Story by Maria Morava
It’s hard not to cry at nights, when Ruth Rodriguez comes home from her job as a domestic violence advocate and case manager.
The workload is overwhelming, she said –– and more than she’s ever seen working at True Ridge, an organization that provides education, social, legal, and mental health services to the Latinx community in Henderson County.
One year ago, domestic violence providers across the country voiced fears about how the COVID-19 pandemic would worsen violence in homes.
Their fears were well-founded. According to a poll conducted by the North Carolina Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NCCADV), 75% of service providers across the state reported increased demands for services during the pandemic.
While COVID-19 cases and domestic violence cases rose in conjunction, many providers don’t expect domestic violence cases to decline with the pandemic. In fact, some survivors may begin to seek services only as restrictions are lifted.
Rodriguez used to accompany a survivor to court two to three times per week. These days, she accompanies several survivors per day, sometimes five days per week.
“I’ve been to court many times and the majority of cases are domestic violence,” she said. “It’s all over. It’s everywhere.”
During the pandemic, domestic violence cases ‘skyrocketed’ in severity
Last March’s stay-at-home order rang alarm bells for domestic violence service providers in the state.
Knowing that domestic violence is more likely when a potential abuser is unemployed, isolated, using drugs or alcohol or suffering from depression, providers prepared themselves for a deluge of cases as the state went into lockdown.
“Male unemployment is actually a major factor in increased risk of violence,” said Cassandra Rowe, healthcare program coordinator at NCCADV. “We were nervous about that. We also knew that many survivors were going to be at home more of the time with people who are violent.”
Stay-at-home orders protected people from the virus, but they also forced domestic violence survivors into the ultimate unsafe place: their homes.
As a result, violence increased not only in volume –– it increased in severity.
Ryan Kelly, associate director of victim services at InterAct, a provider of domestic violence and sexual assault services in Wake County, said she observed a spike in severe domestic violence cases during the pandemic.
“We have a screening tool that we use with our clients,” she said. “It’s a series of questions that helps to educate us and the client about the risk factors that are present in this dynamic, and then also to assess the overall level of risk.
“The number of people that we would consider high-risk skyrocketed this year.”
Being high-risk, Kelly said, means being at risk of severe injury or death at the hands of an abuser.
And along with more risk came more barriers to safety.
“People were losing out on financial resources with job losses, which creates a barrier to safely exit a relationship,” Kelly said. “People who would typically rely on support systems for a safe place to stay didn’t have a lot of options, because a lot of households didn’t want to welcome guests over the course of the year. Or it could be that a court intervention was necessary, but the courts had operational changes due to COVID.
“Essentially, what we saw is that the cases became higher risk and the safety plans needed to become more complex, because a lot of the resources that we would typically rely on to help somebody achieve safety were shifting very quickly.”
Providers have had to be ‘innovative’ and ‘nimble’
The pandemic forced providers to reimagine their services and meet survivors of domestic violence where they were –– trapped in dangerous homes with little privacy.
Kelly said she and her colleagues at InterAct placed emphasis on maintaining survivors’ access to services through new portals of digital communication.
“It became a priority of ours to try to pivot our access points, so that people could continue to communicate with us and receive services during the stay-at-home orders,” she said.
Many of InterAct’s in-person staff migrated to crisis lines during the pandemic to focus on fielding calls. The organization also launched a chat function on its website.
Kelly said that while shifting to remote access points helped maintain services, the stay-at-home orders created issues of privacy for survivors seeking help.
“If you’re talking on the phone in a household, and your abuser is a couple of rooms away, that can be difficult,” she said. “So, what we typically would do when we first receive a call is address that first, you know, ‘Where are you calling from? Is this a safe space? Let’s talk through what we’ll do if somebody comes into the room.’”
Even though some services were able to function well remotely, Kelly said a bigger challenge came with restrictions on congregate settings and their implications for domestic violence shelters.
The transition from a congregate to non-congregate setting was a logistical challenge, Kelly said –– but one that the county and its shelter programs came together to solve.
“We were able to make it happen within a couple of weeks’ time,” she said. “It took me by surprise, and I’ve been a service provider for a long time. I think it just spoke to that sense of –– the community has to have each other’s backs right now. We have to be innovative, we have to be nimble … It’s a matter of life and death.”
The pandemic may end, but its impact on domestic violence will linger
For some providers, the spike in domestic violence has not been steady but episodic.
Lauren Wilkie, executive director at Safelight –– which hosts the largest domestic violence shelter in Western North Carolina –– said she has noticed periods of “flooding” for services based on fluctuating pandemic restrictions.
“There were these breaks of not coming in, and then all at once,” she said, referring to the stay-at-home orders that were implemented and later lifted.
Safelight and its Believe Child Advocacy Center have been paying special attention to the closures and reopenings of schools, which have prompted increased demands for services.
“There was such a spike with schools reopening of people that were then, as we anticipated, being abused at home with no one having eyes on to recognize it, and report it,” she said. “We wouldn’t have as many referrals as we normally get there, and then suddenly it would be three to four times the amount we normally have.”
As pandemic restrictions begin to lift for the long run, providers are anticipating a bigger and more protracted flood in demand as survivors who have stayed home during the pandemic begin to gain more access to services outside.
At True Ridge, Rodriguez said efforts are underway to employ more bilingual advocates to handle a caseload they predict will increase.
Still, providers are hopeful that although they will be busy –– some of the risk factors for severe harm will abate.
“Isolation is a crucial part of domestic violence and keeping that cycle of abuse going, so we will hopefully see that lessen for a lot of people,” Rowe said. “Unemployment will decrease, people will be going back to work. I don’t think it’s going to bounce back to normal … but all of those things could help plateau or decrease the rates.”
Agencies and providers statewide are preparing to adapt to a new normal –– and they’re doing it together.
“It’s not about my agency or your agency,” Lori Garcia-McCammon, executive director at True Ridge, said. “Hopefully, this is an opening of partnerships where people realize what their strengths were during the pandemic and what their weaknesses were –– so that they start opening up to say, ‘You do the best work in this, I do the best in this. How can we make this positive for the community?’”
For True Ridge, and other North Carolina providers, the community remains the priority.
“We want to be that family that people haven’t had here to lean on other than their abuser,” Garcia-McCammon said. “When you walk in here, you have family.”
