These California workers were used to solving crises, but COVID-19 took it to a new level
Accustomed to solving one crisis after another, workers at WEAVE, My Sister’s House and other agencies addressing domestic violence adopted radical changes in how they served people in the face of statewide orders for residents to shelter in place to help slow the spread of the coronavirus.
Initially, they did so with the thought that they could go back to the old way of working once “things got back to normal,” said Jacquie Marroquin, the program director for the California Partnership to End Domestic Violence.
“We are now — what? — (eight) months into this pandemic, and we’re now pivoting to no longer waiting or planning for things to go back to normal,” Marroquin said. “We’re planning for a brand-new normal, a brand-new normal where remote services are just going to be the norm, where (we’re) meeting survivors where they are instead of asking survivors to come to our organizations. It’s just the norm.”
That new normal hasn’t come without lots of anxiety, soul searching and exhaustion. Nilda Valmores, the executive director of My Sister’s House, saw it with her team, and so did Beth Hassett, the chief executive officer at WEAVE.
“COVID-19 has added a lot of stress,” Valmores said. “The job was already stressful without COVID. Staff has expressed a lot of stress about either whether they may get COVID or whether their parents will get it from them. Their parents are worried about them, to the point of whether they should come into the office. Some staff members ended up resigning, in large part because of COVID, because of that stress and the feeling of pressure from it.”
In Hassett’s case, she had one 20-something staff member who decided it would be best to move back to their home state and live with their parents and another who decided to “start a new life” because the pandemic had so changed the world.
Both agency leaders had to work quickly to fill the positions because they had committed from Day 1 to keep their offices and services running despite a lull in calls for help immediately after the stay-home orders were issued.
“At the outset of the pandemic, when shelter-in-place first came on, there was a decrease in the number of people who were reaching out for help,” Marroquin said, “and I think that was because people were trying to figure out what the heck was happening.”
But that lull had ended by midyear for WEAVE and many agencies and what they experienced was not only an uptick in the number of calls, but also a realization that the individuals who were calling were experiencing more intense levels of abuse than they had seen in victims prior to the pandemic.
How staying at home can be problematic
At the Marjaree Mason Center in Fresno, Executive Director Nicole Linder has seen an “extremely high” need for services, and the severity of the abuse being experienced has been “a lot higher.”
There’s a contradiction here, Marroquin said, because the safest thing to do amid a pandemic is stay home, but that kind of isolation just feeds into the power and control issues happening in relationships where there is domestic violence.
Valmores said she believes this is why her agency is not yet seeing an increase in calls: “We definitely think there’s a lot more issues that are not being reported yet, and that’s because their partners may be home with them, so they can’t leave and they can’t even make a call freely to figure out what their next steps are.”
And, in the immigrant community, some partners are using the pandemic or racial tensions as a way to further isolate those they are abusing, Valmores said. For example, she said in the Asian community, abusers are telling their intimate partners that, if they go out for help, no one will help them and they could face harassment because people are going to think they caused COVID-19 or are spreading it.
President Donald Trump has referred to COVID-19, the respiratory illness caused by the coronavirus, as “the China virus” and has blamed the nation for causing the illness.
Hassett said that, after speaking to some people who have sought help, she learned that fear of COVID-19 exposure kept some people from seeking help from WEAVE. The congregate setting of a shelter is outside the comfort zone right now for some people, she said, even though they have instituted social distancing rules.
Linder had to do the same as children ended up staying the whole day at the shelter when their schools closed: “Televisions were installed in individual rooms and children were provided with activity packages. Meals also moved from the kitchen to the individual rooms.”
Because of COVID-19 and financial concerns, Marroquin said, a growing number of people are choosing to seek legal protections and remain living in the same home as their abusers. That trend already was growing even before the pandemic, she said, but it’s accelerated since March.
‘They don’t really have another choice’
Domestic violence agencies are quickly pivoting to offer assistance, she said, and while there’s a myth that domestic violence doesn’t exist in the LGBTQ+ community, it occurs at rates the same as or higher than straight relationships.
