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Public Defenseless
504 | By Helping Victims and Perpetrators, Domestic Violence can Be Solved Without Relying on the Criminal Legal System w/Liz Ortenburger
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Foreign.
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Welcome back to Public Defenseless with Hunter Parnell as we explore the rot in the criminal justice system and what we can do about it. Hey there, everybody. Welcome back to another fantastic episode. Today I was joined by Liz Ortenberger. Liz is the CEO of SafeNest, one of Nevada's largest providers for people who have both been harmed by domestic violence and for people who have done the harm in a domestic violence situation. And what are we talking about today? Well, folks, just like our episodes in the past with Professor Lee Goodmark, our episodes about criminalized domestic violence survivors in Oklahoma and New York, today's episode is all about challenging some of our assumptions and orthodox thinking about the best ways to deal with the harms of domestic violence. Traditionally, there is one path for people to walk down, and that is the criminal legal system. You pursue charges and then there's victim services, and then maybe you win, maybe you don't win. And then if you win, maybe there's some things that happen to the individual who did the harm, but they're separate, they're reactionary. And today we are talking about a way to be proactive, to interrupt those cycles of violence, to not rely on the criminal legal system to try and reduce the incidence of domestic violence in our community. And what I like so much about this story is anytime we have the ability to hear about a program that is challenging that orthodoxy that is saying maybe the criminal legal system isn't the best vehicle to solve every single problem in society, I think we need to be paying very close attention because these programs need to be replicated around the country. Liz brings to us a wealth of data and anecdotes that paints a very clear picture that in order to reduce domestic violence, we need to be going up the chain, not down it. We need to be getting to young people before they engage in acts of violence, and we need to be showing them that there are better ways for conflict resolution. There are better ways to deal with your anger and emotion. That folks, that is how we actually reduce violence. That is actually how we prevent violence instead of just reacting to it. And what I like so much about this story is that Liz doesn't treat people in the way that the criminal legal system usually does, which is they often treat victims as mere tools and pawns so that they can secure prosecutions. And they often treat perpetrators as, this is the that you are the worst thing that you have ever done, and you'll never be better than that. And Liz, I think, breaks down those barriers. She gives people a voice and she treats them with a level of humanity and dignity that I think is necessary to unpack what might be decades of neglect, abuse, trauma that they have to work through in order to recognize the harms that they are causing to others. And I hope that by listening to today's episode, you can see what organizations in your communities do this kind of work and if you don't have them, how you could potentially get them set up. What are the ethos and the procedures and the policies in place that we can create so that we do not have to rely on the criminal legal system to solve the problems of domestic violence? As always folks, if you're liking the show, like subscribe 5 star rating 5 star review Feel free to reach out to me on Twitter, Instagram, via email or on Blue Blue Sky. If you are liking what you're hearing and you would like to contribute to the ongoing cost of production for the Public Defenseless Podcast, you can go down below in the show notes to PayPal, Patreon or Stripe, where you can contribute for as little as $5 a month or as much as you feel you can afford to give. As a reminder folks, I take no sponsorship money. I do no advertising reads. This show is funded predominantly from the generous contributions of listeners like yourself and out of my own pockets. So if you're liking what you're hearing, if you would like to contribute to the show, go down below and subscribe on Patreon Today. If you do so, you will gain access to the video versions of the show. You will get the episodes a day early. And all that means you will get to see my adorable co host, my miniature Datsun Puppy Beans, who has once again been scooped up from his mid introduction nap folks. He's been a real trooper in recording all of these introductions for my bar prep study. He has been working overtime and as you can tell if you're watching the video can barely stay awake. If you want to see how adorable he is, you want to see how tired he is instead of just hearing me describe it, I encourage you to go below and subscribe on Patreon today. Now without anything more from me, let's get to the episode. Liz welcome to the Public Defenseless Podcast. How are you doing today?
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I'm good. Thank you for having me.
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Of course. Excited to speak with. You know, I always enjoy these conversations because they are ones that that we don't always get to have and but they are such an important conversation to be having for anyone who is interested in any sorts of alternatives to incarceration or to solve Public safety issues. So I think there will be areas where we agree and we disagree. And I'm so excited to speak with you. So tell us a little bit about yourself. Obviously, most of our guests are public defenders, and you are not one of those. So tell us a little bit about your career journey and ultimately how you ended up at the organization that you are at now.
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Yes. So I'll start with the end. I'm the CEO at SafeNest, which is the largest domestic and sexual violence agency in the state of Nevada, serving primarily Clark county, which is the home of none other than the famous Las Vegas. I got into this work. I was in youth development most of my career doing phenomenal stuff at the YMCA and at Girl Scouts, and moved to Las Vegas to be the CEO for Girl Scouts in this market. Did that for three years, and then saw the incredible need that we had on the front line of services, particularly those affecting women, particularly women in poverty, and was asked if I was interested in the job at Safenest, and I took it 10 years ago, and here we are.
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So what about. Because a lot of, you know, I think the approach that you all have is trying to go earlier, more of a proactive prevention as opposed to a reactive after violence has already occurred. But how did your work with youth development inform the way you understand where we can be most effective in preventing future harm?
