Former Shelter Worker Tells All: “80%-90% of the ‘victims’ there are not victims”

Thursday, May 27, 2010


By Abusegate Bob

Fabricated DV stories. Abusive treatment of shelter residents. Fudged utilization numbers. And more. This eye-opening account comes from a former shelter worker…

I used to work at a shelter here in Texas and really had my eyes opened. I went there thinking I was going to help victims. Well, an estimated 80%-90% of the “victims” there are not victims. Most are just homeless.

The “victims” call the hotline to get into the shelter. When asked what the abuse was and when, they say “None.” So the worker tells her that she will not qualify to come in. The caller then says, “Oh, my boyfriend hit me,” and that gets her in!!

Or a grown woman would call and say, “My mother threw me out because I wasn’t helping with the bills” and “My mother called me a ‘bitch’.” Being called a bitch was all it took to qualify!!

And many of the “victims” came in repeatedly. They leave and come back a week later and they are allowed to do this forever. There was once a woman who said her husband had been dead 10 years and was abusive before he died. Because she had been abused in her lifetime, she was let in.

And the abuse by women living in the shelter to the other women in the shelter is rampant. Sometimes that will get a woman kicked out and put on the no-admit list.

However, I am not saying that partner violence doesn’t exist. We had some very brutal cases, and a couple of women who ended up being murdered after they left and went back to the boyfriend. The point is, the occurrence of violence was nowhere near what the shelter director reported.

They also had a Victims of Crime Act (VOCA) grant. When I brought to the director’s attention that we should not be reporting the ones (we had to report for the 6-month and year-end progress reports) who came in with only verbal abuse since verbal abuse is not a crime. But she wouldn’t listen to me.

Another big problem was that when our “numbers” went down, the director would call a meeting and ask what we were doing wrong. “We have got to get our numbers back up or else we’ll lose money,” she would say. One time she was asked, “Well, isn’t it a good thing for there to be less need for our shelter and that abuse is going down?” The director said, “Oh no, domestic abuse isn’t going down, it’s just that the hotline workers aren’t letting people in!!”

Now, an unusual thing was that the director was not too much into the feminist philosophy, thank goodness, and she even votes Republican. But she just wanted to have a big shelter that needed lots of money to serve their victims.

Another time some DOJ statistics came out that showed there were more victims in a dating or co-habitating relationship than married. I showed this to the community education department, hoping they would emphasize the need for marriage and intact families. Of course I was dismissed. That didn’t fit the agenda. And I saw that this was so true, an estimated 99% of the women who came in were living with an unmarried partner — and that goes for the ones who really suffered abuse and the ones who had not.

And on the questionnaire we gave to the victims, two of the questions were 1) Did he have a “special chair” that only he was allowed to sit in, and 2) Did he demand the remote control? Let’s hope some crazy legislature doesn’t try to add these to the legal definition of domestic violence!!

Sincerely,

A Former Shelter Worker