Let's Get Honest! Absolutely Uncommon Analysis of Family & Conciliation Courts' Operations, Practices, & History

This segment (background-color: light-blue) is to illustrate that I believe blogging an under-reported issues (just get that idea out there) may gradually have long-term impact: Not blogging is to just let the standard rhetoric, practices AND FEDERAL/LOCAL FUNDING prevail, uncriticized). If you’re not interested, that background color will help you scroll down below it.This model San Diego (problems began surfacing almost immediately), then Alameda County (nepotism, cronyism in choosing the leader, possible violation of federal rules about grants recipients, first leader has been in rehab, front-lining a soap opera life, and hardly a role model for DV survivors — or mothers, then a national model, and now I even found some Justice Centers overseas — I learned by looking at a book review by the “founders” (Casey Gwinn/Gael Strack) that this (bad) model was taken off another one, CAC’s, justified on certain premises and now institutionalized. (CAC is “Children’s Advocacy Center”)

The to-the-contrary viewpoint is that civil servants are paid to do their jobs — and should do it. They shouldn’t be running around setting up nonprofits to attract federal funding on “replicatable models” so as to have a nice retirement package with conference and travel fees as write-offs. These nonprofits then enact the personal visions of a closed-corporation set of individuals. The input from people who are NOT organizing their lives to be on “the conference, publish, sell, mentor, duplicate, apply MLM” circuit (on the public dole) — is neatly bypassed and eliminated. The mutual self-congratulation factor is through the roof, and these epractices will not stop without a little interference from the “rank-and-file.” Like you, or me.

The model can also be summarized as conflict-of-interest collaborations in the form of nonprofits staffed in part by civil servants. In this one, faith leaders are blended in, which absolutely IS a danger element for anyone who has been a victim of domestic violence OR child abuse — as the faith leaders are practically THE leaders in covering that same thing up. The faith leaders are in there in part because of then-President Bush’s influence. I want people to see this because, if it’s not protested, it will be duplicated under a different name. Read on……

In the 2011-2012 year, the California State Legislature was considering a “Senate Bill (SB) 557 — Family Justice Centers” — citing the 2002 San Diego one as a model. I blogged it when I heard about it.

Here it is:

Bill Analysis: “This Bill would allow local governments to establish family justice centers, and allow these centers to be staffed by, among others, law enforcement, medical personnel, social service and child welfare personnel. This bill would also authorize the FJC to share information between the partner agencies after obtaining informed consent from the victims receiving services.” …. “The Family Justice Center (FJC) model was originally developed in San Diego, which opened a center in 2002. …The United States Department of Justice, through its Office of Violence Against Women, has identifed the Family Justice Center model as a best practice in the field of domestic violence… (etc.) [Casey Gwinn, Gael Strack, Hope for Hurting Families: Creating Family Justice Centers Across America Volcano Press, 2006)

.**

**update (I linked to the book); it’s 219pp and selling for $48+ new, and looks people are also off-loading used for $7.00 or so. Notice that the authors were public employees themselves; this is a pattern. I called it “Casey Gwinn’s retirement plan.” A review shows up from Joan Zorza, Esq. of DVLEAP. Zorza is also associated with the BMCC now, and some has received a minor grant (if I have this right) from the California-based nonprofit “Center for Judicial Excellence” (Marin County, establ. ca. 2006 itself).

(from the book review): About the Author
Gael Strack, J.D. is Chief Executive Officer of the Family Justice Center Alliance, an adjunct law professor at Cal Western Law School & a member of the American Bar Association’s Commission on DV. She was Director of the San Diego FJC for five yrs. & Assistant City Attorney for the Office of the San Diego City Attorney.
Casey Gwinn, J.D. serves as President of the Board of the Family Justice Center Alliance. As elected San Diego City Attorney from 1996-2004, Casey led the effort to open the nationally acclaimed San Diego Family Justice Center. He is currently Chief Executive Officer of the YWCA of San Diego County.

Zorza comments (pause to note that all three – Gael Strack, Casey Gwinn (City Attorney), and Joan Zorza — are attorneys. Yet they are talking in terms (below) of “service providers” — wraparound services taken from the Child Advocacy Center (CAC) model. GUESS WHAT — there are problems with those models, too — anyone think to consult the parents about these things before launching them????