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Yeah, absolutely. So anybody that has worked in youth development knows childhood trauma is probably the most, the largest health negative outcome that our children have. If you've studied way back in the day, it was the 40 developmental assets. Today, it's adverse childhood experience scores, which has been around for about the last 15 years. It's a scale of 1 to 10. What we usually see is kids that have a 4 or higher have like 1,200% higher chance of committing suicide, 4,600% higher chance of intravenous drug use, incrementally massively higher rates of domestic violence, sexual assault, both as victims and as batters, child obesity, job loss. So the. The list goes on. Right. So childhood trauma markers, of which there are 10, four or higher, really gives us an indication of the likelihood of these kids experiencing really traumatic outcomes as adults. And so Safenest has really, in the last 10 years, said, look, yes, we are still going to do this work we do for survivors. There's incredibly important work to be done in childhood trauma, and how can we play a role in that, particularly for the kids that come into our care with mom or dad through our adult domestic violence services? And so yeah, that is one angle in which there is huge. If we wanted to do anything in this country, people ask me all the time, like, well, what would you do? You know what? I would stop spending money on everything that I do in my adult space and I would turn it all towards childhood trauma.
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It can be so frustrating at times because this answer is so clear. And unfortunately, despite all of the data and the evidence we have, we still run into such a culture like, oh, well, kids are resilient. They just, they just bounce back, don't they? And they'll be tough. And we can't see in the moment how this event is going to impact them for the rest of their lives. And, and because we refuse oftentimes, I think because we also don't want to confront the things that happens in our childhood, that's part of our own defense mechanisms. We continue to allow this to happen. And when it comes to violence, we know that they can be cyclical. People grow up in violent households that can make them more prone to being victims of violence and perpetuators of violence. And then that violence just continues on generation after generation until somebody puts a stop to it. So you alluded a little bit to your work with safeness, but give us the 30,000 foot view and how you are approaching domestic violence differently than say, a more traditional approach.
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Yeah, so. So of course there's the youth piece that we just talked about, but we also work with abusive partners. And not just in the court mandated treatment space, but we also have couples counseling, we have individual counseling, not in the group setting with licensed therapists, housing, workforce development and wraparound services for abusive partners. Because what seems to be the missing link to me in domestic violence work, which is really, you know, the 1970s, domestic violence first started to become a public matter. We started to see it in research, we started to see it in papers. We sort of see the first shelters, Virgin. And it really made this massive divide at that time where the nonprofit community really became the survivor centered community, which at the time really was women focused. Right. And it still is fairly female focused. And then that feminist movement really turned to the criminal legal system to said, we need you to deal with these abusive partners. At the time, I think that all the right intentions were there, but that really has not done anything to drop rates of domestic violence like in the history of, you know, the 50 year history of the movement, even shorter time, the 30 year history of violence against women act has not created a space where we're seeing a drop in homicides. We're Seeing a drop in domestic violence rates overall. And so, you know, failure can look different ways, but to me it's like, okay, we are on the wrong path. So when I came into safeness 10 years ago, I started really couching myself and understanding the abusive partner. And the metaphor we use a lot is, look, when Nixon declared a war on cancer, he didn't say, we just want a war on the symptoms of cancer. It might kill you, but we want you to be as comfortable as possible before you die. No, he went in and said, we want a war on cancer. We want to understand why it's here, what's the tumor, how do we remove it, and how do we save people's lives? And today there is massive amounts of cancer treatment. But in domestic violence, all we've done is said we want to deal with the symptom of domestic violence, which is a survivor. We don't want to deal with the root cause of domestic violence. We'll incarcerate, we'll lock it up, we'll make it so that the abuser can't work again, but we won't actually do anything to stop domestic violence. And that's really been the history of the movement, which will make a lot of my sisters in the space very angry because I know we do important work every single day. And I know there's a lot to be said for that survivor who comes out of our shelter program. That's the micro, the macro level is not changing. We are not changing systematic domestic violence in the domestic violence movement. And that's hard for people to hear. I do think it's also important to think about as we look at the domestic violence industrial complex, the nonprofit sector of it. What is it funded by? It's funded by survivor services. So is it somewhat self serving to want to keep having survivors? Right. What are we creating here? Because we're certainly not diminishing the levels that we're seeing so fairly. Just sort of complicated mess that we've created out of the movement and we sit in every single day, but we're not actually dealing with the root cause. And so safe nest, we wanted to change that trajectory, still do all of our survivor services because they're critical and lives are important and every single person deserves to have a healthy relationship. But the truth is, 70% of my survivors will end up back with their abuser for a whole host of reasons. The primary one being financial. Some of it's religious, some of it's cultural. So 70% are going to move back. So for that 30% I'm either creating a vacancy for a new survivor to be created, or we're actually doing something to create a safer home for folks that are going to be reunited or a safer individual who's not going to compete, continue to abuse. And that's the lens in which we work.
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Yeah. And some of the things that I want to touch on there, because we've talked about them in previous episodes and to kind of bring some of that data back. I know specifically our interviews with. Multiple interviews with Professor Lee Goodmark about sort of. You have not said the phrase specifically, but the carceral feminist sort of era that came about. And listen, I think I said it on that episode, and I'll say it again. If I didn't say it, then I understand why that happened. In the 70s, hearing about what predominantly, but not 100%, what women were dealing with and the abuse that they were dealing with, with their families, and the way that society just accepted that was disgusting. And I don't blame people for going like, hey, the tool we have at our disposal is to incarcerate these men. Let's actually use these tools. But I think, as you have pointed out, not only with the goals of carceral feminists was. Was to protect women. The tool that they turned to. I think what people couldn't see at the time that we can now see more clearly is like, why weren't cops arresting people for domestic violence? It wasn't because they lacked the probable cause for it. It's because they didn't care. And then those same cops, mostly men, mostly driven by misogyny, you make them arrest people, well, then they just arrest the women. And that is what has happened through this process, is that so many criminalized domestic violence survivors then get into this system. And now this system that was designed to protect those individuals, victims of domestic violence now have been given this superpower to punish the very people they were designed to protect. So alternatives to this seem. I think there is enough evidence now that we are removed from the 1970s. If we take that step back and see it, that go. What you were talking about makes a lot of sense. So I want to go through sort of the. The. The first. When you explain this to people before we talk about the specifics.
