 Hello. Welcome to the Judge Ben Show. My name is Ben Joseph. I'm a retired Vermont Superior Court Judge. This is a program that is on town meeting TV once or twice a month. Today we're taping a show that deals with the recent, what's it called the economic report from the network. The network against domestic violence and sexual assault is an organization that supports the activities of, I think, 15 different local organizations, which work in this area, trying to provide support and help to the victims. And I'm very fortunate to have Jessica Park was the deputy director of the network. And Sarah Robinson is also a deputy director. I think, Jessica, you're in charge of policy and organizing. Is that right? That's right. Yes, I'm the director of policy and organizing. Okay. And Sarah, you're just working all the time. Not all the time, but, but yes, I do many things. You're busy. Yeah. Okay. So the immediate reason for this program today is that the network recently released an economic report. And it brought up a lot of things that I think the public should be aware of. First of all, the scope of this problem. How many complaints that local organizations get in the last year for which we have a report. Can you help me with that? We can start there. So thank you so much, Judge Joseph, for having us on. And you're absolutely right that our role is statewide to support these 15 local organizations who provide direct services to victims of domestic and sexual violence across our state. And together those 15 organizations serve every square mile. The state of Vermont are largest towns and cities and the most rural regions of our state as well. And each of those programs offers a variety of support. So they, we have a 24 hour hotline that's available to victims and survivors. Also those programs help survivors navigate the legal system. Housing needs any other barriers to their safety that they may be navigating as they're seeking healing and safety as a result of domestic or sexual violence. And your question's a great one. You know, last year in 2020, about 17,000 calls were made to our statewide hotline. People reaching out for help related to domestic and sexual violence. And as we know 2020 was a really interesting year. It was not, it was not your average year. And so we are certainly under still understanding in Vermont what the impact of the pandemic has been on victims of domestic and sexual violence, but overall, what we see over the past several years is that the number of people reaching out for help about domestic and sexual violence has stayed around approximately even and grown some. And so we know that this continues to be a significant problem that many Vermonters are facing in their families and in their communities. And we're happy to do our part to both support those survivors and work to prevent future acts of violence. And what is the cost of it? Is it your, your initial report talks about the economic impact which I think would probably apply to several different areas of your work, but what does it cost the state? Do you know approximately? Yeah, I can jump in here. So the economic impact report we looked at what our public investment, our public expenditures are on domestic and sexual violence over the course of one year. And in Vermont, we found that that's about 111 million each year, which works out to roughly $177 per capita. And we were really intentional in trying to frame the conversation in this way. If I could just back up a little bit and talk about how we got to this report. You know, for, for many, many years, the movement to end violence has been doing really incredible work with victims and survivors. And we know that, that we still have 17,000 calls coming into our hotline every year. So this report was really a first step in us trying to do things a little bit differently to change the narrative around violence in the state. The kind of the old way of thinking is that, is that it is bad people over there. And really what we know is that violence can impact anyone. It doesn't matter who you are, where you live, your socioeconomic status. Violence is real and it's present in our communities. And so we wanted to show a way to really change that narrative from an us versus them to a, this is all of us. And this is a community problem that we all need to gather around. So the economic impact report is really kind of our first step in, in that new way of thinking and that new way of trying to solve this problem. So that we can make a violence free future. And so we looked at, we looked at what it costs folks to really get a sense of, you know, what are we all investing in this every year. And when I think of the course I don't just think of the dollars and cents, you know, I think in dealing with these cases when I was in a bench and often I would find that there had been some kind of violence in a home where children, young children, six, seven year old kids were witnesses to this violence. And I often thought that this is going to have ramifications for the rest of their lives. It just, I remember I had a case in which he committed an anal side of me on his own son. And he came into his credit and pled guilty. And when I got the pre sense report I found out that he had been a victim of exactly the same kind of violence when he was a child. It's it's just, I mean it's just horrifying to think of this stuff. Just horrifying. What do you what do you, what kind of support do you provide to people who call up and asking for help. So it's such a such a good question and I will just note that you know the impact that domestic and sexual violence have on children are clearly pervasive and significant and you know now we know so much more about the way that when