Borrowing From Child Advocacy Centers

What is a simple idea taken from some of our best child advocacy centers (i.e., to create a one-stop shopping center where all service providers are located so that each abuse survivor can access as many of them as she wishes), turns out to be much harder to put into practice, particularly in a coordinated manner that will best assist abuse victims. The FJC staff knew if they are to end the violence and keep victims safe they not only had to wrap their clients in services, but wrap their clients’ children and their perpetrators in services as well.

San Diego itself also had some issues with Casey Gwinn as City Attorney, per a 2001 article from a San Diego Union Tribune; calling him a political lightweight, his 1996 election a shoe-in enabled by the late announcement of the (incumbent City Attorney’s) retirement so he essentially ran unopposed, not an effective litigator (lost a $94million damages suit by a developer against the City) and willing to ethically cut corners. He’s also a loyal Republican and was hoping Bush would appoint him US Attorney (notice the connection of the Family Justice Centers to a Bush-related initiative). What’s worse, it looks like when one of his own employees (that is, as I recall AT the Justice Center) was being abused by her husband at home, stalking, and in general making life miserable not just at home– but also affecting her work (tell me about it), rather than get this woman help, Casey’s response was to dump the case — on another support staff (causing her extreme distress) and relocate the problem off his own floor).

This news is from 2001. As I showed, above, looks like the Justice Center got started in the next year, 2002.

Asked why the Union-Tribune failed to support Gwinn, insiders cite the opinion held by many local lawyers and politicos: the city attorney is an intellectual and political lightweight who got into office through the good graces of his onetime boss, ex-city attorney John Witt. Insiders also say that Gwinn has often seemed too willing to cut ethical corners. On the verge of retirement back in 1996, Witt delayed announcing his departure, hoping that it would be too late for candidates other than Gwinn to get into the race to succeed him.

The strategy worked and Gwinn ran unopposed. Even then, he raised thousands of dollars from members of law firms with business before the city, including the downtown firm of Luce, Forward, whose partner, Charles Bird, a Gwinn contributor, represented the city in its legal battles against opponents of the Chargers’ ticket guarantee and the downtown baseball stadium. Much of the money was used to repay Gwinn for a personal loan he had made to an earlier campaign in which he had run for district attorney.

Here’s yet another one showing, this guy (along with several others) jumped at the chance to “buy” (cheap) from the city “service years” at discounted prices — to better fund their own pensions. This is in here for learning, and for character reference on the financial habits of a DV crusader attorney….

And Here Are Employees Who Bought Years They Didn’t Serve

Don Bauder*, August 25, 2010

[*the title of the article above was: “Is Casey Gwinn trying to get Don Bauder fired?”]

In 1996 (the same year the City tapped the retirement fund** to finance the Republican convention), the City of San Diego enacted a purchase-of-service credits plan. Employees could buy years of service and grab those hyper-generous benefits without having been on the payroll. For six years, the employees were able to buy those credits very cheap. The years weren’t priced at actual cost. The mistake was discovered in 2003, but the City then gave the employees several months to buy in at the old, actuarially fallacious rates. Obviously, employees piled in, snapping up more than 8,000 years of service — costing the City $146 million.

[[Comment re: RETIREMENT FUNDS: **If more people understood the principles behind Comprehensive Annual Financial Reports, and how the retirement plans themselves are an investment plan that by now could eliminate the need for ANY current taxes, including the income tax, this might not have happened. Also see:

CAFR: so-called ‘pension funds’ engorge Wall Street’s biggest banks
Posted on July 12, 2012 by Carl Herman
I documented that California’s so-called “pension fund” of $460 billion contributed just $1 billion (4%) of the state’s $27 billion pension cost, and the total $600 billion in retained taxpayer assets are lied-in-omission removed from the $16 billion budget deficit claimed as “forcing” austerity.

Now Clint Richardson has hit another home run in documenting California’s Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR) as funding Wall Street’s biggest banks by the billions, including $2 billion directly into the very same mortgaged-backed and asset-backed securities that were fraudulently created, fraudulently marketed, and fraudulently rewarded through taxpayer so-called bailouts.

]]

So here is the list of City employees who bought the benefits for years they didn’t serve: former Mayor Susan Golding 5 years; former City Attorney Casey Gwinn 5; former City Manager Michael Uberuaga 5, and former portfolio manager for the City pension fund Doug McCalla (who is getting $14,537.06 a month in pension) 5 years.

