 Welcome to Community Matters on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm your host today, Cynthia Sinclair. And I'm here today with one of my local heroes. And I am not kidding, she's an amazing woman. The title of today's show is Increasing Concerns about Domestic Violence in the Time of COVID. And she is an absolute expert. I'm here with Nancy Creedman. Thank you so much for coming on today. Thank you so much for the invitation. Appreciate the opportunity to spend the time with you and the community. Nice. Well, it's really nice to see you again. I've been sort of down and out for a while and haven't done much. I think I've had almost every leader that works there at DVAC on my show for all the different programs. And this is the first time I finally get to interview you. So I'm very excited. Thank you. I'm pleased to. Thank you. We know that, well, I know that, sorry. I know that DVAC was founded in 1990. And there was just two of you, right? Two sort of on your lunch hour, trying to make it all work. And then you were incorporated by 1991. Nice move over. And so you went from a staff of two to a staff of almost 50 between then and now, which is pretty remarkable. That's correct. We are now at 50, but it was a slow growth. We kept adding programs and inventing new ways that we could help the community. And so we added programs as time passed. And so now we are 30 years later at just about 50 staff, professionals, experts in the field of domestic violence. Having them work with me is an incredible blessing. Well, I know I'm very honored to have you on today. I am a victim of domestic violence. Ah, excuse me, I am a survivor. And actually, in a way, I'm more like a soldier because I'm out here trying to fight the war. And there's a difference between being a victim and a survivor. When you are a victim, it means you are still in the midst of it. And when you're a survivor, it means you have successfully extricated yourself from that abusive situation. And then soldiers, like Nancy and I out here, just trying to help people to show people that there's hope in healing on the other side of abuse and doing our best to try to help people get to that other side. And the effects can last for a long time. So I know for me, there's just no excuse for domestic abuse. There's just no excuse for it. There's lots of reasons, but there's no excuse. And my first husband put his gun to my head. And I have a big scar right here that will never go away. And every time I put on my makeup, every time I look in the mirror, not everything. But a lot of times I look there and I'm reminded of that abuse. And in the beginning, it made it hard. Now it's like a badge of courage. And I go, keep fighting. See, keep fighting. And it reminds me to keep fighting for other people. And I know that you guys have basically three departments that deal with the oversee, the direct services, the specialized programs, the administration. So could you tell us a little bit more about what those direct services are and what some of those specialized programs are? Yes, I'd be happy to. We have a very well supervised and well trained staff who work in different programs in the departments that you alluded to. One of them is our legal team. So we have a staff of attorneys who will assist survivors in family court actions, whether it be a straining order or a paternity case or a divorce or a post decree. Sometimes people will have gone to court and gotten a divorce decree or a protective order. And it needs to be changed. So our attorneys will help people. Because sometimes when the crisis has recently occurred or you have an attorney who doesn't necessarily understand, and that's the way our attorneys understand it, the court order that you get may not be responsive to your needs. So anyways, we have a legal team. We have advocates who will help survivors navigate their droning from danger to safety. Whatever barriers they encounter, whatever challenges they are experiencing, whatever decisions they have to make, we assist them in thinking through what's their best next step, what's the best choice given this barrier, what is the best thing I can do in this moment to stay safe, get safe, provide safety for my children if I have any. We have programs. Let me just add two more things that I think are very important. The community now, we have programs that support children and teens. So we have a teen alert program. And we have a program called Fulama Ika Ohana. Works with children and their non-offending parent. So we're supporting the whole family to make that transition together to safety and stability and self-sufficiency. That's wonderful. I want to make just a little bit of a point in that when you say safely, getting away, that's so important for people to remember. Because a lot of times when you try to leave is when the abuse can get more dangerous and get ramped up. So it's very important to remember to stay safe. Go away to make the phone call. Make sure you reach out for help in a way that isn't going to compromise your own safety. That's correct. The most dangerous time for a victim is the moment when she is taking steps to escape or end the relationship or leave to be safe. Right. I know when I left, this is many years ago now, it's been almost 30 years now since I left my husband. My ex-husband. And for a long time, he did that very same thing. For many years, I moved across town, wasn't quite far enough away. I moved across the country. That was just about right. And I risked safety in Alabama, not exactly my first choice place to be, but it was across the country from California. So I liked it just fine. Okay. So sometimes people have to take very, very extreme steps to get safe. Yeah. When I was back then, it was about, they say 50% of all domestic violence ends in the death of one or both spouses. Is that statistic still in play or not? I think the statistic is that in a woman's lifetime, 50% of all women will say they have experienced some form of abuse, right? I don't think 50% of women killed or killed as a result of domestic violence. Was that you? Right. Well, you