The National Coalition Against Domestic Violence reported that one in four women and one in nine men find themselves in abusive relationships and that 44% of lesbian relationships and 54% of people in transgender relationships have experienced domestic violence.
“Safety planning was a lot about how to separate and how to get away from the person who’s causing you harm whereas now so much of the safety planning that is occurring is for families who are in fact staying together,” Marroquin said. “They don’t really have another choice. Housing is a huge issue. It was already a huge issue ... coming into COVID. As a result of COVID, people are less likely to be able to actually move and get a place on their own, even for those of us in the best of circumstances.”
This is part of a massive restructuring that’s going on right now in the domestic violence field, Marroquin said, as agency leaders move to address the layers of stressors that are exacerbating the existing issues of power and control in relationships ruled by domestic violence.
But, as Marroquin noted earlier, agencies working to end domestic violence also have moved rapidly into offering counseling and other services to their clients in a remote way. Thanks to an influx of state funds, My Sister’s House and other nonprofits around the state were able to start offering counseling through videoconferencing that complies with privacy laws.
Leaders in the domestic violence field have been talking about the possibility of offering services in this way for some time, she said, but in order to help prevent the spread of COVID-19, they expedited the start of the services.
It’s something that typically would have been harder to do not only because of the cost of adding the technology but also because staff already had so many in-person sessions going, she said. Amid the pandemic, all staff had the bandwidth to learn the technology and get skilled enough to help even those clients who weren’t so savvy with technology.
“It has accelerated the innovation that we were already talking about, the innovation around like how to provide services for the whole family has now accelerated as a result of the COVID pandemic because we don’t have another option,” Marroquin said. “Families don’t have another option at this point.”
Trying to strike a balance
Even as they adopt innovations, she said, leaders of domestic violence organizations have struggled with how to care for the people who work with them.
“We had a shortage of personal protective equipment at the outset,” she said, “so there was this rush of ‘What do we do? We still have people who are at our shelter. We still have 24-hour programs. How do we keep our staff safe? And, how do we keep our staff employed?’”
That doesn’t mean it hasn’t been challenging for people working in this space or for those they serve, said Ericx Perez, who does youth outreach at the Sacramento LGBT Community Center. The LGBT center and nearly every domestic violence organization does outreach among youth to teach them what a healthy relationship is and head off abusive relationships before they can start.
Typically Perez would be spending much of their work day in high schools, providing guidance to student clubs under the Gender and Sexuality Alliance Network or Pride umbrellas. Those sort of peer-to-peer networks and education have proven quite effective, said Jessica Merrill, a spokesperson for the California Partnership to End Domestic Violence, because youth tend to listen to and seek support from people their own age.
But that outreach became a lot tougher after the stay-home orders, Perez said, as students were spending a lot of time on Zoom for their classes.
The last thing they wanted to do after that was to spend more time on Zoom, Perez said, so they tried to make it more interactive by delivering craft supplies to them at home and having everyone work on a craft together during a Zoom session. To get word out about the sessions, Perez said, they posted them on a virtual chat network for gamers called Discord, a spot where teens were already connecting.
Teen dating violence affects one in four young people, Merrill noted, and many of the teens who may end up in such relationships could be witnessing more intense forms of intimate violence in their homes amid the pandemic.
When you’re working in this field at this unprecedented time, Marroquin said, it’s hard to step back and put your personal needs first because you don’t want to miss a connection, but agency leaders will have to strike a balance.
“The adrenaline is coming back down, and we’re starting to realize, ‘Oh, we’re not going back to normal.’ This is the new normal,” Marroquin said. “There’s a balance here to be had between the really wonderful, beautiful, innovative work that we’ve been talking about for a while, that we’ve been able to push out into the field and at the same time the impact of that on the helpers, on the people who are actually doing the work.
This story was originally published November 18, 2020 at 5:00 AM with the headline "These California workers were used to solving crises, but COVID-19 took it to a new level."