LGH COMMENT: We have done this to ourselves decade after decade, by not paying attention to where our taxes are going, not learning to understand government, and engaging in a consensual relationship to “fork it over” up front things the same government already has enough assets to fund itself — but chooses not to; apparently it’s more fun to continue taxing, accumulating wealth, and threatening people who have been conditioned to “fork it over” based on myths about how money works. Catherine Austin Fitts also explained it well enough; the banks are feasting on public credit, both the ones bailed out and the ones that didn’t need a bailout. Not to mention, the drug money gets invested in real estate….

Please read — until it sinks in. Excerpt from Fitts link on a title about “Ethnic Cleansing,” and it’s talking about Los Angeles, among other places. Notice even as highly placed as she was, it took her time to see the bigger picture:

My evolution came slowly. In 1989 I was named Assistant Secretary of Housing-FHA Commissioner under Housing and Urban Development Secretary Jack Kemp. I managed  $300 billion of mortgage insurance, mortgages and properties of the Federal Housing Administration and, as Commissioner, I advised the Secretary on another $1 trillion of mortgage financing. I was fired by Jack Kemp in late 1990 because I would not go along with the questionable political practices, which seem to be built into HUD’s machinery and purpose. But still I did not see the bigger picture.

Fulfilling my childhood dream, Hamilton [[her company formed after being fired from HUD]] also created new software and money management tools, which were, for the first time ever, able to map down to the neighborhood, exactly how HUD and other federal money worked, who profited when loans defaulted, and how money came into or left a community. For example, we were often able to see where HUD was spending $100-250,000 per unit on apartment buildings when there was single family housing available within walking distance for $25-50,000.

{{COMMENTS: Notice she, too, was paying attention to the FLOW of money, which I said above. That’s how profits are made and maintained. People who don’t pay attention to how the money works, are going to lose it to those those who do. Understanding is Power… but you have to want it — and think outside the box]]

Secretary Cisneros had been extremely supportive of our work. We had unrestricted access to rich quantities of government financial data that was supposedly public but hard to understand. We were translating that into useable information so that people in any community could see how the money flowed through their neighborhood. We helped HUD get increasing amounts of data up on its web site. An unforeseen side effect for the women at Edgewood, and for Hamilton, was that by seeing clearly how the clean money worked, we also began to see how the dirty money worked.

As an investor for more than twenty years, I believed that it was actually more profitable for people to own their own neighborhoods and businesses and to know exactly how the money worked. The MONEY MAPS we made were so simple to understand that they looked like comic books. . . . .

[[Just ONE more paragraph, to make this point: The government OUGHT to be held as accountable to us as the SEC supposedly keeps public corporations accountable. Securities Exchange Commission refers to DEBTS — the buying and selling of debts to raise capital (etc.). But it isn’t. IF IT WERE, people like Casey Gwinn and friends could not run around the country teaching their cronies how to set up nonprofit “justice centers” and get federal grants (from the public at large) to fund them without anyone really following them closely but people who want a piece of that action… Perhaps there’d be less poverty and drugs….]]

I was also advocating that U.S. government investment in communities should be subject to the same public disclosure rules that private companies are obligated to follow under the Securities and Exchange Commission Rules. If you are a shareholder in a company, that company is using your money. The law requires that they use your money legally and that they do their best to protect your money and make you more. To earn money, and to do so in a fair, honest and competitive way, federal and state laws require companies to report performance and key transactions to you, the shareholder. Every citizen is a shareholder in the government. If governments worked like they require corporations to work, they would be required to report to you, in the sunshine, exactly how the money was working, in your neighborhood, and you could either approve – or disapprove of the fairness and effectiveness of that, based upon your understanding of your own needs. That is very threatening to those who have used agencies like HUD as a trough to pay off political cronies.

Where this information can be learned, however — is by learning to read the CAFRs. That actually is what I should be doing and blogging currently. Consider this “in transition” stage… Moreover, Catherine Austin Fitts is not exactly broke — and she could have used her influence (and money) to publicize the CAFRs for us — but instead chose to market her own product and models through SOLARIS — and apparently got in on some religious networking from a large church in Washington, D.C. at one point (but that’s another story). Suppose the same transparency were ALSO applied to religious corporations??? They are definitely real estate investors!