know, things have changed. The approaches changed. There's more help for people now. This is back in the 80s, you know? There wasn't a lot of help out there for me. I had to find my help in the form of books. And, you know, I'd go to the library and the bookstore and just look stuff up. So being a victim of domestic violence leads to a great deal of isolation. Many, many victims are isolated intentionally by their partner. And that isolation envelops them in such a way that they are often immobilized. Difficult to decide what to do. Or even financially too, right? They can be manipulated also. I mean, what is your target population? I mean, I know it's for domestic violence victims, right? I get that. And the victims can include the children, their collateral damage, all that stuff. But what's your target audience say here or target population here in Hawaii? What do you find people that need the most help? Well, I think one of the great misconceptions that our community still clings to is that domestic violence is a problem that impacts only certain kinds of people, certain kinds of families, certain kinds of communities. And really it's important for us to lift up the truth, which is that anyone can conceivably be a victim of domestic violence. Domestic violence does not discriminate. So you can be well-educated, you can have a job. You can have grown up in a family where there was not any domestic violence. There can be no drugs and no alcohol. So we're still trying to dispel misconceptions and the myths about domestic violence. That there's only certain kinds of people for whom this is a problem. So our target audience is our community in its entirety. We want everybody to know that no one deserves to be abused and that the Domestic Violence Action Center is here to help them if they are. Good answer, boy, I like that. I like that. Okay, so on your website, there's a thing that says something about cutting edge challenges that are faced by both programs, DV programs and survivors. So specifically what speak to the programs, the issues, the problems that DV, the people have with those? Well, I think one thing that's very, very important to mention is that we were born in the movement to address domestic violence with the understanding that the criminal justice system was the right response, the perfect response to domestic violence. Because after all, an assault is a crime. However, not everybody sees the criminal justice system as an ally, not everybody who has encountered the law enforcement community or the police have felt supported by the police or law enforcement reports. And so if they need help, again, they might not be willing or interested in getting help from the criminal justice system. So we have tried to do a lot of outreach into communities, work with schools and clergy, businesses, healthcare practitioners so that wherever anyone finds themselves, dropping their children off at school, going for a doctor's appointment, they will have the opportunity to disclose when they're ready that they're being victimized at home or they're afraid of their partner so that they can be helped to navigate their way to the Domestic Violence Action Center or other community domestic violence programs. If you are an immigrant, you may not feel comfortable calling the police. If you are in an indigenous community, you may not feel comfortable calling the police. So we really had to broaden our thinking about how does a person get access to supportive and responsive and effective community support. The other thing that I just wanna add that I think is very, very important too is that there's not one way to help somebody. Circumstances are all quite different. Different ethnic communities address the problem of domestic violence in very different ways. And so there's not one Western mainstream approach for addressing domestic violence. So we have on staff experts from each of our communities, Japanese National, we have a relationship with the Japanese Consulate and we have a staff person who works exclusively with Japanese Nationals. We have somebody who works with the Kofi community. We have a Korean advocate. We have a Native Hawaiian program, LGBTQ community. So we've tried to shape our programs so that they mirror the people who are gonna need help. Right. That's wonderful. So a lot of the people, they're split into specific programs then and then they're what specifically trained. I mean, I know they're specifically trained for DV, but then again, are they once again, even more so specifically trained for that particular program, like working with the youth, they're working with the Filipino, like you said, or how does that work? Well, if they come from the community, so they don't need specialized training in what it's like to be a Filipino or what it's like to be Korean and what it means to be Japanese because they are Japanese or Korean or Korean. People that work with the Japanese people and the Korean. That's what I'm talking about. That's what I'm talking about. Our staff are from those communities. Correct. Well, that's right. Comfortable talking to someone they have the language barrier is broken now and all of that stuff. The values, the community values. Listen, I want to talk more now about how COVID-19 and all these lockdowns are starting to really affect domestic violence victims. We know that being stuck inside is causing everybody to be a little more testy and angry and having a little bit of trouble relating to each other's healthy in a healthy way. So now with COVID, how does that increase the people that are in those situations anyway? Well, it's very important to make a distinction that the pandemic and the coronavirus and the stay at home orders did not turn people into abusers. What it did do was make it more difficult for those people who are living with an abuser to escape. It also made the danger that much greater because they were under constant surveillance by their partners. Their partners were much more able to control them, control who they were in communication with, what kind of communication they might have had with