeutic programs.

“If they see us working together, it can give them a sense that there’s support for them,” Lee said.

Also on the Iles team is Barbara Philips, director of the county’s Victim-Witness Program. She says she has seen many cases in which it’s simply left up to the victims whether to seek help.

“I see this team approach as a model that should spread to courts in the rest of the county,” she said.

But Lee cautions that if that happens, other courts will need a key ingredient present at the South Justice Center: Someone like Judge Iles.

On Sept. 1, Iles will help lead a seminar for 300 area teachers on how best to determine whether a student has been battered.

“Judge Iles has a passion for helping these children. You need that to make a coordination project successful,” Lee said.

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Jerry Hicks’ column appears Monday and Thursday. Readers may reach Hicks by calling (714) 564-1049 or e-mail to jerry.hicks@latimes.com