Only two years after the center opened, this article surfaced about an employee of the famous SD Family Justice Center when the DV got a little too close for comfort. The link is to a 2010 blog, and I’m reporting it in the comments, but the news article came out ca. 2004. No matter, by 2006, they have published and well-known DV Attorney Ms. Zorza was congratulating Gwinn and Strack on their new book. …

City Employee Files Suit Against City, Casey Gwinn

//Statements Regarding Family Justice Center Lawsuit
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The founder of the Family Justice Center, San Diego City Attorney Casey Gwinn said he has handled more than 10,000 domestic abuse cases.** Now, many of his employees at the Family Justice Center and at the City Attorney’s Office are asking how one of his workers was allegedly abused for years without getting help…”

[[**if the reporting is anything like the ACFJC’s, that may be highly exaggerated]]

records show that police responded to numerous calls at the victim’s former home on Armacost Road. Several workers at the City Attorney’s Office and the Family Justice Center told 10News that the victim came to work with broken bones, bruises, cuts and black eyes. “If Casey Gwinn didn’t notice that on one of his own — seeing her every single day — then what is he doing at the Family Justice Center?” questioned Clark.

“According to the lawsuit, a long history of severe abuse against a Family Justice Center employee was going to be made public when the woman threatened to kill her husband and was arrested. Clark was then assigned a special project to quietly help the woman.” {{and you can read the rest.}}

Here’s a 2012 IACP (small print logo shows that means “International Association of Chiefs of Police”) conference/workshop brochure, see page 6.(?) with the help of a DOJ/Bureau Of Justice Assistance Grant, Casey Gwinn and colleague Gael Strack running workshop with his colleague Gael Strack advertising (with Anaheim Police Chief) their Justice Model again (p. 6, and see presenter bios at the back)…..

Looks like Casey dumped the job of handling the tough situation on one of his support staff, who herself ended up getting threatened by the woman’s ex-husband. She sued. This was only in 2004!!! Yet, eight years later, there’s no “Josie Clark” following Gwinn’s trail to correct the record on his less than heroic behavior on behalf of victims (this link is quoting the news article, quoted on the “CA SB 557 — Just Say No! or at least “Whoa” post).

Clark took on the new responsibilities that lasted more than two months. She said the woman called her seeking help day and night — once every half hour at work and at home at 3 a.m. and 5 a.m. Late last year, Clark said the woman’s estranged husband threatened her life.

“Her husband basically said I was going to regret it for interfering and said he was going to come after me and that he was going to kill us both,” Clark told 10News.   After her arrest [and obviously, release], Gwinn had the woman working as a receptionist on the 16th floor near his office. But when the death threat allegations against Clark surfaces, the woman was moved to the 11th floor, just 30 feet from Clark.

“She still comes to the office beaten up, and Casey Gwinn has done absolutly nothing to help her,” Clark said.   The lawsuit itself, the plaintiff’s attorneys say, is about how Clark was forced into the mess and then discriminated against after she had nervous breakdowns and clinical depression. Conditions, they say, came directly from her “special project” to basically act as a drug, alcohol and abuse counselor for a co-worker.

Apparently it’s more fun to travel nationally (while on a pension and probably also being paid by their “creation”) talking about stopping domestic violence (and getting more grants to do it) — than actually dealing with the real thing. This account also brings up the question (at least in my mind) — were the Justice Center staff showing up on one, or two, sets of books — city payroll AND nonprofit salaries? in other words, who’s minding that shop? HERE’S a 2002 working paper (Harvard JFK School of Government) talking about City Attorneys, which devotes many (double-spaced) pages on the San Diego model, and speaking positively about Casey Gwinn’s longstanding concern about domestic violence, and Strack’s desire for a one-stop-justice shop.
[[well, now I have a 9,600 word post. Oh well!! material about San Diego starts around page 17. Don’t quote (i’m not quoting, just linking!) without permission of author.]]

This is forming a nonprofit under private board control, using public funds (OVAW) and mixing civil servants (law enforcement, social service and child welfare personnel). It so happens that this model also had President Bush’s endorsement (2003) and he wanted to make sure that the pastors also had some input in this. The conflict of interest — centralization — of this model, both in structure and funding, is unbelievable. Not to mention, both the original AND the second model (San Diego AND Alameda County) have shown some serious conflicts of interest, and problems — in their origination, and in their execution.

