Protecting domestic violence survivors during COVID

While stay-at-home requirements helped to keep many county residents safe from COVID-19, those same requirements also kept many stuck in unsafe home environments. As the county moves forward with reopening, the increase in domestic violence cases during the pandemic is becoming more apparent, and the Advocacy Center of Tompkins County is working to protect those survivors from harm.

The Advocacy Center has a long history in the community. Originally known as the Task Force for Battered Women, the center was formed in January 1977 by a group of volunteers, according to its website. In 1982, volunteers secured grants and local funding to hire staff and renovate a house to use as a shelter for abused women and their children.

The Advocacy Center established the Child Sexual Abuse Project and one of the first Multi-Disciplinary Sexual Abuse Investigation Teams in the country, which still exists today. Throughout its over four-decade run, the nonprofit continued to expand its reach, serving youth and LGBTQ residents and, in 2013, adult survivors of sexual assault and rape, which prompted the name change.

“The general mission of the agency is pretty simple,” said Kristi Taylor, education director for the Advocacy Center. “We are working towards increasing people’s safety, whether they’re experiencing abuse now or have in the past, and also really reducing the traumas that are associated with the forms of abuse of domestic violence, sexual assault or child sexual abuse that we deal with.”

That mission hasn’t wavered during the pandemic. If anything, it’s become even more important, Taylor said. The nonprofit has continued with its advocacy work, kept its hotline and shelter operational and responded to many calls from survivors of domestic violence since March.

Still, Taylor said it was quite a scramble originally to keep those services going.

“In March, when the New York on PAUSE and the stay at home orders came, it was a pretty abrupt, ‘OK, everybody, we’re working remotely,’” she said. “That’s a big shift from what we were doing, including figuring out, what is the technology to make sure that people can still reach us? How do we make sure that we’re doing safety planning for folks that are in unsafe situations?”

The Advocacy Center had to consider shelter capacity and density, along with navigating a new system around the courts for many survivors seeking litigation against their attackers.

Making these efforts all the more pressing was an increase in hotline calls to the center shortly following the stay-at-home orders issued in March, followed by a lull in calls that was anything but encouraging.

“There was a period where things got a little quieter, and, in our work, that’s not always a good thing,” Taylor said. “And what we were worried about and had been paying attention to was having youth and adults who potentially were sheltering in place with people that they weren’t safe with but also not having the access to reach out and connect with their advocates or connect with us.”

Finding a safe way to connect with survivors when they were stuck in their homes wasn’t an easy feat.

“We had different technology upgrades,” Taylor said. “When we couldn’t do face-to-face meetings for a period of time with folks, how can we still have a connection with people, have a rapport, because we’re talking with folks who are sharing some of the most intimate details of their life and very personal things.”

Fortunately, the center was able to upgrade its technology and find secure platforms to do video communications and accommodate the increased need. The Advocacy Center also received considerable community support in this effort.

“We did a lot of outreach and really trying to put things into the world and connecting with other community partners who have contacted folks to make sure that we could use kind of our entire community network so that folks knew that the hotline was available, that the shelter was open,” Taylor said.

After the quiet period, as the county has moved forward with reopening, the center is seeing a resurgence in calls.

“Our hotline, in some cases, is seeing double the numbers of calls that we had seen the same time last year and hearing from domestic violence victims and youth who were experiencing sexual violence and not having the connection to things like schools or the typical youth programs that they might be engaged with,” Taylor said.

Taylor explained that the disparity in calls wasn’t because domestic violence decreased during the worst of the pandemic; rather, domestic violence cases increased during the shutdowns, but the pandemic made it far more difficult for survivors to get to a safe place to reach out, thus leading to fewer calls. Once reopening hit, more survivors could get out of their unsafe home environments, leading to the large uptick in calls later on.

Taylor also clarified that the pandemic wasn’t the cause of the domestic violence but instead something that increased abusers’ access to their survivors.

“Domestic violence is about power and control,” Taylor said. “Offenders [were] then using the opportunity of the pandemic and the rules and the stay-at-home order to increase the control and make justifications for not allowing somebody to leave or to talk to family or friends or to reach out or to see their kids.”

While reopening has made it easier for survivors to reach out, there are still many concerns related to the pandemic to consider, like how the pandemic has increased financial pressures for many, which can isolate and trap somebody in an abusive situation and make their situation worse.

“Housing concerns, those types of things have increased so dramatically during the pandemic, which then can really have a disproportionate impact on survivors,” Taylor said. “The longer the pandemic goes on, that’s another factor of really trying to find creative supports and solutions for survivors that can create real barriers to their safety.”

Beyond that concern is a concern for the future of the center and the other agencies it works with, as many nonprofits are being impacted by budget shortfalls caused by the pandemic.

“When I look at the whole network of social supports that are relying on grant funding, there’s a worry about what budgets are going to look like for next year and how that will impact the availability of those kind of networks of supports that need to be present for adults and youth to increase their safety in the community,” Taylor said.

These concerns and increased demand for services, Taylor said, necessitates increased education and awareness of this issue and of the services the Advocacy Center provides. In addition, protecting survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault needs to be at the forefront of budget decisions, Taylor said.

For now, Taylor said that the Advocacy Center has no intention of stopping or slowing services and plans to continue working to protect survivors during and after the pandemic is finally over.

“We are looking at increasing the [hotline] capacity to make sure that we can really answer every single call that comes in on the first try, really make sure that we’re out there and also making sure that people know our education team is operating,” Taylor said.

Readers wishing to learn more or reach out to the Advocacy Center can visit its website at actompkins.org or call the hotline at 607-277-5000.