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Yeah.
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What sort of responses do you get? Because, like, I'm going to be honest, Right. When I say these things, I remember having Lee's book, you know, it says decriminalizing domestic violence.
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Yeah.
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I am a relatively. I'm not a tall guy, but I am a stocky gym bro looking dude covered in tattoos, walking around with the book that says, decriminalize domestic violence. Let me tell you, my wife did not want people seeing me read that in public. I am not a great vehicle for this message, and I know that. So obviously you have some advantages I don't have here. But this is. This can be a shocking, I think, paradigm to explain to people. So how does it. How is it received? What are the things you hear back from people? And how have you navigated to grow this into such a large organization in Las Vegas?
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Yeah, so, you know, part of that depends on the audience, right. When you're talking about the traditional domestic violence movement, your statewide coalitions, your sister agencies who are doing similar work, who are couched in this, you know, hotline shelter, kind of the sort of traditional services of a domestic violence agency, this is hard for them to hear because it feels like I've given my life to this work. Many of the women who work in this movement are survivors of this movement. And so it can be incredibly like deflating to have me come along. Or Lee's book, which I have read many times. We had Lee come out and speak to a law class here. She's phenomenal. It can feel like you're losing something. Right. And what I hear from folks who are sort of couched in that sort of historical feminist piece is we fought so hard to get this. We don't want to give this up. Right. Like, giving away some of this requires some vulnerability that you have to believe. We're not going to dial it way back to the 60s when this stuff wasn't even talked about. Right. Or the 50s. I mean, domestic violence has been illegal on the books since 1920. Didn't really come to the public forefront until 19. Really. 77 is kind of the first part where we started to see these things. 1975, I think, was the first shelter. So that audience, and I can understand why. Right. That's a. That's a difficult message. Like, whoops, what if we got this all wrong? But when you talk to folks working in the marginalized, intersectional space of domestic violence, so those folks that are working with marginalized populations, they get it because bell hooks, who was one of the original authors back in the 80s around this, she got it. She didn't say, I want equality, which was very much the feminist, white feminist movement of that age. She said, stop the oppression. I don't want to be equal to my black male peer. I see what he's going through. That's not what I want. I want the oppression to stop. I want to be able to live a full life without having to be oppressed by violence, oppressed by the other things that are oppressing to a marginalized population. They get it. There is always skepticism. I just came back from dc, I was at a Family justice center legislative event there. The Family justice center movement, which I would say is kind of on the forefront of really being able to tackle some of the homicide rates in this country. They still are very kind of like, yeah, but we don't want abusive partners coming in here to get services, even though that's what happens in Europe. There is a fear here that because of our access to guns and things like that, somehow opening your door to domestic, to the abuser is going to create a dangerous space. I will tell you, safeness. And I owe this to. My predecessor has been serving abusive partners and survivors in the same building for over 30 years. And we've called 911, to my knowledge, in the last 10 years, twice, because we had somebody come in who was, you know, aggressive, but never a gun, never anything that we were overly concerned about, just somebody who was angry at the situation. Right. And so it depends on the audience. When I talk to public defenders about this, they. They like this because, you know, I think public defenders are on the front line of seeing what I see in the survivor space. They're seen probably mental health, definitely substance abuse, low income, somebody who's probably childhood trauma that's never been diagnosed, never received services, probably is not even admitting that. Childhood trauma, for the most part. Right. They're kind of stuck in this space. They get it because they're on the front line of this. And, and the DA's get it as well because oftentimes when that case is in its last final part of the criminal process, the survivor and the abuser drove in the same car together. They're living together. She's recanting. She's no, you know, she's not even going to show up. So the legal system, I think, gets it, but it can't get out of its own way to figure out a solution beyond what we're doing.
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Yeah, and I get, for the DA side especially, you know, I can understand the political pressures that exist because this is a pretty radical departure from the previous. And this is one of those categories, domestic violence, the name of it itself, entail, it invokes a picture in people's heads of the worst of the worst. And don't get me wrong, folks, that obviously happens, but you know, at the Level that I worked at until recently, we prosecuted DVs at the municipal court level. And at that level, we're talking about like two people are getting into an argument and somebody smacks a phone on the ground, or two people get into an argument and like you hit your fist on the wall and there's a dent in it. Oftentimes there is no physical abuse, there is no actual violence, and it's somebody who lost their cool. Not to say that we shouldn't do something about that, but that isn't the image of domestic violence, which is far more common than the, you know, bloodied face, broken nose type that we see. And because people don't have that exposure to the breadth of these cases. It's a lot like child abuse and neglect, where people hear child abuse and neglect and the first thing they think of is the kid getting beat. When in reality, most of child abuse and neglect cases are neglect cases where kids just don't have enough food to eat. And I think that these are. There's a lot of parallels here because I think we are noted, we are not. We now know with data that our goal with family law, when we have a child who has experienced abuse and neglect, the goal should be reunification. That should be what we're working for, because in the long run, that is better. I don't have any research to indicate that that's true for these couples. But I think we're seeing the reality that whether or not it's the best, it is what happens most often. So we have to do something different than what you described, which is so common. Public defenders, we see it all the time. The recanting witness, you know, we have seen the witness who recants. And then the prosecution nonetheless puts them on the standard, grills them about their recantation, traumatizes them even more. I then got to get up and do my job and it's, listen, it sucks to cross examine a person like that. I don't take joy in it. But I got my client I got to look out for, that person's been harmed more. Probably a waste of everybody's time. And what has come of it. There isn't a real solution. So I want to break this up into the two different categories and how these two services work together. So let's first start with somebody who has been harmed, who wants to or intends to get back with their partner. Tell me how your approach differs from others with that individual.