children either experience violence themselves or witness violence, those experiences stay with them and have consequences for the rest of their lives. You know there's been some great research that's been done over the past few years that some of your viewers may have heard of aces, adverse childhood experiences, and it's a way of actually looking at the things that many of us or anyone experiences in their childhood and understanding how those events have impacts on their health for the rest of their lives. So when we're talking about the cost of domestic and sexual violence I think you're so right judge that it part of it is the dollars and sense of today when we think about law enforcement response we think about incarceration. When we think about our child protective services. All those pieces are part of the puzzle, and we haven't even started to really calculate what the long term impacts are. So, the fact that people who experience violence as children have adverse health outcomes when they're in adulthood. Or as you said these sometimes generational impacts that happen as a result of violence and the impact that that has on families and on our entire community. And so, we really are just starting to quantify what this problem looks like, and Jessica can speak a little bit to the actual dollars and sense of the report and and what we found on a yearly basis. Well Jessica, the floor is yours. Yeah, absolutely so you know like Sarah said there are so many costs that we could not calculate as part of this report, including the, you know the personal financial costs to victims as well. But what we did is we broke down the cost findings into. There's five different sectors where we know that victims get services or support. So health care, we found that about $35 million is spent on health care for victims. Another 12 million is victim services, which would be those 15 member organizations that we talked about that serve every county in Vermont and provide advocacy and support to victims of domestic and sexual violence. The vast majority of the spending is in our corrections law enforcement and judiciary corrections alone is about $58 million a year. And there was one piece of the pie. Judge Ben that you have talked about is our children and how our children are impacted in this and that was something that we really weren't able to find out, because the data doesn't really exist in our state so we attempted to look at our department for children and family services data around how many cases of substantiated child sexual abuse there are or abuse as a result of domestic violence in the home. And while we could get numbers for how many cases there are yearly we weren't able to get a dollar figure for that because that's not something the state tracks so we know that there's likely millions of dollars in spending a year by our Department of Children and Families that we just weren't able to calculate in this report. And, you know, I think your point judge Ben is a really good one in that these impacts on children are significant and their life long. And it's not something that I think we've really been paying attention to as a state. Well, I hope that, well, one of the reasons I was anxious to have you on to talk about this today is I want there to be more public knowledge, more understanding what the consequences of this are. When you deal with victims, do you help them get get lawyers or get what kind of supports do you offer them. That's a great question. So the first thing I would say is that we offer and try to connect survivors with whatever supports they need. And one of the things about domestic and sexual violence is that everyone situation is different. So there are some, some people who are really interested in understanding what their legal options are, and whether or not it makes sense or the advantages or disadvantages to reporting that violence to moving forward through the criminal justice system. There are other people that are really not at all interested in those types of approaches but may have challenges related to their housing, they might have employment impacts of the violence they may have had to leave a job, or, or have to add additional employment to support their families. There also might be people who have experienced a lot of people that experience both domestic and sexual violence, have major economic impacts to their own personal finances. And they might need support with credit repair, things like that. And so all of those services are things that our member organizations seek to provide to survivors. We do also out of our office operate a small legal clinic, and we provide direct representation to victims of domestic and sexual violence. In specific cases. And when we are unable to provide that direct representation we often are able to refer to lawyers who can provide that kind of representation either low bono or pro bono. And the, but the big thing I wanted to make sure that all of your viewers understand is that if they choose to reach out to a member organization, they can figure all of that out completely confidentially. For a lot of victims of domestic and sexual violence. Hey, sometimes people don't have been experiencing violence for a long time, or are not sure what they whether what they experienced was violence or not they're still trying to make sense of that experience. And so one of the things that our advocates do is try to offer a confidential listening ear. And so it is one of the great advantages to being able to reach out to our member organizations that individuals can rest assured that those conversations are private, they're confidential. And that as survivors are thinking about their options weighing their options that there's