anybody, their access to technology, their ability to leave home, to go to the market. So their options were greatly reduced and their danger therefore was greatly increased. We were aware of this from the very, very beginning. We were quite concerned. We wanted survivors to know that we knew that they were being hurt at home. And so we did a very doziastic campaign to educate, bring information to the community, educate the community and businesses and healthcare practitioners. Let them know that the Domestic Violence Action Center was open and available to help. We were considered essential workers. We did a couple of things to make it possible for survivors living with abusers to communicate with us. If you are living with an abuser, you cannot make a telephone call with your partner standing nearby or in the next room. So we added a text feature and a chat feature on our website so that if you're working from home, you could be looking like you're working from home and really chatting with somebody at our office or you could be texting because those are silent forms of communication that allowed them to ask for help and receive safety planning or crisis support or referrals to get free and safe. So I heard that there's a signal. Is there a signal that you can give to people that there's some countries, I don't know if we're doing it here, but I know people were starting to talk about it before I got sick, people were just starting to talk about it. Has that actually come to fruition where you can just give a hand signal or you can say a certain word and that lets your doctor know that you can't safely say it, but it's happening? Well, I'm aware of what you're referring to. There was some kind of a hand motion, a hand signal that was being used in other places. I wasn't quite sure how it would be effectively implemented because if I do this to you right now. Right? What am I telling you? What are you supposed to do? Are you gonna call the police? Are you gonna come to my house? I mean, we didn't think that that was sufficient for conveying a danger or the need for help. What we encouraged people to do was to reach out to others, like if I know that you're or I'm concerned that you might be in danger, I reach out to you and say, I'm concerned about you. I want you to know that I'm available to help you if you need help. If you say the word blue, I will call the police. If you say the word yellow, I will come and pick you up. I'll drive by your apartment or your house and you can run out and jump into my car. But we establish what that message, that communication, what that signal is and we agree on it, which to me seems much more useful. They work, that's much better because it's much more specific to what the person needs where it's just sort of a general signal. Yeah, what does it mean? So I was very smart that you followed through with that followed up. Let's talk about some of the specifics that maybe you've seen with domestic violence. But wait, wait, before we do that, we have a question from a viewer. And we take questions during the show, it was sort of a new thing to have been doing. So there's a question that's come in and I'd like to see if you can give me an answer for it. How is the pandemic affecting domestic violence issues and how is it different in Hawaii versus other states? Well, thank you for asking the question. We believe that what we're experiencing here in Hawaii is very similar to what is occurring across the country and across the globe in fact. The UN Secretary General issued a statement very early on that domestic violence was on the increase in countries across the planet. And certainly our experience here in Hawaii mirrors that. We are doing about eight or 900 safety plans a month with clients on our caseload, with callers on our helpline, people who are reaching out to us by text and by chat, we immediately decided it was very important for us to increase contact with the clients who are already working with our staff. So we are having client contacts numbering around 3,300, 3,500 a month with the people who have been lucky enough to find us. I mean, not everybody knows we're here. We like to think everybody knows we're here, but they don't. Well, commercials you guys have been having lately. Right. I've seen some stuff come through. I'm always, yay, every time I see it. You have 3,300, so how is that very different from before the COVID hit? What, have the numbers changed a lot or no? Well, we made a commitment to increase our contact, have more frequent contact because of the danger and the dire circumstances that people were in. So you can see that from last year to this year our client contacts have probably increased about a thousand or more a month with the people who are already working with us. Safety plans have also gone up. Helpline calls to our helpline have increased. We are very, very busy and we're so happy to be here to support the people who need us because these are very, very frightening circumstances to be living in. Yes, they are. I can't imagine, I know how frightening it is on a regular day, but in a situation like this where there's no place to go. I mean, you guys are essential workers, but I'm sure people are at home thinking they have no place to go. They have no place to go. They don't see their friends anymore. They don't see anyone anymore. Children, I worry about kids being abused. Just before they would go to school, if you were to meet with novice of bruise, there could be an intervention. Correct. Now nobody sees them. And so I know that that's kind of an issue too, but it isn't very much an issue. You know, when you live with an abuser, at least there's a respite when the partner goes to work or you go to work, it creates an opportunity. When you're ready to take it to get information or to make a plan, to make some decisions or to escape. But if nobody is going any place, there's no job to go to. There's no school to go to. There's no church to go to. It reduces options, which is what makes it so dangerous for victims. Right, absolutely. And you know, I was thinking about something when you