Back when the women’s movement brought domestic violence into the national consciousness, shelter seemed the most viable answer to the problem. Get the victim out of harm’s way. Many states still did not have laws against battering one’s wife. Intimate partner violence was seen as a private family matter and what research existed around domestic violence still carried a residue of such incidents being the fault of victims inciting their abusers. It would be decades before the idea of men being held accountable for their violent behavior even became part of the national conversation. Creating shelters was the first nationally coordinated attempt to address intimate partner violence, and throughout the 1960s, ’70s, ’80s, even well into the ’90s, it was more or less the only solution offered to women in dangerous situations. In 1964, California opened a shelter for female victims of alcoholic partners who were also abused, though Maine and Minnesota are generally credited with the first shelters devoted solely to battered women. Shelter saved, undoubtedly, many thousands of women’s lives, and continues to do so today. Over the course of four decades, the shelter movement expanded, and today there are more than three thousand.1
The definition of shelter varies widely; it can mean a bed in a hotel room for a night, or a group house with two dozen families. Cities with dense populations sometimes have small apartment buildings or single occupancy motel-type residences. Outside of major cities, shelters tend to be single-family homes in residential areas, where victims and their children are allotted one room and share kitchens, bathrooms, and dining and living rooms with five to eight other families. There are rules governing curfews and chores. Historically, boys over the age of twelve and pets have not been allowed in shelters, and most contact with friends or family, including a victim’s employer, had been discouraged, for safety’s sake. (New York is currently creating what it’s calling the country’s first 100% pet-friendly shelter; Arkansas, meanwhile, opened the country’s first shelter for men in 2015.) Shelter doesn’t simply mean a safe place to sleep; it means walking entirely out of your life, having your children walk entirely out of their lives. It means disappearing from view.
This is what came into focus for Kelly Dunne when Dorothy refused shelter. Kelly Dunne once told me the “dirty little secret” of shelter was that it was a “ticket to welfare.” If a woman needed shelter and the closest bed was across the state, she had to take it immediately, even if that meant leaving a job or a kid’s school and friends behind. Dunne said some of the most haunting images she carries with her in her twenty-five-year career include watching women standing on the curb with their suitcases and their children, waiting for a bus to take them across the state to the only place that had a shelter bed available that night. It is profoundly disruptive. Necessary sometimes, still, but wrenching.
More and more victims resist staying in shelters, Dunne said. They wonder whether they can continue in their job or care for their elderly parents; whether they will be able to make a doctor’s appointment or a dinner date with friends; whether their child can still be in the school play; whether they can bring family heirlooms; whether they can post on Facebook or Instagram. “The answer to all those questions is no,” Dunne said. “Shelter was this way to get the criminal justice system off the hook. They’d say, ‘If she’s really that afraid, she’ll go into shelter,’ and when women didn’t, we’d surmise that they really weren’t that afraid.” Dorothy taught her how dangerous such an assumption could be.
In recent years, shelters and clinical-treatment providers have worked to better accommodate the needs of abuse victims. Jobs are often encouraged; sophisticated security systems have been installed in shelters that can afford it. Some shelters now allow teenage boys to stay with their mothers and families to bring their pets; others permit contact with friends and family. One afternoon Candace Waldron, the former executive director of Healing Abuse Working for Change, a crisis agency in Salem, Massachusetts, arranged for me to visit their new state-of-the-art shelter. It had replaced the one where Dorothy and Kristen stayed, which had been a tiny house on a side street close enough to the ocean that sand skittered across its narrow sidewalks. Situated in an elegantly renovated Queen Anne Victorian on a wide boulevard with security cameras discreetly tucked away throughout, the new shelter had room for eight families with three separate cooking areas. There was an elevator and a children’s playroom piled with toys; the hallways and staircases were brightly painted and hung with flower paintings. A small sandbox was set up in the backyard. It was, so far as shelters go, large and airy, while also being devoid of the kinds of personal touches that most of us have in our homes: photos of family, say, or posters, kids’ art, tchotchkes, toys, books, CDs.
This is top of the line: play areas are provided, security is tight, conditions are decent. And yet even at their best, shelters represent a total disruption. Still, speaking out against shelters has cast advocates like Dunne outside the mainstream. “It’s not a popular opinion to be putting forth in the domestic violence world,” she said. This despite the fact that most shelters remain chronically underfunded, opening and closing at the whim of state or county budgets, and that the evidence suggests that shelters provide victims and their families neither an easy respite nor a long-term solution.