someone there that can listen to them. Do you help people get relief from abuse or another great question. So really from abuse. Thank you pretty much yes. From abuse orders are really common tool that survivors use to create safety. So a lot of people might know them as protection orders or some in some states are called restraining orders. So you don't have to report your, the violence that you experienced to the police in order to seek a protection order. It's, you know, a civil court order that you can seek directly from the court. And we do our programs absolutely that is one of the major things that we do is assist people in seeking one of those orders. They can be sought, you know, in a planned manner during the week, but they're also available 24 hours a day seven days a week from the court so if somebody needs to seek an order in the middle of the night or on the weekend they're also able to do that. And it involves a survivor filling out some information about what they've experienced. And then that paperwork goes directly to a judge, and a judge makes a determination about whether abuse has occurred and whether there is a risk of a future abuse. There are many survivors that those protection orders are really important and effective tool. What can they protection order provide for. So many things. There are conditions in a protection order so one, if a judge decides to grant it. The judge will also lay out several conditions for the person who's causing the violence. And there are some conditions that are more common than others. But those are judges really tailor each of those conditions to the circumstances that they see, and essentially the story that they read about in the paperwork. They can include things like no contact orders so someone not being able to verbally harass you call you incessantly text things like that can be what we call stay away or distance orders where they say you have to stay a certain distance from somebody. So protection orders can also involve individuals needing to move out of temporarily at least move out of a certain location. It can include issues related to child custody, and really importantly it can also include issues related to access to weapons. So in Vermont, there is this connection between firearms and domestic violence homicide and that firearms do increase the risk of somebody unfortunately getting killed from domestic violence. So there are firearms present in a violent home. And so a protection order can also offer some protections around an individual not being able to possess or purchase firearms during a short amount of a fixed amount of time I should say. I wanted to want to ask you, the people who come in and seek your help. Is there a some percentage of them that are contemplating suicide. I would say that there, there are some really interesting connections between domestic and sexual violence and mental health and suicide, generally. In a lot of different ways. So, you know, interestingly, for a long time in Vermont we have had what's called the Vermont Fatality Review Commission and so we actually look at deaths that result from domestic violence. And for many that body has existed for a few decades, but it's only been the past few years that that body started to look at the role that suicides play in deaths resulting from domestic violence. So, we're just kind of trying to uncover that and understand a little bit more about it. But what I will say is that it, there's kind of two sides, two sides to the coin one is that undoubtedly domestic and sexual violence cause are trauma experiences for many people, and they can cause long time and long term impacts on mental health. And at the same token, one of the things that I love most about my job is the incredible resilience that many of the survivors that we work for display. And so there are people who have difficult experiences in your life and I would say that the most common story is of people overcoming adversity, and of finding meaning in what they have experienced and being able to build really to heal and being able to build new lives. And so both exist at the same time and everybody's journey is really different. Well, you know these are saying the law when I was in law school that every case is unique to its facts. And I'm sure that every case is unique to its facts and the kinds of things you deal with, which is one of the reasons you need the resources because you really have to understand, in effect to investigate and evaluate the facts of each case. And this requires time, and therefore it requires resources. Money. A lot of this comes down to money, and whether or not the legislature can come up with the money or you can raise it through donations or you raise a lot of money through donations from other sources other than government. It, it's certainly something that we're working on. You know, for a long time I would say that you're absolutely right that our services have primarily been funded through state and federal dollars. And what we absolutely know is that that is not something that we can always count on, and that at the end of the day survivors need to be able to count on services being available in communities. So we really rely on a mix of funding from individuals from private foundations from certainly the legislature and state government and from the federal government in order to really create the services that are needed by survivors. And what services do you think need the most support now. Yes, I wonder if you want to talk a little bit about prevention. That's what I was just going to do. Yeah, so you know we have funding state funding federal funding for our victim services and the supports that we provide. But I think the one place where we