Whose Side Are You On, Anyway?

Kat Diane
Kat Diane
Aug 9, 2017 · 5 min read

An Open Letter to Every Domestic Violence Service That Has Ever Denied Aid to Victims

Dear Domestic Violence Services, Child Protective Services, And Adult Protective Services,

I’d like to start by giving a wholehearted thank you to one of you in
particular — Safe Haven of Fort Worth. Thank you, Safe Haven. Thank all of you and those you network with. You gave me hope in a time in my life where I stared into an abyss of chaos and fear. Where I wanted to end my life because I felt I had been permanently damaged.

Thank you for hearing me. For seeing me. For taking me seriously. For never once dismissing my abuse as “not bad enough,” for helping me work through setting up a safety plan, for making sure I could get back on my feet after all of the horrendous, toxic s*** I lived through for 8 years. For offering groups for victims like me to get together and find common ground, find peace, find hope. For understanding I’d flown over a hundred miles to get away from my abusers, was safely living with my parents, but for still welcoming me with open arms for your non-residential services.

The rest of you domestic violence services, any of you who deviate from Safe Haven’s standards? Sit down. Shut up. Listen for once in your God damned lives.

I’m about to tell you all something you all likely know, but will never openly own.

You. Don’t. Actually. Help. Victims.

Or at least not in any meaningful way.

I want you to imagine you have a gun held to your head by someone you’ve lived with for at least several months, if not years. This person has repeatedly left you with every reason to believe this moment would come.

But it’s been progressive. It didn’t start with guns. It didn’t even start with physical abuse. It started with the way they’d talk to you, talk about you, about the things they’d make you do, the things they’d do to you, the things they’d refuse to let you do, the things you weren’t to say to others. It started with controlling you. Your environment. Your life.

When that gun is pointed at your head, who do you call?

If you’re lucky enough to have the split second chance to run to a safe place, the police, of course.

But if you’re not?

You don’t call anyone. You can’t. Because that would just make the person with the gun on them extra angry, and when your life is on the line, you aren’t going to do anything that might provoke the person threatening you.

No one who is in immediate fear for their life is going to call your hotline.

So then I demand an answer to this: why the f*** is it, that when I called a domestic violence hotline in the Bay Area of California, begging for a safe place to stay, that I was more or less laughed at and told I couldn’t be helped unless I was in immediate, physical danger, within the span of the prior or next two hours?

Let me tell you f***ers something.

I was living in terror. I had been assaulted before, but seeing as I had a nontraditional relationship dynamic (polyamory) with two abusers, not one, this meant tag teaming on their part. Do you know how much courage it took to pick up the phone and call your hotline?

One never physically abused me. That was my soon-to-be ex-husband. He abused me every way imaginable except that way. And I think he knew better — he knew that if he hit me, I’d stop taking his bull**** and leave.

The other was a mutual partner of my ex-husband and mine. He was a transman. He abused me every way except financially.

Do you remember how he physically abused me, STAND! of the Bay Area? (Yes, I’m calling you out, because I called you and your response was the one that left me the most hopeless). He slammed open our patio porch, threw two bottles of my Xanax at me, and told me to “ go f***ing kill myself.”

While that was the only case of physical violence I endured while he lived with us, let me make something clear — I spent the next two months being told I was “making a big deal out of nothing” by my ex-husband and that man, living in fear, fully believing there would be a next time, and having to prepare myself in the event it did, for fleeing and calling the police. I was being severely abused in almost every other sense, including sexually, but I would have hoped it wouldn’t have been a God damned domestic violence shelter echoing their sentiments.

Because everyone else I confided in was terrified for me. Horrified. Sad. Heartbroken. Wanted me to get the f*** out to safety.

But not you.

And I’m not alone.

Just today, a woman told me she has been failed by domestic violence services 3 separate times. She lives in New York state. One of those times, she was failed by CPS, who thought it was reasonable “discipline” from her mother to keep her and her 3-year-old brother from being able to breathe, by choking them.

Then again when she was sexually assaulted, and the state troopers insisted she “wanted it.”

Once more, very recently, when she was in an abusive relationship with a man. I’d like to give a big “f*** you” to Equinox Domestic Violence Services who wouldn’t help her simply because he’d never laid hands on her.

You see, the common problem those of you running these services seem to overlook is physical abuse isn’t the only abuse, and all physical abuse starts out with other types of abuse.

Let me put it bluntly — you think someone who is immediately fearing for their life should call you as soon as that’s happening.

I think you simply set the goal posts like this so you can have a reason to turn countless victims, many of whom will die or end up critically injured, away, simply because you don’t want to justify the financial expense of helping those victims before their situations reach critical mass.

You see, your problem lies in side-stepping preventative interventions.

If a person goes to the doctor, has a family history of colon cancer, and is having disturbing GI symptoms, would you consider his doctor is “doing his job well” if he told that patient “well, it’s definitely not metastasized yet, so I can’t help you?”

F*** no! And in the event that doctor did let it metastasize, wouldn’t you be morally outraged, seeing as by the time it has, you’re basically a dead man walking?

This is true of victims of domestic violence. We can’t be saved once the gun is on us. That’s pure chance on whether the gun gets put away or the trigger gets pulled.

But you can help us when our partners are screaming at us. When they’re refusing to let us leave the house. When they refuse to let us have control of our finances. When our parents are punching holes in our walls. When we’re a dependent, disabled adult who is having our meal times strictly controlled with venom words thrown our way when we protest that one meal a day isn’t enough.

So, I am going to only say this once more —

Whose side are you on? The victim’s? Or the abuser’s?

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