In response to a New Yorker article in which I covered many of these same points, a reader wrote in:
As the founder of one of the country’s first shelters, I reject the statement … that shelters are, in effect, a ‘ticket to welfare.’ High Risk Teams are an important innovation, but they reach only a fraction of victims who are already known to law enforcement or service providers. The model is most effective as part of a comprehensive approach to preventing domestic violence that includes shelter. Shelters provide safe housing and trauma support for individuals and families, the vast majority of whom have endured chronic abuse, poverty, and homelessness. It’s the place where survivors report feeling safe for the first time in their lives. Support services emphasize education, employment, and a pathway to stable, affordable housing. Indeed, our High Risk Team, a partnership of more than twenty-five local agencies, has sent families to shelters on numerous occasions, when shelter was truly their only option.2
I cannot argue with this letter writer’s statement. So I must concede that these two realities uneasily coexist: that shelter is necessary and saves lives, but it is also an abysmal fix.
Dunne, too, concedes that shelter is necessary sometimes. She described an ongoing case in which the assailant had been ordered by the court to wear a GPS bracelet so that his movements could be monitored. He failed to appear at probation for the fitting and was effectively on the run and at large; for his victim, shelter was the safest option. Often shelter can be helpful even just for a night or two to let tempers calm down. But Dunne also characterizes shelters as prisons for women, with strict rules and curfews, and says that children, removed from the familiarity of home and friends, can emerge from them traumatized. Even in the best shelters, like the one I saw in Massachusetts, you’re housing traumatized people with other traumatized people. Families are most often allotted a single large bedroom.
Imagine any other crime where the impetus for change, and the loss of civil liberties, lies with the victim, Dunne said. “Shelters have saved the lives of battered women,” she said. “But it seemed inherently unfair to me, that this was our answer.”
These days, there is a push to try to keep victims in their communities and out of shelter, to build a kind of safety wall around the victim. One of the methods of this is called transitional housing. Transitional housing differs from shelter in that it offers more long-term accommodation, and in most cases, more autonomy. Many cities have some version of transitional housing today, so to find out what transitional housing actually looked like, and how it differed from shelter, I went one afternoon to meet with a woman named Peg Hacksylo. Hacksylo is the former executive director of the District Alliance for Safe Housing in Washington, D.C., and founder of a transitional housing program lauded nationally as a model to emulate.
I visited one summer afternoon. The building bore no signs out front or any indication at all of what it was. A small children’s playground was built in a side yard behind a fence that spanned the building’s perimeter. I had been told in advance I’d have to be buzzed in—a camera was stationed at the entrance, along with other cameras at key locations around the city block taken up by the building. Tall iron fencing—nearly impossible to climb—terraced both sides of the walkway.
The building itself is in one of D.C.’s gritty neighborhoods, with gentrification curling in from the edges, and so affordable housing—D.C. is the fifth most expensive city in the nation—has gotten even more difficult to find. As of this writing, the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment is more than $2,200 a month.3 It’s an issue that every city in America grapples with, but particularly those with fast-eroding affordable housing: San Francisco, New York, Boston, Washington D.C., Chicago, Los Angeles, and many others.
“Historically, if a victim of domestic violence went to the services in the city to get help or shelter and she would explain that she was homeless because of [domestic violence], they would say, ‘You should go to a domestic violence shelter; we don’t deal with that,’ ” Hacksylo told me. “And the domestic violence shelter system was so small and lacked so much capacity that … what would happen is that victims would go into domestic violence shelters and when they would time out of those shelters, they would go back to the family intake system to say, ‘Okay, I need housing.’ And the [intake system] would say, ‘Are you at a shelter?’ And the victim would say, ‘Yes.’ So the intake people would say, ‘Okay, then you’re not homeless.’ ”
Hacksylo says to get around this, programs had a practice whereby they’d have to make survivors homeless by basically evicting them from whatever program they were being housed by in order for them to be able to say, legitimately, that they were now homeless and needed housing.
