Survivors, not victims
Domestic violence cases and their lasting impacts
By Taylor Stumbaugh
Miami University journalism student
Growing up, Shawna associated love with cruelty. This association was instilled in her as she watched her father abuse her mom, and with time that abuse trickled down to the kids.
She says as she watched her mother live with the abuse, it taught Shawna not to give up on her partner, to stick through everything.
Some days her father would come home from work and the kids would have to take his shoes off. Other times, she would be called to the living room in order to hand him the remote from the coffee table in front of him.
Shawna says she doesn’t remember him ever calling her by her first name. His favorite alternative was “c**t.”
“Looking back now, I feel like it was more like we were his servants, not his children,” Shawna says. “Because there was no loving relationship between him and us kids.”
Over time, the mental abuse turned physical.
As the oldest, Shawna received the brunt of her father’s abuse, especially after he started cheating on her mother. She said she remembers the first time he hit her, after a fight between him and her mom.
“I guess I got the courage to say something to him. But not in a disrespectful manner that he felt like I was being, I was just being honest. And I stood up and told him that if he wasn’t cheating on my mom, then none of this would be going on right now,” Shawna says.
“And he hauled off and punched me in my face.”
Her father ended up going to jail, but the abuse didn’t stop after he was behind bars. The cycle continued with her first boyfriend, and then with her ex-husband.
Shawna’s not the only one going through this, though. A 2023 report from the National Network to End Domestic Violence showed that close to 2,500 Ohioans — adults and children — were served by domestic violence programs in the state.
Even though predominantly women experience domestic violence, the YWCA shelter in Hamilton is open to everyone, and it’s free.
“We’re trauma informed, so we believe everybody’s story,” Lynn Garr, assistant director of domestic violence services at YWCA, says. “We’re not detectives who investigate, we just take their situation or experience at face value.”
The domestic violence shelter, also known as the Dove House, is one of many resources in Butler County and shares the YWCA building with the Goodman Place. The Goodman side is permanent supportive housing where the residents are encouraged to stay, they pay rent and can have visitors.
“On the domestic violence side we have victims, and we call them survivors,” Garr says. “A survivor can be anyone, male, female, trans. Everyone is welcome in [the] shelter.”
The Dove House is there for the survivors who need to feel safe, have nowhere to go or are in a place in life where they need extra help. They can bring their kids and pets to the shelter; however, unlike the Goodman Place side, no visitors are allowed.
Garr says they usually like to see a transition happen within 60 to 90 days, but YWCA doesn’t give them a time to leave. Instead, they do 30 day reviews. The change can be stable housing, employment, enrolling kids in school or simply helping them begin to build a foundation of sustainability.
The Dove House works hand in hand with the Goodman Place. When a survivor is transitioning out of the shelter it’s an option for them to move in next door where rent is only 30% of their income.
One survivor, an 18-year-old choosing to go by “Gray,” says she moved into the Dove House to escape her abusive household and to begin building a future after high school graduation.
She’s grown up in different houses ranging from her adoptive parents, to an uncle and back to her biological mom who has battled substance abuse all of Gray’s life.
“Yeah, absolutely I would say the mental abuse was like a cycle,” Gray says. “… [My mom’s] just a terrible person and there was emotional abuse, verbal abuse, and it’s just like a cycle of when you don’t let her get her away.”
The pattern of abuse didn’t start with her mother, though. Gray says it’s generational, starting with her mom’s mom and spreading throughout her family.
To escape the mental abuse mixed with occasional love bombing from her mom, Gray looked toward YWCA for help.
To stay at the Dove House, survivors call the domestic violence shelter number and the shelter takes whatever information they’re willing to give — including name, number and if they’re from Butler County to ensure the Dove House is serving the community.
“[They] give preliminary information over the phone, as much as a person is willing to supply, asking what’s going on, what’s the situation, if it’s indeed they’re fleeing from them or actively fleeing from domestic violence,” Garr says. “That’s the first criteria.”
The second criteria is a background check.
Garr says they do this to see if someone’s been kicked out before, if there are any red flags or previous altercations. She says very little will keep a person out of the shelter and the check is on a case by case basis. However, if someone comes back on the sexual offender registry, they won’t be approved.
“Say for example, they were in shelter and they were asked to leave for you know, maybe they brought in drug paraphernalia, you know, that won’t keep you out of shelter, but that’s just something that we’ll be aware of if they were to ever come back,” Garr says.
In Gray’s case, her high school guidance counselor and principal helped her get into the shelter as well as helped move her in.
Causes of domestic violence
In 2023, Butler County had a total of 1,010 charges, according to the 2023 Domestic Violence Report. Other Ohio counties similar in size to Butler also experienced high rates. Stark County had a total of 1,545, Lucas County had 1,765 and Lorain County had 1,110.
There is no one way to pinpoint the exact causes of domestic violence, but Garr says a major factor is relationship dynamics.
Garr says she’s seen many occasions where people have met their significant others at homeless shelters and at addiction clinics.
