Domestic violence victims face many obstacles

o YWCA Clark County main phone number: 360-696-0167.

o Crisis hotline: 360-695-0501.

o YWCA website: www.ywcaclarkcounty.org.

o Clark County Sheriff’s Office domestic violence Web page: www.co.clark.wa.us/sheriff/community/domestic.html.

For information about donating to Verizon’s HopeLine program, which sells used cellphones to raise money for domestic violence victims, visit

www.verizonwireless.com/hopeline

According to information from the YWCA Clark County and the Minnesota-based Domestic Abuse Project, you may be headed for danger if your partner does any of the following:

o Treats you roughly — physically or verbally.

o Investigates your whereabouts and your contact with others.

o Dictates how you dress.

o Puts down your friends and family.

o Tells you that jealousy is a sign of love.

o Threatens to commit suicide if you leave.

o Limits your actions, travels and friendships.

o Controls the household money.

o Destroys your belongings.

o Threatens to hurt you, your family, friends or pets.

o Forces you to have sex in ways or at times that are uncomfortable to you.

o Touches you in ways that hurt or scare you.

o Tells you that your fears are not important.

o Blames you for the abuse.

If you are concerned about a friend who’s living with domestic violence or abuse, here are ways you can help.

o Say something. Tell your friend you are willing to listen. Don’t force the issue, but allow your friend to confide at his or her own pace. Don’t blame your friend. Support your friend’s right to make independent decisions.

o Focus on strengths. Your friend is probably living with a constant stream of negative messages and insults. Bolster your friend’s self-esteem by pointing out skills and strengths. Emphasize that your friend deserves a life free from fear and violence.

o Guide your friend to community services. If your friend can’t figure out what to do, point out confidential resources such as the YWCA.

o Help create a safe plan. If your friend wants to end the relationship, help figure out a way to stay safe, consulting with experts, if possible. Things may get volatile and dangerous if the abuser feels a loss of control.

Why doesn’t she just leave? After all, what could be simpler?

An avalanche of ugly revelations about domestic violence in the professional sports world has sharpened attention on a problem that is more complicated than it may seem. It’s as complicated as cutting-edge social media and the very nature of masculinity, according to professionals who work on domestic violence issues for the YWCA Clark County.

“The sports world isn’t unique,” said Stephanie Barr, the Y’s domestic violence program director. “But it’s been encouraging that this problem has become so much more visible and there’s a push for more accountability.”

If anything good comes from all this, Barr said, it will be new policies and laws, as well as “generating positive conversations about what masculinity shouldn’t be … (and) what healthy masculinity should look like.”

October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month. This year, the Y is emphasizing healthy relationships and the empowerment of victims who do manage to take control of their lives — despite the complications.

Like what? According to the Washington State Coalition Against Domestic Violence, many people in abusive relationships have no place to go and no resources of their own to fall back on. The high cost of rental housing these days is well documented, and shelters and transitional programs are swamped.

“On just one day, domestic violence programs in Washington could not meet 398 requests for housing,” according to the coalition. So choosing to flee violence may mean choosing homelessness, Barr said.

Those are just the most obvious physical and financial barriers to fleeing. The whole picture gets a lot more nuanced than that.

For one thing, it’s quite common for victims to be fearful for their own lives if they try to flee, Barr said. In at least 55 percent of homicides by domestic abusers, according to the coalition, the victim had left or was trying to leave.

“It’s one of the riskiest times” for the victim, she said. Many victims have figured out “how to stay relatively safe” in bad situations, she said, and even that seems like a better deal than facing a future that’s even more dangerous, or totally unknown.

There may be issues around custody of children and fears for their safety. There may be issues of faith. And, there may simply be a real commitment to the relationship no matter how bad it’s gotten.

Finally, the victim may in fact be trying to leave — and finding it tough for all these reasons. Two different studies cited by the coalition found that it takes women multiple attempts to escape an abusive relationship permanently — an average of five tries across an average of eight years.

Victims “are emotionally drained, financially challenged and isolated from family and friends,” the coalition’s statement says. “Surviving abuse takes an incredible toll on people.”

Early patterns

Consider the earliest training that everybody gets in the nature of love relationships. Movies and TV portray it as romantic when the smitten man obsessively pursues the woman and won’t take no for an answer, Barr pointed out, and that’s the lesson many of us — both women and men — grow up with. And people who grow up in abusive family situations are at greater risk of replicating those patterns in their own families, she said.

Remember the intensity of your earliest love — the infatuation and maybe the worry and jealousy? For young people in particular, Barr said, it may be hard to parse the difference between a bit of normal possessiveness and anxiety versus what grows into unhealthy, controlling, isolating behavior and a basic lack of trust.

“Jealousy can be flattering at first,” she said. But relationships that seem to be all about control issues are headed for trouble, she said. “It can happen slowly over time. Sometimes there’s a fine line. There may not be a definitive moment where you say, ‘Oh I’m being abused.'”

Ariella Frishberg, a domestic violence program specialist at the Y, said young couples these days sometimes start up joint Facebook accounts — perhaps to show the world they’re a couple, she said, but also so each individual can see every little thing the other posts. It may seem like a demonstration of commitment and closeness, she suggested, but it’s really a public display of a lack of trust.

The teen years “are a really good time to start thinking about what’s healthy and what’s a normal relationship. Unfortunately, a lot of teens think coercion is normal,” Barr said. “Abusers are smart and manipulative. They’re good at figuring out exactly how much they can get away with.”

Empowerment

Why doesn’t she just leave? It’s the “wrong question to be asking,” according to the Washington State Coalition Against Domestic Violence, because it implies that the victims are responsible. “In fact, we should be asking what we can do to stop abusers from being violent and controlling,” the coalition’s statement says.

The Y never seeks to break up relationships, Barr said, and has no agenda “other than to find out what (our clients’) agenda is.”

It isn’t trying to convince anybody to leave anybody. But when people come seeking help — usually but not always women, by the way — it does work with them to pull resources together, identify other allies in their lives and even build escape plans. Sometimes the “superhero” is a friend, a co-worker, even an employer, who knows what’s going on and offers to listen and help, Barr said.

Earlier this week, the Y put up a small display of T-shirts that were painted by women who have survived domestic violence. It’s part of the Clothesline Project, an idea that grew out of Cape Cod, Mass. The shirts are a way for them to speak out with messages like:

“He wouldn’t listen. No means no.”

“Hands are for helping, words are for healing.”

“He said he was sorry,” boldly declares the body of one shirt. It’s almost too easy to miss the sleeves that add: “Every time.”