For many, this resulted in an endless loop of recurrent homelessness and violence and shelter and homelessness and violence and shelter. Even today, a task force headed by the D.C. Coalition Against Domestic Violence reported that a third of homeless women in the District were homeless directly because of violence in their home.
Hacksylo’s office had purple walls and a red ceiling. She was dressed in an olive linen sheath that gave her the appearance of floating. Her braided hair had a colorful scarf in it. Back in 2006, Hacksylo told me, the city had just two shelters, which between them offered forty-eight beds for women and kids only (no men). The police department, meanwhile, got more than thirty-one thousand domestic violence calls a year. (Domestic violence didn’t become a crime in Washington, D.C., until 1991.4) Between D.C.’s two primary agencies—House of Ruth and My Sister’s Place—seventeen hundred victims annually were getting some kind of assistance. The gap between needs and services was gigantic and overwhelming.
At the time Hacksylo had left her role as deputy director of My Sister’s Place and taken a job with the Office of Violence Against Women (OVW). After a coalition of domestic violence groups convinced the D.C. city council of the District’s overwhelming need for shelter, the council allocated a million dollars to anyone willing to create additional safe housing. If funding is the most significant challenge any nonprofit organization has, this seemed like a no-brainer; here was basically a bank account just waiting to be used by someone to address an obvious and huge social need. The recipe was all right there: need plus funding.
But no one came forward to apply for the funds.
It was an unusual situation, to have a vast pool of funding, and no applicants.
Hacksylo, who knew her way around the D.C. domestic violence community, was tasked with finding out why. She set up a series of focus groups and for four months tried to figure out what the problem was. It turned out to be maddeningly simple: existing domestic violence agencies were so overwhelmed on a day-to-day and hour-to-hour basis, need for them was so great, that none was in a position to be able to implement such a vast, new program. It wasn’t a lack of vision, necessarily; rather, these agencies all suffered, individually and collectively, from a lack of people power. So Hacksylo went to her boss at the Office of Victim Services and said, “Look, this is my passion, my love. If you don’t mind, I’ll start a nonprofit and do it myself.”
Hacksylo laughs about it today. “It really was a backwards way for a nonprofit to get started.”
But within six months she’d pulled together a board of directors, filed the paperwork for her nonprofit status, got a funding sponsor, wrote her grant proposal, and found a building to purchase. She’s not a religious person, she told me, but the fact that so many things fell into place so quickly suggested to her that “something bigger than me was happening.”
In July of 2007, Hacksylo’s new domestic violence agency—DASH—put a contract on the building where I met her in the summer of 2017. They called it the Cornerstone Housing Program. It took three more years before building renovations, staff hires, and program planning allowed them to begin admitting survivors and their children. In the meantime, Hacksylo did more focus groups that confirmed what she already knew: that many survivors either ended up in the homeless shelter system, or they went back to abusers for lack of housing alternatives. Anywhere from 25 to 80% of homeless women, depending upon which study is cited, have domestic violence histories. And it gets worse. In cities where police can give nuisance citations, domestic violence winds up being a major cause of eviction. Matthew Desmond writes in his book Evicted how domestic violence nuisance cases surpassed all other forms of nuisance citations combined (things like disorderly conduct or drug charges) in Milwaukee, and that 83% of landlords who were issued such citations either evicted those tenants or threatened to evict them, meaning that victims who were abused became not only less likely to call the police next time, but they were also often victimized a second time through eviction. Later, Desmond recounts how the chief of police in Milwaukee was baffled when rates of domestic violence homicide increased and, as Desmond writes, “his department’s own rules presented battered women with a devil’s bargain: keep quiet and face abuse, or call the police and face eviction.”5
Once Cornerstone opened, Hacksylo was surprised to learn that DASH was getting just as many calls from advocates at other domestic violence or social service agencies as they were from women in abusive situations in need of housing. They were saying, “I have a victim of [domestic violence] right here and I don’t know what to do.” Hacksylo began to realize how siloed the services are for homeless versus domestic violence, how little any of these groups tend to communicate with one another to work together. “What’s happening is that victims are falling through the cracks as a result,” she said, citing a kind of circular inferno that so many victims found themselves in.