“So now you’re talking about trauma bonding, and [trying] to build a relationship on top of, you know, our trauma. So that obviously becomes difficult if you have two people that are not healing, that are not receiving proper services and [not] working on themselves,” Garr says.
Erica Fries, the Women Helping Women (WHW) advocate on Miami University’s campus, says she thinks domestic violence has increased in Butler County because of the housing crisis, inflation, financial dependency and drug use.
“People who are just getting out of an abusive relationship,” Fries says, “or maybe their abuser was the sole financial provider, or that sort of thing is obviously the struggle of ‘If I leave, I’m going to be living on the streets and etc.’ So it just further perpetuates that violence.”
Fries says Women Helping Women has strong ties with the Dove House, even sending survivors there when they have room. However, outside of recommending the shelter, Fries said the WHW office on Miami’s campus is centered mainly around Title IX and different safety accommodations.
Domestic violence cases on campus aren’t nonexistent, though. Since being hired a year ago, Fries said she’s had two cases where she’s directed survivors to county courts to a get a protection order.
Garr also mentioned the cost of housing going up in recent years being connected to domestic violence cases, but she said there are more ways than just costs being a cause for housing issues.
Misdemeanors, felonies, criminal histories, previous evictions and open cases can all prevent someone from qualifying for housing. Garr says people can be evicted for a number of different reasons, a domestic violence situation being one of them, but it’s still on someone’s record.
“Landlords are not lawyers, they are not judges, they are not police officers,” Garr says. “If the lease is violated, for whatever reason, it’s their job to evict, and that could be a domestic violence survivor, and so going to get another place to live [your record] impacts you.”
Garr also believes an underlying factor is a lack of early intervention and how Hamilton specifically doesn’t have a lot of opportunities, causing people to depend on their partners more.
“I think the overall takeaway is domestic violence and homelessness do go hand-in-hand, although there are separate factors,” Garr says. “But I think there is even a more underlying issue from the domestic violence and the homelessness and how, I’m gonna say survivors, but I’m really kind of just talking about everybody, and how people end up facing one or both of those situations.”
Reporting the incident
Lieutenant Lara Fening with the Oxford Police Department (OPD) says domestic violence cases can be difficult to navigate because in order for officers to make an arrest they need hard evidence.
For instance, they need evidence of injury as well as photographs of the scene because it’s likely the suspect will deny anything happened.
“If we don’t make an arrest when there’s an injury we better have a good reason why we didn’t,” Fening says, “and that may be something like a witness saw they fell down or they ran into a fence causing that scratch [not an abuser].”
According to the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP), every department should have a domestic violence policy, but they don’t need to create one from scratch. IACP developed a domestic violence model policy “to help departments of any size put in place the priorities, guidelines and procedures to be followed by law enforcement officers in response to domestic violence calls.”
Part of IACP’s policy states “law enforcement [is encouraged] to make an arrest when probable cause exists, and when arrest is authorized by law, instead of using dispute mediation, separation or other law enforcement intervention techniques.”
Although the police have resources to help domestic violence victims, Shawna says they weren’t helpful in her case.
She says there was a time after her divorce while her children were still young when her ex-husband would call the police on her. In their divorce papers, there was a section dedicated for certain times he would call their two boys during the day. It was so in depth, she said she had to tell him in advance who the kids would be around, as well.
“It got so bad he would constantly call every time I had the kids, all day long, and when I didn’t answer the phone,” Shawna says, “he would start flipping out and start yelling and screaming.”
One specific time, she was back living with her parents and her oldest son was out at the pond with Shawna’s mom, his grandma, and the youngest was asleep. Shawna says he kept “calling, and calling, and calling” and everything she said to him “wasn’t good enough.” So, she turned her phone off.
Next thing she knew, a police officer was banging on her window for a wellness check of her two sons, Connor and Logan.
After the officer checked on both sons and saw they were OK, he said, “I will take care of him when I get back to the station.”
“But even though they say that, nothing was done,” Shawna says. “I don’t understand that. So, he got away with doing something ridiculous, not to harm me but to make me look like I was doing something bad because now growing up, all my kids know is that daddy calls the police on mommy all the time.”
Fening says even if police suspect people are using wellness checks to harass an ex, they can’t ignore them.
Shawna says that was the third or fourth time her ex-husband called the police on her.
Years later, the abuse followed Shawna from her ex-husband to her most recent ex-boyfriend. She said her Parkinson’s was acting up due to a lack of proper medication and mental stress, causing her to have a mental break.
Shawna says her ex-boyfriend tried to put her in a nursing home as well as a psych ward because “she couldn’t be a parent to her son.”
He succeeded in the latter by kicking her out.
“I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know where to go,” Shawna says. “I had no family.”
So, she made her way to the hospital at UC West Chester. Her psych doctor there got in touch with her case worker who got her into the Dove House.
“The women there are fabulous. They were so sweet to me,” Shawna says. “They told me to take the [first] 30 days and heal as I had been so traumatized.”
Now, after 90 days in the Dove House, Shawna is in her own apartment.