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Yeah, so for our, particularly our survivors in the residential program, you know, the. A number one in a shelter Program. Many shelter programs for survivors, I think can feel like prisons. They can, you know, there's all these rules, there's all this 90 days and then you're out on your ear. You know, we don't run a shelter program like that. Our shelter program does not have a length of stay maximum. And it's designed to have a very open and honest communication with your advocate so that when you start to say, well, we're talking again, then we can, and you know this up front, but then we'll reinsert it as the relationship grows. Offer him to come in for free confidential counseling. It's at our other facility. It's not obviously on our residential campus. And then let's see if he engages. And then when she offers that, and if he engages, which is really rare, she then has an indication. And it's not always she, he, sometimes it's he, sometimes. It's all different things, but for the most part it's female, male. And so if he engages, great. Now we can work with him. For our couples counseling program. If you're not in residence with us, we want to do six individual appointments before we're doing anything together. And that comes with an assessment as to whether or not we think that this is healthy and we're sharing all that information with the survivor. Like, look, he didn't engage, he didn't come to class, he hasn't engaged in any way. That for you is one kind of understanding. The other understanding is, okay, let's go out. You want to go out to dinner, you want to see him? That's great. Maybe on the second time that you're doing that, have a discussion around something that you've generally argued about. Let's see if your voice can be heard right. Public place, safe as possible. But let's test. You don't have to go all back in. I know shelter is not the greatest place to be, but let's take this in baby steps. What we're trying to do is create an environment where the survivor is in charge. They can drive their own engine in the direction that they want and they can test things and then they can pull back. But they have some safety to see whether or not that relationship is going to work. That in ideal circumstances would be great for abusive men in particular. Letting go of some of that vulnerability, if you're not court mandated to come to classes, letting go of some of this toxic masculinity that's holding on to you and coming in and allowing yourself to be vulnerable is a, it's a that is an ask. That's a big ask. And so that's kind of how we do it. And every case is a little different, right? As you're, you know, navigating it as a couple with kids, without kids, what does all this look like? Sometimes we have success. A lot of times we need to make sure that that individual is getting some substance abuse counseling alongside the domestic violence. But it's. Every case, every couple is kind of its own, unique. We think this is going to work now for our residential survivors, where that's easier for us to sort of check in, stay on top of for our folks, which we have many, many more clients that aren't in our residential program. It's just making sure everybody knows what the services are, that they can come in, that they can. They can understand what's going on. We have asked for some grant money to do more stuff because there is no funding to work with abusive partners. To your point of, like, let's. They're bad. They're horrible individuals, right? It'd almost be like. Like, you want us to have a class for pedophiles. It's like, yeah, but how did a pedophile become a pedophile? How did an abusive partner become an abusive partner? And so we really try to change the context of the message. So it's. And some of the things that are hard, especially for people that have done this work for a really long time, is how do you create a welcoming space for an abuser as much as you create a welcoming space for a survivor? Because what we sort of come from the belief system that. That most people, if not all people that are abusing are survivors of something. They're all surviving something. So if we just take down this mantle of, like, this is a horrific person, and we don't want to help you, of like, hey, this is someone who's struggling. How can we help? Now, we do have a couple of exceptions to this. If we have a record of you strangling or threatening someone with a gun, we will still provide services for you, but we won't do it in person. There's the level of shootings and mass murders.
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And when you say history, what does history mean?
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So what we. Every client we work with does a danger assessment, law enforcement, and that in the dale it's called. And that has in it the specific questions of were you ever threatened with a gun? Or have you ever been choked, strangled, or had your airway obstructed by your abuser? So we use that as our guide. If they're coming in for court mandated programming and that's in their police record. We do most of those classes virtually anyway, so it's not a problem. But if we're serving you and your survivor and you've got the salt with the gun, first of all, we're letting the survivor know she's in a lot of danger, especially if there's strangulation. But we won't serve you on campus, but we will serve you. We will provide services. I think everybody deserves to get some help. It's just you at this point have a level of danger and that's a seven year window on that.
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Okay?
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Yeah.
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And it's one of those things that like a lot of the programs that we have diversionary programs more broadly, not to say that this is specifically that, but like other types of programs that are views, alternatives to incarceration, unfortunately we have kind of replicated the same problem and already going, well, there's good people and bad people. And if you're a good person, you're going to get the services and if you're a bad person, you're not. And here's the thing, folks, the people that you're labeling as bad people are often the people who need these services the most.
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Right.
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They are the furthest along in their descent into unacceptable behavior and they need the most acute services. And unfortunately for those individuals, what is the most typical experience that I am aware of is they get arrested, they pick up an offense, they spend five to 10 years in jail, prison. And because of the way programming works, they don't actually get any services until about the last two to three years that they are in jail or prison if they get any services at all. They have spent 2/3, 3/4 of their incarceration surviving in our horrendous prison system.
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Yeah.
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And if they were brought there, say because they have an anger problem with violence, you know, a really terrible place for that person to be in is in prison. Because that anger problem that results in violence might keep you safe in prison, it might keep you from getting killed. And you learn that it's a good thing to have that. And then you have three to four years left, you finally start getting some programming. Is that really going to work at that point in time?