Yes, per Forbes (and you can see elsewhere) Susan B. Carbon, (2009 Obama appointee to the Office of Violence Against Women) explains the approach to stopping this violence as a ‘Coordinated Community Response” (CCR) focused on training. Therefore the grants focus on the training and trying to PERSUADE communities that VAW is no longer acceptable:

DOJ Director on Violence Against Women in the United States (Forbes, 3/8/12, by Rahim Kanani)

In one of the most in-depth discussions to date on violence against women in the United States, and to coincide with International Women’s Day, I interviewed Susan B. Carbon, Director of the United States Department of Justice’s Office on Violence Against Women (OVW).

Judge Carbon was nominated to this position by President Barack Obama on October 1, 2009 and confirmed by the United States Senate on February 11, 2010. As Director, she serves as the liaison between the Department of Justice and federal, state, tribal, and international governments on crimes of domestic violence, sexual assault, dating violence and stalking. In this role, she is responsible for developing the Department’s legal and policy positions regarding the implementation of the Violence Against Women Act and oversees an annual budget of nearly $400 million.

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One of the signature achievements of VAWA, reauthorized in 2000 and 2005, is the development of the concept of a coordinated community response. VAWA-funded projects have an impact that goes well beyond the number of victims served, professionals trained, or arrests made.  VAWA encourages jurisdictions to bring together stakeholders from diverse backgrounds to share information and to use their distinct roles to improve community responses to violence against women.  This mechanism allows these programs to serve as models for other agencies in their jurisdictions.  This not only improves the quality of victim services and the criminal and civil justice response, it often changes the attitudes of the community as a whole.

To understand a few things: You can read through this entire article, I’ll bet, and find next to nothing on to what degree the violence against women takes place in or around not the CRIMINAL or CIVIL justice system, but the FAMILY COURT system, which is a hybrid, and exists parallel to it. I expressed this in a post January 2011, “Happy New Year: What Rhetoric Are You?” By continually censoring the topic of the family courts as systematized violence against women (and against honest men who don’t need sticks and carrots to care about their own kids), the violence WILL continue, the grants WILL continue to be needed (notice the size of that budget — $400 million!) and certifiably insane restraining orders followed by bait and switch, years (sometimes a decade) long custody battles WILL be waged, around which careers are made by the court professionals — while the people involved in those cases remain at risk of life and limb, and stalked into poverty and marginalization throughout society.

It took me a while to understand that this Director was a former Family Court judge in New Hampshire! Why would she then betray former colleagues by airing the dirty laundry of that court system towards women, specifically mothers? Or explain how the fatherhood funding through HHS (which circulates primarily through this venue) is helping take children from SAFE homes and put them back in DANGEROUS ones?

These have to be looked at, I believe, from the corporate/nonprofit/government funding angle. Again, for all the talk, sounds like Casey Gwinn has some serious drawbacks when it comes to personally handling domestic violence, or dealing with critical issues as a City Attorney. I don’t want to rehash it all here, but in retrospect, it’s another way that public employees can arrange things (like getting grants, publishing, conferencing, travelling and in general demanding to reshape justice without adequate feedback from those served by it) while on a City pension (which he apparently bought some years of), and making for a very nice retirement package. He’s probably only mid-50s right about now.

For example: California Dirty Laundry on the [nonprofit collaborative]] Justice Center Circuit:

It turns out that the then-wife of Bill Lockyer — who got a $90,000 plum job (original listing $65,000) to run the second in a chain Justice Centers in California (the Alameda County one) — as of about 2006, while my custody case (same general area) was heading south fast, and I myself was going fast back towards another round on Food Stamps (needlessly) — had problems of her own. Some of these may come from political marriages to previously divorced career men a few decades one senior (I believe the age gap was about thirty years; she was his third wife) and this woman who SHOULD’VE provided help and leadership in this county — instead:

~had to go into drug rehab
~had an affair with someone she met their
~apparently got into a dangerous situation (with a young boy attached?) in a motel room that required a 911 call
~eventually had to resign from a County Supervisor position she’d taken AFTER the plum One-Stop Justice Shop position (Family Justice Center Alliance). Her spouse Bill Lockyer had poured an unprecedented $1++ million of campaign funding into getting this post, only to have seen himself cheated on, and their child endangered, with a woman who had a problem with drug addiction. That’s our local (county/state) government in action….
~ is now going through a divorce and actually being sued, last I heard, for child support from Bill Lockyer.