While Hacksylo was busy putting together Cornerstone, she also began looking for scattered site transitional housing; scattered sites are basically units that DASH has negotiated for with landlords to lease to their clients. In the hyper-expensive housing market that is Washington, D.C., these scattered sites are a constant source of need, and DASH has had to go farther and farther beyond the city limits to find affordable housing and willing partners. At the same time, with transitional housing all across the country now offering survivors a pathway to stability, Hacksylo says the Housing and Urban Development Agency (HUD) is moving away from transitional housing, claiming that it’s overly expensive for what it provides. Instead, HUD is moving toward what it calls “rapid re-housing,” getting domestic violence survivors in and out of a subsidized housing situation in just four or six months.
Hacksylo says for most people, this is simply not enough time. Often, they have significant debt or their credit has been ruined by their abuser, or they haven’t had a job in a long time. Sometimes they want to finish a degree or vocational training. At DASH, their rent is covered for two years. They can sometimes apply to extend that for another six months, and after that, DASH has a project to help with another two years of partially subsidized housing. And even then, Hacksylo says, it’s sometimes not enough time. I think of Michelle Monson Mosure and the long view she had for her own survival. She was going to school, putting things in place to buy the house from her father and slowly establish credit in her own name, and then she was going to get a nursing job. Would four to six months have done much of anything for her?
The frustration for Hacksylo is clear, but she knows she has to work within the world that exists, not the world that she wishes. Wherever she can, she’ll create it. Today, she is working on a national model (NASH—the National Alliance for Safe Housing) based on what she created at DASH. She told me that in 2013, she began a new pilot program that has changed entirely the way she thinks about surviving domestic violence. It’s called the Survivor Resilience Fund and it’s just that: a pool of money to help survivors. “The conventional wisdom is that if a victim wants to get out of a situation, then she must leave her home and uproot her family and start all over again, and that typically means going into a shelter, and then going into some other subsidized long-term housing, finding a new job, new schools, putting their lives back together entirely,” she told me. Exactly what someone like Dorothy Giunta-Cotter had been facing. But what Hacksylo has found in this pilot project is that there are many survivors who have the ability to sustain their own housing, but they’re facing a short-term financial crisis. Maybe they don’t have enough money saved for a security deposit and first month’s rent; maybe they don’t have a way to furnish a place they’ve moved into. Maybe they have an abuser who racked up credit card debt in their name. Whatever the situation, the Survivor Resilience Fund is simply a means to get them past that first big financial hurdle and keep them in their own communities.
“For me,” Hacksylo said, “it’s been this total paradigm shift, because I’ve worked in shelter and transitional housing my whole career.” She says basically, the money they can offer helps a survivor avoid homelessness as a result of private violence. But the resilience fund has proven to Hacksylo that conventional wisdom isn’t always necessarily true, that survivors don’t want to leave their communities, and many don’t even want to be cut off from their abusers. They want to be safe, but they also want their children to have both parents in their lives, so the fund provides them with a way to establish their own home in their own community and in many cases keeps the criminal justice system out of the picture. “When survivors have access to income,” Hacksylo said, “they necessarily are in a better position to demand safety and justice for themselves.”
Before we finish, Hacksylo takes me on a short tour of Cornerstone. It finally opened to clients in 2010, and today has forty-three studio and one-bedroom units; DASH covers rent for two years—long enough, Hacksylo says, for survivors to get their finances together, pay off debts and hopefully save some money, to address whatever other needs they may have, like substance abuse, and to get their children situated in school. There is a small fitness room with a television in one of the units and two communal play areas for kids—one for younger kids and one for older, plus the playground outside. Twice a week they have volunteers trained on children’s trauma come in to play, and two former students of the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design have a nonprofit to work on art therapy with the kids. The basement has walls lined with children’s art that’s been professionally mounted, and she says they do community art shows regularly where the kids are the docents. The units have hardwood floors with newly renovated efficiency kitchens and large windows overlooking the neighborhood, where sunlight streams in on this muggy summer day.
What Cornerstone offers is immediate: it’s not a beautiful place to live, but it’s an autonomous place to live. Hacksylo says it’s like a first apartment out of college. But it’s not a place that seems, at all, like a shelter, where everything is shared, everything is a negotiation with someone else. Families have privacy; most of the sixty or so kids who live here at any given time don’t even know they’re in a domestic violence program. The units are a kind of visual symbol of hope. That a future without violence can exist for them and for their children. Another way to think about it might be this: empowerment comes with sovereignty.