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Probably not, no. And also, you know, there are our own municipal court does this here. They will do the classes when they're incarcerated. And I'm like, that's not going to work. Because the whole idea of the batters intervention classes, even when they're court mandated is that you're testing what you're learning in the environment in which you live. Prison is not an environment in which you're living. This needs to be tested with your partner or a new partner, whatever that looks like. And so yeah, the prison is not, I mean, I, you know, you see this in Europe where even if you are have a prison sentence, it's like, okay, maybe it's, it's got these limits to it, but you're out in society because we, what, what are we training people to do with long term incarceration? We're certainly not training you to live amongst your fellow man in an, in a normal everyday world. And so yeah, we're, and you're right. We, we, we kind of put everybody, I study social construction of target populations and deviant is one of the four quadrants. We put everybody in that deviant box and we just don't, we. Politically, it's very hard for politicians to spend money on you. It's, it's, it's much more palpitable for a politician or somebody with power to be tough on crime because society doesn't see this population as redeemable in any way until we have a loved one or someone who is labeled that way. So then how do we relabel people? Right? I mean, you, you hear the shifts in language from an abusive partner to someone who uses violence to all these kinds of things. That's an attempt to move this population out of the deviant box into a different box so that they can at least get some services. But it's very, very difficult for our overall system of justice to understand the redeemability of people. I think public defenders see that more than anybody because they're on the front lines of working with these folks. But then what services are happening? And then I think an even more important question is the services that are happening for that violent individual. But should that person have children? What is happening for their kids while they're incarcerated? Because right now what you're doing is just creating trauma for them. Being separated from a parent in a horrific situation, you know, taking them to prison to visit a loved one is not easy. Got its own set of trauma with it. It's actually one of the ace questions is did you have an incarcerated close family member or parent? Because that in itself is trauma inducing. But yet could you imagine like taking resources and spending money on incarcerated children or children who have an incarcerated parent so that that trauma is somewhat mitigated? Where's the therapy for them? Where's the help? So we we fail the entire unit. And then we wonder why, when dad was in prison 30 years ago, son's there today, right?
- [34:19]
B
Yeah. And a couple things to build on there. One, the the real difference that I have seen in talking with people or just seeing how Europeans who work their prison and jail system, they all seem to, or at least the majority of them. Not all, because there's obviously some European countries don't fall on this, but the ones that have the type of prison systems that we think about as being ones that are far better at producing public safety than ours are, they all get that like the punishment is that you're not at your house. The punishment is that you have a restriction on your freedom like nothing else needs to. We don't need to punish them any more than that because humans crave freedom. They crave the ability to dictate what they do with their lives. And we have deprived you of that. What else do we need to do? You talk to an American, what do they always say the most? Prisons are supposed to suck. Jail's supposed to suck. It's supposed to scare you straight. And they don't get that the punishment is already that you're living in a box for some amount of time. You can't see your friends, you can't see your family, you can't go to your favorite restaurant. I would, I've always kind of hoped that this conversation would be easier post Covid because people and I was in the UK when Covid happened and we had actual real life lockdowns, not what the majority of Americans went through, which was like a restriction on their ability to go to their favorite restaurant at the time of day they wanted to. But even that right. The, the collective like this is unbear that people dealt with that. That's the point, guys. A little infringement on our freedom is unacceptable to the average American. And yet we can't understand that the punishment is. That's enough to just have that we don't present. Doesn't have to be brutal for it to do what people claim they want it to do. Now the second part, the public defender thing you talked about, of course we have that insight because we know that one day that person who is our client, that will. They're an alleged victim the next day. And that alleged victim, well, they're our client the next day. We see that the boxes we put people in are not as black and white and firmly separated. They are porous. People travel between them depending upon where they go. And the, you know, we, we when we see how much being an alleged victim maybe led to somebody becoming a perpetrator of harm and vice versa? Well, we. We are able to understand, like, this is not doing what we say it's going to do. So you had a statement, you know, how do we make a space is welcoming to both these people? And. Yeah, great question. Tell us, how do you make a space that is welcoming to both people? Because I could imagine there's some people at home, myself included, who can't picture it, who don't see it, who haven't seen it modeled. So tell us a little bit about how you do that.
- [37:06]
A
Yeah, so great question. So first of all, understand in Vegas, 30% of our arrests in domestic violence are female. So when someone is walking in our door for services, no matter what their gender, we assume everybody's a client, and we don't put you in a box. When I started at Safenest, if you were a man and you walked in, you would get a perpetrator packet. If you were a female and you walked in, you would get a victim's packet, right? Like, that is not how we do things. When you walk in that door, you are treated like everybody else, asked what it is that you need and treated with respect and dignity. That's step one is no differentiation when you walk in that door based on your gender. It was very interesting when I started because the organization had actually thought they were going to get a bunch of money to build a new building. And within that building design, I'm very glad they didn't get the money, because within that building design, there was a victim's entrance and a perpetrator's entrance. And I was like, this is one of those things. Like, you're in a room and you think this sounds like a great idea. But then when you play that out in your mind, how is that actually going to work? Right? Like, you don't know. None of my offenders that we work with are raising their hand and going, yes, I'm a perpetrator of violence. It takes six weeks to get to, like, recognition of this harm that you've caused. So how are we doing this? Right? So we just said, everybody that walks in is treated with dignity and respect. Everybody's allowed coffee, water. They all sit in the same waiting room together, you know, And. And then when folks have identified what service they're there for, they're all led into the same offices. They're individual offices, but they meet with an advocate because everybody deserves to be heard and understood and cared for. And so everybody does an Assessment about what their needs are from start to finish. And so we figure out what you need and then we case manage. If that case management means you're going into our court mandated or CPS mandated classes, great, then let's get you in, get you signed up, get your work in on that. If there's other things that are identified in that needs assessment that you need, then let's figure out if that's housing, if that's workforce development, if that's substance abuse, whatever. That's the advocate's job is not to delineate between, you're a victim, you're an abuser, therefore I will treat you differently. It's to treat the human being that is in front of them with the services they need and that our agency is very proud to provide.