That’s the local leadership… in one of the highest-homicide areas around.

Why should anyone be paying for anything resembling “technical training and assistance” or advice, or more bright, innovative? leadership ideas proceeding from “Lifestyles of the Rich, Famous, or Politically Connected” which simply lack judgment?

By contrast with Ms. Nadia; I’m not a drug abuser; I didn’t cheat on my husband, or hang out with meth addicts in rehab with small children — yet none of these people are very interested in honestly dealing with the mounting roadkill, in their own jurisdiction, directly related to using the family courts to deal with criminal matters. Possibly because the head of that Alameda County Justice Center one is herself a family lawyer? go figure.

(Below, I also just looked up the bar associations. Turns out the county bar is “exempt active” like so many others — so we don’t get to read their tax returns, while they (these attorneys) sometimes literally get to give a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down on children’s (and their parents’) lives.

(Sept. 2012) “Meth Charge for Lockyer’s Wife Imperils his Ambitions”
(Bloomberg.com, James Nash)
Meth charges, sex tape, extramarital affair
. . .
Lockyer, then 61 and California’s attorney general, married Nadia Maria Davis, 31, an Orange County lawyer, in 2003, the Los Angeles Times reported at the time.

It was his third marriage and her first, a Lockyer spokesman, Nathan Barankin, told the Times. He said the couple had met at Democratic Party functions and that she was expecting a baby, the newspaper reported.
Nadia Lockyer became executive director of the Alameda County Family Justice Center in 2007, according to her biography archived by the nonpartisan League of Women Voters of California Education Fund. The agency is part of the county district attorney’s office and helps victims of domestic, sexual and child abuse,

In 2010, Nadia Lockyer was elected to the Alameda County Board of Supervisors. Of the $1.64 million in contributions raised for her campaign, $1.45 million came from her husband’s state political account, according to campaign finance records.

Seriously — these are public servants, on the public payroll; and they simply lack common sense. So when I heard about this set of centers trying to replicate the business model, I put up a stink, on this blog.

I’m not really kidding — there are some problems with trying to set up “Justice Centers” as a standard. I completely forgot about that issue, but recently (March 2013) see someone else — in San Diego — decided to also say “Show us the money” of the San Diego one. [[Domestic Violence Program Sponsor Pulls Out]].

Speaking of, well, “interesting,” listen to the DV agencies arguing (last year, 2012) about the problem with teaching abstinence and forming and maintaining two-parent families to sexual assault victims; i.e., marry your way out of poverty and abstinence yourself out of rape? This was Kansas, a state that ought to simply be vacated by women, from what I can tell. However, to me, the interesting part is listening to Anne Menard of the NRSDVC (clearinghouse/check acronym, I probably have the letters reversed) who is herself also something of a consultant for the National Healthy Marriage Resource Center (NHMC) making excuses.

This is about a proposed state contract and deals with TANF. Found in the Wichita Eagle 1/24/2012:

SRS stand for the Social Services sector in Kansas…. I THINK this is a large contract with “Kansas

The Kansas Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services, which is handling the proposed contract, said the language supports goals of a federal program and is not meant to steer women into staying with abusers, that its intent is to encourage healthy relationships that prevent violence.

The concern stems from new language the state has inserted in a proposed contract for providing services to low-income victims of domestic and sexual violence who receive cash assistance from the state. The controversial terms include specifications encouraging a vendor to work with faith-based groups, to promote “unification” or “formation” of two-parent families and to pursue abstinence-based pregnancy prevention.

Those voicing the concerns — including Sedgwick County District Attorney Nola Foulston, state and national domestic violence experts and lawmakers in both parties — say such language is confusing, contradictory and insulting. A woman in crisis often is torn about whether to leave her abuser, and if she has decided to leave, worries how she will survive economically.

[[hardly confusing — just contradictory and insulting. Pushing healthy marriages to people who’ve had dangerous, nearly lethal ones shows someone has a screw loose…. We know you bled, have physical injuries, were traumatized, have PTSD, and have experienced death threats, threats to kidnap the children and are vitally concerned right now about restoring economic self-sufficiency. However, just for the record, two heads are better than one, and “the best parent is both parents.” Children without fathers are likely to lead lives of crime, poverty and delinquency and be abused…. statistically we know this is true…” (of COURSE this can’t be told the woman in trauma directly. She will find out later during a custody hearing….)…

Wichita Eagle, cont’d….