really want to shed some light and highlight is on prevention. And here in Vermont, we don't have any dedicated state funding for prevention work. And that is something that we're definitely trying to highlight with this report and our new campaign uplift Vermont. In this new reframing of how we're talking about violence we are imagining a world where, where we can interrupt this violence before it begins where we don't have to accept that this violence and its associated costs are inevitable for our communities. To do that we really need to think upstream, and we need to focus more on prevention. So that is something that we, you know, our member programs, all 15 of them are providing prevention services through other funding sources, but really finding a sustainable state funding source for that is going to be a priority of ours in the next few years. So what, what can the organizations do to prevent violence? What is the prevention? What, what, what, where does the prevention come in? That we could talk for the whole rest of the hour. You've got six minutes so go ahead. You know, I mean, our programs are already doing really amazing prevention work. They're in our schools, they're talking with children about what healthy relationships look like, what consent means. They are doing really foundational work and I think that is really important. And there's a bigger picture around primary prevention that doesn't get talked about as much and that is making sure everyone has the resources they need to thrive. So Sarah and I are two members of our policy team, but we also work with our other colleague Cara, who's our director of economic empowerment. And so making sure that people have access to the things they need like housing, you know, mental health services, things that provide that kind of reduce the stress and the strain on our communities is really essential in our primary prevention. Well, I take it that one of the problems of many of these things in the space is that they're economically dependent on their abuser. And then one of the things that makes them love to come in even to complain about this is the thought that they won't have housing and support for their children. And that's, that's a big, that's a total order. Absolutely correct. And one of the things that we know is that violence, it disrupts people's lives in all kinds of ways. And that there is a really important relationship. It's between poverty and domestic and sexual violence and it's, it is not. It's a myth that poverty is somehow a precondition for domestic and sexual violence and that is not the case at all. In fact, domestic and sexual violence cause poverty in so many ways and for so many victims and survivors and so economic instability and ensuring that survivors have consistent reliable sources of income and housing is such a huge issue for so many survivors. But that, that is really a key piece to both addressing and preventing domestic and sexual violence. I would also say that, you know, back to where Jessica started off with the report a little bit. There's something to be said in terms of prevention around us understanding that people in our lives experience domestic and sexual violence. So I would bet that almost every one of your viewers, either knows of someone who has experienced domestic or sexual violence, or if they haven't shared that with them. That is a reality for perhaps their neighbor or a fellow parent at their child's school or a colleague or a co worker or a friend. And so one of the things that we're really trying to do is make sure that people know that, first of all, it's okay to have experienced domestic and sexual violence that there's help available. And that for those of us that are lucky enough in our lives to have not personally experienced it. We are still impacted because our community members are our family members are the people that we know and love our. And so we really all have a role in addressing this problem. Well, I think one of the most important things is, is that a person who's a victim of this has someone to talk to, who understands what the problems are, and can tell them, you know, what's available to them. If it's only just if it's just someone to talk to, I think that's extremely important. And this is one of the services that all of your organizations provides that right Jessica. Absolutely right. People have been trained so that they understand what to anticipate, and they can provide help. I think it's a great thing that you're doing. Absolutely and I think that's a great thing that everyone of us can do in our communities is let the survivors in our lives know that we're here and we're available to them and that we support them. I've, I've limited these interviews to 30 minutes, because I've, I understand that people sometimes don't have the time to go beyond that. But obviously we could talk for another 30 minutes at any time you'd like. I want to thank you both for coming in. This is a this is a very, very important subject. And I'm just afraid that it's not given the attention might otherwise receive. So thank you again. Thank you all for for looking in and if you see that phone number on the, on the tape when you when you view the show. That's another you can call to get support in your community. It's a very wonderful service because if you dial that number, the, the, the, the organization that receives your phone call routes it to the local program for the county in which you live. It's really amazing. So real, this technology stuff is really great. So thank you once again for look again. Thank you for Jessica and Sarah for your help. Thank you judge Ben is a pleasure to be with you today. Oh thank you Sarah. Thank you so much. Thank you just by all.