- [39:41]
B
Do you have any difficulties in finding service partners who are willing to work with this cohort of people? And if so, how do you navigate that? Because when you say housing, I know in a lot of, if somebody's homeless, a lot of shelters ban men with these charges hanging over their head or with a history of it. And like this cohort has been and can be frozen out of a lot of services because of either prior charges or even by coming forward and saying, yeah, I have done this even without a criminal charge.
- [40:14]
A
Yeah, yeah, so. So, Cat, our Catholic charities in town only works with men and they don't discriminate in that way. So they're an obvious partner. Salvation army, same sort of thing. And most of our shelters aren't doing background checks. So if it's, it's not asked, it's not told. So that works in our favor. But when we think about like long term housing, right, Like HUD funding, transitional housing, those kinds of things, that's a heavier lift only because the way that HUD dollars are defined is like you have to prove so much about a client to be able to place them in that program. I'm, I'm happy, I'm very unhappy with most things coming out of this current administration. But one of the things that is coming out in our HUD documents that are coming this time around is less restriction on who we serve. So the fact that they're coming to Safenest as a client, we're not being asked anymore, what side of the domestic violence pendulum are they on? And so we have some freedom to use those dollars in a way now what's hard for people in that space is like, I have to be careful about how I speak about this in our community and in our donor Community. Because if you want to get people outraged, don't allow someone to bring their pet. That will be one way to get them outraged. The other way to get people outraged is if they think you're spending money on abusers and victims are being iced out of services. Right. So we do a really good job walking that tightrope of like, okay, we're housing people. But I also then talk a lot about the fact that some of the women that we are housing are also abusers. And guess what, they're also moms. And they. So I do a lot of work in the community about trying to remind people the face of domestic violence is not a man. All the time. We have bi directional violence. We have all these kinds. So it's a gentle role. I do have partner agencies that will not work with men. Not even the abuser tag. They won't work with men, which is a little frustrating for us because of there's such complexity in the space. But we work around it. If you're not going to work with men, then let me find someone who will. And so what happens for us is if you will work with everybody, you're going to be like somebody that we're going to say, great, let's get this partnership up and going. If you're going to be sort of fragmented in who you're going to serve or require some things, we're gonna say, okay, let's, we're gonna look for someone who can do it all first. But if that, if that falls through, then we're gonna find somebody to partner with you or do you know somebody who could partners with you? In this space we have a, like a phenomenal church that we work with that runs a program called Dads Inc. And they, their whole, their whole goal is to help dads that have been either incarcerated or certainly involved with the criminal justice system still be in their kids lives. So by the name, right, Dads Inc. They're not working with moms. But what I have to make sure then is I have a mom's program which we actually provide that can do that for the moms. Because we want all parents to have a working, functioning relationship with their children.
- [43:32]
B
Yeah, and I've heard too like one of the, a big critique of some shelters is that for women who have older, like older teenage boys, they might not even be permitted to come into certain spaces. And that can then leave certain women who just want to be with their kids either in a position where they have to give their kids up to child services and let them go into the foster care system or they have to live on the street like it, there are a lot of these restrictions that can feel very frustrated because I understand why some of these blanket policies exist because they make it easier and there's a little bit more CYA from a legal liability perspective. So we're not making these decisions. I get it. But it can leave a lot of people who need things the most out in the cold, unfortunately. How, what is the proportion between court mandated and not court mandated? And then tell us how that appears differently as well.
- [44:30]
A
So let me address the kids in shelter really quick because I think I, I, we have a shelter in town that does that. If you're, if your son is older than 14, he's separated from mom and goes into like a youth ward, I, I am heavily opposed to that. Family units are family units. And also most of my moms and dads rely on their older kids to help. Like it's, you know, it's, that's a, that's sometimes baked in and so then you're making that kiddo be somewhere else also. That feels unsafe. Like I don't want to be removed from my son's 16. If I had to go into a shelter, I would want him right next to me because I, to make sure he's okay. And so yeah, I think shelters need to really think through, you know, their whole entire, how they're, how they're serving people and why some of these rules exist and, and, and make sure they're doing right by their survivors. And I always, I'm a huge proponent of like ask your people in shelter. You know, we don't have to make this up. We've got a ready audience who will give an opinion most times of the day if I walk over there and ask a question, but just a. Ask your surv what feels good for them, what doesn't feel good for them. Make sure everyone's clear on the guidelines and all that. But, but if a 14 year old's been providing childcare for the family so that mom can go to work and then you make that 14 or 15 or 16 year old not be part of that family unit, you're creating a whole new space for mom. Also what you're doing is forcing her to go back or into a different living situation which might not be as safe and as, and as ready as your shelter. So in our abusive partner program, I will say, and this is growing all the time, but about 90% of what we deal with is court mandated. What we try to do though is make sure that population is really aware of all the other services that are provided. And I'm also trying to push for funding because so in Nevada or Clark county, only 30% of the domestic violence 911 calls, of which there are about 100,000 a year. So I'm not talking about a small number of calls.
- [46:41]
B
There's about, that's a lot.