were just talking there about how when they go to work or when they're ready was a very important thing that you just said. I know that for those of you out there watching this today, if you're not involved, you've never been exposed to domestic violence in any way. You don't understand it. You don't understand, they go to work. Why don't they tell somebody when they're at work? That's not the way domestic violence works. It's a control factor that it doesn't matter how far away from that person you are. You know you're going home that night, right? And you know, or your children are there, or there's something there, or they have so convinced you that you are not worth anything without them. That it's not, even though you're out on your own, the programming is still intact. And it's as if they have a leash attached to you. So, and when you've been so long, why do you stay for so long? Why don't you just leave? They don't understand that people are stuck in that, one day I'll be good enough syndrome, where they think one day they'll be good enough and the person will stop hurting them, when in reality they have to face the fact that it's not their fault, it's not them, it's the abuser. And, but that's a very difficult place for people to come to. And I wish that the greater society would be more accepting and more patient and more, just more caring for people that are in those situations, which is another reason why they don't go out. Why? Because they reach, when they get out there, they hit society that says, oh, you should have left years ago. And so they put that again. You know, there's also the hope. I mean, people have a lot of hope that the promises their partner makes are going to be real and come true and that he is going to change and that the family has to stay together. And survivors are just like the rest of us. We make a commitment to something, we try to make it work. We have investment in it, we give it our best. We believe the promise that lays ahead and we want our children to live in a family setting. That's what we're fed. That's the fairy tale that we're fed. Walking away is very, very challenging. What's there when I get there? I have no support. I have no money. I have the doubt of my coworkers or my family. I'm still feeling like it's my fault. And your point about the community is very, very important. There's a lot of victim blaming, a lot of judgment that she didn't, there's something that wouldn't result in domestic violence. I agree. So let's kind of inform the public and anybody out there that might need help. During, maybe during COVID-19. So let's talk about some of the specifics on this slide. So other than that, we've got coercion and threats. Let's go, let's go around. So we'll start there and then we'll go around to intimidation. Talk about what some of the threats and the coercion, what does that look like for victims? Well, maybe the abuser is threatening the survivor about being exposed. And if they go any place, they'll be infected. And then they'll be to blame for infecting their children or their partner. And so it effectively immobilizes the victim because she can't bear the responsibility of infecting the people that she loves. And so she might be inclined to believe that it could be her fault if she goes someplace and exposes somebody. That's a way of coercing somebody into not doing what they would like to do. And so intimidation is kind of like the same thing, right? Intimidation is kind of the same thing. Because of the man is bigger than you. I know for me, my ex-husband was six, three, you know? And he was a big guy. So that just even without ever opening your mouth is a form of intimidation, yes? Definitely. I mean, the other way that intimidation plays out is let's say the survivor is committed to physical distancing and not taking any chances by exposing the family. Maybe the partner is demeaning her or degrading her for wanting to exercise caution or physical distancing. So that's a way of intimidating that has a different kind of immobilizing effect by that immobilizing effect. Sure. So then there's emotional abuse. And I like that now legally, that is a legal definition for domestic violence. And that has only been a few years that that has been a legal definition. I think it should have been all along. But so emotional abuse sometimes is worse than the physical abuse, right? Because you can't say, look at my bruise, right? You're not going to show people. It's just this broken heart that, you know, and I think that emotional abuse is the first stages of full-on physical abuse also. Because it's that emotional abuse that cowers you, that breaks down your self-esteem, that, you know, breaks down all of your support systems and everything else too. So pretty soon you think you're just a piece of crap. Which I think I can say that. I'm not sure. A piece of junk, there we go. Everyone thinks you're just, you think you're a piece of junk and that you don't deserve to be treated better. And I know for me, with my first husband, I was 30 years old when I remembered my childhood abuse and started to go to counseling to heal from that. And my line for my ex-husband was, hey, I used to think I deserved this, but I know better now and this isn't working. But that's because it was, I thought I deserved it. That's what I was programmed to think. And even if it doesn't come from a childhood abuse, it can come from just that emotional abuse can break you down to the point where you think you deserve that kind of treatment. And I think that's an important one to really stress that emotional abuse is domestic violence. And I know that people don't always think so, right? So look, I wanted to thank you for having me. Oh my, there's so many important things to talk about. Nancy, I hope you'll come back. I applaud everything that you are doing out there in the community. Please keep up the good work. Anything that we can do here at Think Tech, please feel free to reach out to us. All right, everybody. This was Community Matters on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm Cynthia Sinclair. See you again soon.