Shelters

Shelters are community-based temporary safehouses for people who have nowhere else to go. Shelters provide services to the homeless, to runaway children, and to domestic violence victims. Shelters for domestic violence victims provide services to women or women and their children who are escaping an abusive home situation, to help them regain control over their lives and ensure safety for themselves and their children. Shelters help women stabilize their lives, understand their options, and increase their ability to achieve their goals. Shelters often offer women such resources as individual and group counseling, selfdefense classes, help finding permanent housing, job skills training, help finding a job, and independent living skills such as financial and household management. Because women are most at risk when leaving an abuser, shelters also help women develop safety plans.

As one example, the Hubbard House Shelter in Florida provides women with safe, confidential housing; a twenty-four-hour crisis hotline; advocacy and referrals; support groups; counseling and case management; parenting skills; and housing and employment referrals. For children, the shelter provides therapeutic day care, counseling and case management, recreational activities, school-based programs, and outreach support groups. As part of its outreach services, it has counseling for nonresidents; support groups throughout the area; court advocacy; and an emergency response team with an on-call advocate for responding at hospitals, to doctors, and at clinics and for responding to domestic violence calls with police officers. It offers batterer's intervention, training in nonviolent communication skills and accountability, and support groups. It provides educational programs to corporations, civic groups, and church groups, and it publishes a newsletter. It also trains police officers and legal, medical, mental health, religious, and educational professionals. Such shelters are staffed by people with professional degrees such as a master's in social work, by grassroots activists, by survivors, and by a network of community volunteers. Some shelters have temporary job openings [Page 1498]for shelter residents getting back on their feet. Although most often staff members are women, it is not unknown for volunteers to be men.

Shelters are a stepping-stone for women leaving an abusive relationship. Often women who are in shelters go back to their abusers. It is not uncommon for a woman to go to a shelter eight times or so before leaving for good. Many women go back to an abusive relationship because they have trouble finding adequate and affordable housing.

Shelters are an important resource for women seeking help, yet they are not ideal. Shelters sometimes limit the number of days women can stay, require women not to work while at the shelter, and do not allow male children over a certain age. The majority of battered women do not turn to shelters. One study found that less than 2 percent of women who were severely abused sought help from a battered women's shelter during the prior year and that no victims of minor violence sought help from shelters. This may be because the services in a community may be inadequate to serve all battered women requesting help and also because shelters are often used as a last resort. Most women who have the economic means to find other resources do not utilize shelters.

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