- [46:43]
A
Yeah, we're busy. There's about 30,000 arrests that come out of that call volume. Right. So that means there is 70,000 calls that are not resulting in an arrest because there's not probable cause. To me, that is my fertile ground. Like that is where I can get to someone before they're involved in the criminal legal system. Because as you know, when an abuser gets arrested, viability to access them until there's a charge and I don't have any. I have talked about putting advocates abuse abusive partner advocates in the system so that at least an abusive partner realizes what the pathway is for them. Get some support going right off the bat. It's not, it's, it's not gonna, it's not gonna come to fruition under the leadership that we have now. But okay, so then we've got this 70,000 calls. What can we do there? And so that's where program that we hope to get up and running with Metro, our police department in the next several months is let's leave postcards behind because an arrest costs a family a ton of money. Particularly if there's an arrest and then a co occurring, no contact and then a TPO. That judge is not just keeping that abuser for 12 hours. They're usually keeping them for two to four weeks because they don't have a place to go and they don't want to just create homelessness. But 12 hours, I can probably hold my job, I can continue to function. You're holding me for two weeks. I've now I've lost my job. Right. I'm homeless. And Nevada, like a lot of places, we struggle with homelessness, but we seem to be so short sighted in actually turning the tap off of the homeless. We just create more homeless and then try to figure it out six months down the line when you've been living on the streets. But if we were actually looking at the systems which are creating homelessness, we would find some better places. And one of those is that abusive partner and victim pipeline into homelessness is the eviction and then the co occurring arrest and then the incarceration or for the victim. Now maybe the breadwinners incarcerated for a long period of time. I can't pay for child care anymore. So I'm in losing my job. It's a spiral.
- [49:00]
B
Yeah. And folks, as a reminder, we had some great guests on from the Clark County Public defender office to talk about the way that Clark county has handled homelessness, specifically the homelessness court, the casino corridor courts. Go back and listen to that because I think that that can give real insight into what you're talking about. Very similarly. Right. Approaching what is in my humble opinion, not a criminal issue with criminalization is the really the only option here. The last bit which has been underlying all of this. Right. You talked about kids and helping them through this. Talk to us about what you're able to do for children who are put into, who are in these situations and ultimately how this is the model that you would like to grow to help interrupt these cycles of violence so that we don't have. I'm sure you like me. I would love for public defense not to be needed. I'm sure you would love for safeness not to be needed. And in order to forget there, we got to interrupt this. So tell us about the work you do with children and how that demonstrates what interruption looks like.
- [50:05]
A
Yeah, so. So this, the statistic is really clear. Kids that grow up witnessing domestic violence in their home 76% of the time repeat the cycle. So we know that 17,000 kids in Clark County, Nevada witnessed domestic violence last year. And that's just an arrests. And I told you there's a whole nother 70%. So if we extrapolate that number out, that's like 60,000 kids a year in Clark County, Nevada that are witnessing abuse, domestic violence. And so when people ask me why are the rates so high here, I'm like, here's the snowball, right? Here's what we have going on every single year. So how do you interrupt that? So the, the first thing, probably the most frustrating thing here is really actually getting the school district to care that like in your. In our school district we have 275, 280,000 students. A high percentage of them have levels of trauma at that 4 or higher. So what can we do inside schools? First of all, I say assume everybody's got some trauma. And there are really simple education programs that are trauma mitigating and they're about, they're not about. Let's not every teacher does not need to be a therapist. This is not about holding a group session inside your classroom. This is about very simply for your kids at an age appropriate Curriculum identifying people in your community or in the context of the United States, but not Oprah, because that feels unattainable to most people, Right? Like, Oprah's amazing, but like, gosh, I'm not going to be Oprah. Right? You introduce them to people who struggled as kids or came out of difficult circumstances as kids who then succeeded. And succeeded means they're happy, they're healthy, and they're in a healthy relationship. Right. They're not bazillionaires. We attach money to way too many things. Then you read a story about these folks, and there's a whole hope curriculum around this stuff. But what you're doing is you're building kids metaphorical backpacks so that when they're say, they're home, mom has a new boyfriend, and they're hearing the abuse, right? Which this is a very common refrain here, that child can sit and think, I don't need to repeat that cycle. What we don't tell young people enough, particularly young men, is that violence is a choice. Anger. Anger can happen. How you deal with it's a choice. And what are the healthy ways to deal with it? And no Hollywood movie shows this appropriately. Walking away from the explosion is not, you know, how this goes. How do young boys in particular deal with all of this? Right? And how do they choose different paths? And for young women and young people in general, what are the early like, really? We need to start talking to you in fifth grade. But what are the early sort of indicators that a relationship is unhealthy? Because they're all watching movies where texting you 300 times in the day to know where you are is loving you, that is control, Right? So how do we help young people understand these things? So school is a huge part of this. Like, it just has to be. I'm hopeful some point Clark County School District will realize this. We have new leadership in our new superintendent. But this is a number one most important thing. But then, so what safeness does specifically is for kiddos that have been in our program. So either at our shelter program or involved in Come in with mom for tpo, whatever the context is in which they have crossed our path, we have a program, it's called Pathways to Hope. And actually, we leave Monday to go to our summer camp. We take the kids with us for a week. We go away. That week is filled with what I just described, these hope stories. All the kids, 100% of the kids, and we're taking 80 with us on Monday, have experienced domestic violence, either directly or they've seen it in their home. And a high percentage have also experienced sexual violence. And so we just, we don't unpack any of that at camp. That's not the design. Now sometimes it bubbles out and we talk about it, but the design is we go, we have fun, we give you your childhood back, and then we have, and then you have a great time. We're heading out to Catalina Island. It is going to be amazing. And we do this every year. And then every two months, that group gets back together, counselors and kids, and we either recycle a HOPE story where we have a new one to share, but it's about building some community for them. This program has been going on in the United States for 20 years. Started by Casey Gwynn out of the alliance for Hope International. We started running ours. I think this is our eighth summer. These are the kinds of programs that break that trauma cycle for kids. They need to be kids again.