Such language is not common in domestic violence services contracts around the nation, said Anne Menard, executive director of the National Resource Center on Domestic Violence, in Harrisburg, Pa. In domestic violence services, the “primary interest that needs to be addressed is safety,” Menard said.

Ms. Menard in her other capacities at the National Healthy Marriage Resource Center (heavily supported by HHS; this is under the “Domestic Violence” link. Essentially, “resource center’ in this context means a complex and well-fleshed out website. If it means anything else, I’m not sure. The “Resources” are on-line articles, looks to me, i.e., “information.”

http://www.healthymarriageinfo.org/find-resources/index.aspx#topic=30&year=all
“Understanding Domestic Violence: Definitions, Scope, Impact and Response.

Understanding Domestic Violence is the first in a series of 5 related Guides developed for relationship and marriage educators and program administrators to help them understand and respond to domestic violence issues that may arise within their programs. This Guide provides a working definition of domestic violence and an introduction to the network of domestic violence services that has been built in the United States over the last 30 years.The full Resource Packet consists of the following Guides: Understanding Domestic Violence: Definitions, Scope, Impact and Response; Building Effective Partnerships with Domestic Violence Programs; Protocol Development and Implementation: Identifying and Responding to Domestic Violence Issues; Screening and Assessment for Domestic Violence: Attending to Safety and Culture; and After Disclosure: Responding to Domestic Violence. (Author abstract modified). (Author: Anne Menard, Addi’tl Author: The Annie E. Casey Foundation, and the NHMRC.org.)

[[smile…]]

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At the center of criticism

A proposed SRS contract contains two controversial sentences: “The vendor will be encouraged to work with faith-based and community supports to increase the unification of two (2) parent families and promote pregnancy prevention through abstinence based programs.”

“The Contractor shall administer TANF funds to promote healthy families, parenthood initiatives and pregnancy prevention through abstinence based program services to encourage the formation of two parent families within the confines of keeping individuals and families safe, reducing both child abuse and domestic violence.”
. . .
SRS now contracts with the Kansas Coalition Against Sexual and Domestic Violence, whose network of subcontractors comprises 29 domestic violence and sexual assault advocacy programs across the state***. According to the coalition, the network includes four Wichita entities: Catholic Charities Harbor House, StepStone, Wichita Area Sexual Assault Center and YWCA Women’s Crisis Center. The network also includes Family Life Center of Butler County in El Dorado, Harvey County DV/SA Task Force in Newton and Safe Homes in Winfield.
. . .

[[***that’s called CENTRALIZED CONTROL — which is what “coalition” is about to start with. They are arguing about including the promotion of healthy marriage as a condition of the grant, because the money comes in part from TANF funding, apparently…]]

Coalition members declined to be interviewed, but gave this statement: “KCSDV’s mission is to increase safety for victims and to hold perpetrators of sexual and domestic violence accountable for the harm they cause. To that end the role that government plays in this mission is obvious, both in the criminal justice system and in the state welfare system.

“KCSDV is committed to working with national, state and local governments to further these goals. Our focus, however, will always be on victim safety and services. Because the harm caused by sexual and domestic violence and stalking is widespread and impacts communities across Kansas, the importance of the partnership with our state’s administration cannot be underestimated. Until proven otherwise, KCSDV will assume that our state government shares the goal of increasing safety in our communities.”

The current contract pays the coalition nearly $1.5 million annually to provide services to about 2,000 abused women. The coalition has held the contract since 1999. Bids for the new contract are due by Jan. 31.

Muddled message
Foulston, the Sedgwick County district attorney, said the new contract language would be confusing and patronizing for domestic violence victims.

It’s difficult enough for an abused, low-income woman to become independent, but under the new language, the message the victim might take is that she needs to stay with an abusive spouse for the sake of her children, Foulston said.

Another troubling aspect is the faith-based component, which doesn’t respect the separation of church and state, Foulston said. It raises the possibility of a victim being “subjected to some kind of lecture under a faith-based initiative,” she said.

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[[(Listen to the excuse made for leaving the language in — the victims won’t be aware of it anyhow!!!) ]]