“For decades, survivors have told us that it’s not safe for them to call law enforcement, that they don’t want to be ushered into a criminal justice system,” said Colsaria Henderson, board president for the California Partnership to End Domestic Violence. “What they want is the ability to be safe in their homes and in their families. They want the violence to stop.
“It’s really time that we re-center on what the survivors are telling us.”
Indigenous and LGTBQ perspectives
Immigrant victims of domestic violence can face additional hurdles. Some avoid calling the police out of fear that they or their family members will be deported, said Dulce Vargas, who coordinates a domestic violence intervention and prevention program for the Mixteco/Indígena Community Organizing Project in Oxnard, which serves Ventura County’s indigenous immigrant population. Survivors and their children may also be reliant financially on their abusers and have no family in the country they can turn to for support. If an abusive partner is arrested or deported, survivors worry they’ll be left destitute, Vargas explained. Additionally, police officers rarely speak indigenous languages or understand the cultural dynamics within the community, which further deters survivors from calling.
Mistrust of law enforcement is also pervasive within the LGBTQ community, said Terra Russell-Slavin, deputy director of policy and community building at the Los Angeles LGBT Center. That’s partly because the legal system historically criminalized gay and transgender people. LGBTQ survivors are still subject to higher rates of wrongful arrest, Russell-Slavin said.
So far, there is no broad agreement on the best or most effective alternative solutions to address domestic violence, but some ideas are coming into focus. They include creating trained networks of community volunteers to intervene in domestic disputes, engaging survivors and their partners in restorative justice proceedings removed from the criminal legal system, and establishing programs that encourage men to embrace healthy definitions of masculinity.
Brooks, who is now executive director of Justice Teams Network, a coalition of organizations dedicated to eradicating state violence, is a leader in the effort to identify alternatives. Over the past year, her organization has been working on a toolkit that lays out principles and strategies communities can use to create their own responses to inter-partner abuse. The work is based on conversations with community members and organizations around the country who are working to address domestic violence and police overreach, mainly in communities of color, she said. It also draws from a program she helped launch this summer in Oakland called Mental Health First, that offers a hotline people can call instead of 911 for help de-escalating psychiatric crises.
While the toolkit is still a work in progress, Brooks said there are some main principles that can help inform the dialogue around solutions. First, advocates agree that responses should be localized to individual communities or even neighborhood blocks, be culturally sensitive, and have broad community oversight.
Such responses should also allow survivors to make decisions about how they want the violence addressed, and incorporate interventions that help the entire family (including children and the perpetrator). Although law enforcement should be a last resort, there must be a plan for when calling police is appropriate to ensure safety, she added. Brooks said she envisions small crisis intervention teams run out of churches, mosques or community centers, likely staffed by volunteers and funded through local philanthropy.
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