- [54:59]
B
Yeah.
- [55:00]
A
But they need to know that they don't have to choose the pathways that they are seeing in their home. And like we talked about earlier, just because a kid's experiencing violence, bucking them out of that home, that is going to be way more traumatic. How do we, how do we help them withstand some of that abuse to some extent, but also to choose not to repeat that cycle? And we've got great examples in our community of people who have grown up in horrible circumstances and gone on to do phenomenal things. And those are in every community.
- [55:33]
B
Yeah. And to the, to like, the young men category of which, you know, I once belonged to, you know, in my, like, I'm Chicano and overcoming the machismo culture that is so ingrained in, in our, you know, just to be a young Chicano man means to not get sad, to not cry, to be tough at all things. And, and there is, like, breaking through that, that takes a long time. You know, I, I, I feel very fortunate to have been raised by a bunch of women who were kind of tired of that culture, which made it, I think, easier for me to reflect on how stupid it is. But just as somebody who, you know, my wife and I talk about kids and I, I, we had this conversation. I worry so much more about having a young man right now than, than a daughter. Like, I would rather have a daughter because the things that are out there in the world, those idiots in the manosphere who are trying to undo the work to get men to stop being like that, it's got to be so challenging and so difficult to break through to that when there are these other sources out there trying to cut you at the knees to bring us back to the Stone Age.
- [56:44]
A
Yeah, we. We have a reporter here in our Review journal who writes an opinion column every Sunday that makes me want to pull my hair out, which is like, how men are being oppressed by the current world and women aren't having kids because we're not understanding our place in the world. Here's the thing that I tell moms and folks that we work with is raising a young man right now is about helping him understand how his role in that relationship is one of partnership. And so it. We no longer, like, financially, women are doing better and better every day. We're still not quite there, but we're in a better space. But. But having a healthy relationship means having these conversations about what does that mean for us. But it doesn't mean automatically taking the role of protector or provider, which, you know, that's the conversation young men need is like, how do I come into a partnership as an ego? And how do I. How do we lift each other up? And if we don't lift each other up, then this isn't the right coupling, and that's okay. Like, that's like helping young men. But I will say, people ask me all the time, like. Like, what can men do? The best thing men can do is, is be involved in Big brothers, big sisters. Be involved in wherever you can volunteer with young men. There's a great program called Gentlemen by Choice. Young Men. Like, I can speak all day long, but I am a white woman of a certain age. I am not going to resonate with the black young men that come to my camp or the Chicano young men that come to my camp. But men who do, who have been through things in life, sharing that with young boys. One of my favorite camp memories is we had a player from an alumni player from the Raiders. Huge guy, was like 300 pounds, massive guy. And he was standing in a creek fishing with a bunch of my little. And it was mostly my black and brown boys because that's our population that goes to camp. It's very diverse. They're standing in this creek with him fishing, and they're not asking him why he. What anything about football. They're asking him why he doesn't hit his wife. And because he had just given a whole talk to the boys about what it means to be a man, a man, a big physical man to be a football player, how he was recruited into gangs when he was young. He gave this phenomenal talk to Them and these little guys, this is our smallest unit. They get this chance to go fishing with him and they're like, oh no, I want to know why don't you hit your wife? Like, what do you do when your son gets mouthy? One of the boys said, what do you do when your son gets mouthy? Right? Because these kids are growing up surrounded by violence and he's sitting there talking to them about the important thing in life is being a good human being. And a good human being is these things. And you could, I could see these boys, I could see their, their entire futures changing. And that's all it takes. You know, you don't need to invest your entire life in helping a young person, but you just need to invest a little bit and help young people who are struggling understand it does get easier and that they have all these wonderful choices and how to not make life limiting choices. You know, we, we have some young people here that, that, that did some horrific. There was a whole sexual abuse case at one of our schools. Those young people made horrible, horrible decisions that have limited where their life is going to go. We've got to get to young people early enough to talk to them about how they can make way different choices and way and then have that. And then when they do make a bad choice, how do we make that not the worst thing that's ever going to happen to them? How do they're still going to be a human being on this planet? How do we help them?
- [60:31]
B
That question you asked, you just said might be like one of the most heartbreaking things I've ever heard come out of a kid's mouth because that only comes out of a kid's mouth when that's what they, they know and are exposed to. And I hope that people are moved by those things because they show that there are ways to interrupt that this is not inevitable. We are set in stone. We can change, we can grow, we can develop. Liz, thank you so much for joining me today for the work that you were doing. Where can people contact you, learn more, read, write if they are curious, like, hey, I want to start a program like this where I'm at. Where would you like to direct people towards to learn more? Yes.
- [61:06]
A
So our website is safeness.org and on there you can, there's a contact form if you want more information from me or from any one of my staff. I can, I can get to that information.
- [61:18]
B
Thanks again everybody for tuning in today. If you like today's episode and you're liking the show, please Remember to like, subscribe, leave a rating, leave a review, and share with anyone who you might think is interested in learning more about our rotten criminal legal system. If you would like to contact me with any questions, concerns, feedback, or potential guest recommendations, you can go to publicdefenselessmail.com and shoot me an email. You can also find more about the show at publicdefenseless.com or on Instagram at Public Defenseless Podcast or on Twitter Defenseless Pod. As always folks, thank you again for your support. If you have the means to do so, it would be great if you could go down to the Show Notes, go to Patreon and subscribe for as little as $5 a month where you can get access to the show a day early and the video versions of the show. Again, thank you all so much for the support and hope to see you soon.