Remembering Del Martin

“When you add our society’s propensity toward violence with ageism and sexism, you have a dangerous situation.”

Del Martin, 1995


The flags at San Francisco’s City Hall flew at half-mast on August 28 in memory of Del Martin, a pioneering figure in the fight for the rights of women, lesbians, survivors of domestic violence, and the elderly. Her seminal book Battered Wives, published in 1976 and updated in 1981 (Volcano Press), has been acclaimed as the first to explore domestic violence in the United States. In it, Del made the case that domestic violence wasn’t grounded in interpersonal dynamics but rather, in historical attitudes toward women, economy inequalities, and inadequacies in the legal and social service systems. Just two months before her death at the age of 87, she was still making history. She and her partner, Phyllis Lyon, were the first gay couple to be "remarried" when the California Supreme Court declared marriage for same-sex couples a fundamental right. Their earlier marriage, along with thousands of others, was nullified four years ago.

In the mid 1990s I interviewed Del for nexus, a publication for affiliates of the National Committee for the Prevention of Elder Abuse. At the time, she was serving on the Advisory Committee for the San Francisco Consortium for Elder Abuse’s “Developing Services for Older Battered Women,” a pilot project funded by the Administration on Aging (DHHS) to explore the link between elder abuse and domestic violence. Her insights and advice are as relevant to our field today as they were when we spoke 13 years ago.

Domestic Violence Activist Speaks out on Elder Abuse
The domestic violence movement has always been a grass roots, self help movement. In the early days, many feminists who had given up on the system got involved. To a great extent, it was women who had left abusive relationships who ran the shelters and led the movement. At one point, we even had an underground railroad to send women who were leaving abusive relationships to other states with other identities. Some women would go from state to state to get away from abusive men. Just leaving a relationship doesn’t mean a woman is free.

The concept of support groups came from the women’s movement. Earlier, when we talked about support groups, we discussed whether women who were not able or willing to leave abusive relationships should be in groups with women who had chosen to leave. My feeling is that it’s wonderful for these women to interact with others who have made it. Somebody who’s had the same experiences is going to be more effective than a professional who knows the concepts but who doesn’t have the personal involvement and understanding.

The feminist viewpoint is “we don’t want to compete, we’ve got to work together to accomplish anything.” When California first allocated funds for starting a pilot project in domestic violence, we said “okay, we’ll take the money but we would like to split it up and use it in various locations.” We didn’t want to compete for money, we wanted to work together. The state had never heard of that before. Ultimately, six pilot projects were initiated.

Domestic violence programs have long recognized that some of the worst cases of physical abuse involved elderly victims. Domestic violence against the elderly is more difficult to address because it’s complicated by dependency issues and having to deal with pensions or Social Security. I have also thought about how difficult it is to reach the frail elderly who are at the mercy of their caretakers. Those are the ones I am really worried about.

Victims need to know that they are not alone. Older, abused individuals often think they are the “only one” and remain silent. Because I am a lesbian, I understand the “only one” belief very well. But the only way you can do anything about a problem is to talk about it and discuss what you are going to do about it. You may not do anything immediately; I know from experience that people will write down the telephone number of an agency and call a couple of years later. This has been true in both domestic violence and outreach to lesbians. I think the point is, if you don’t do anything, there may be an escalation of violence.’’

We also need to get more information out to the media-TV and print in particular-because there are so many people who cannot be reached any other way. There has been more media attention to domestic violence lately and we need to keep pushing it. It may sound cynical, but elder abuse is another angle, and the media is always looking for “another angle.” When my book came out, it got a lot of attention but the hardest thing was to maintain the focus on domestic violence. People from the media would say they had already done one program on it. Well, one program does not do it. It is a continuing problem. We need to identify people at the stations who will cover the issue.

My kick right now is the urgency of political awareness and involvement at the national level. Service providers need to be keyed in politically. If they don’t have political clout, they are vulnerable. We also need to be involved at the state level. In California, the Alliance on Domestic Violence held trainings years ago on how to influence legislators. One of our goals was to help legislators understand the connection between child abuse and spousal abuse. People should get lists of senators, members of congress, and committees, and make contact when issues come up.

We also need to change societal values. We need to raise everyone’s consciousness about ageism, which is rampant, and violence. We’ve tried to get rid of guns in the home because we know that they are more likely to be used on people who live there than to defend the home. When you add our society’s propensity toward violence with ageism and sexism, you have a dangerous situation.

NIJ Funds Study on Financial Abuse

The National Institute of Justice recently awarded a 2-year, $300,000 grant to University of Virginia law professor Thomas Hafemeister and psychiatry professor Shelly Jackson to study financial elder abuse in Virginia. Hafemeister, whose “Financial Abuse of the Elderly in Domestic Settings” appeared as an appendix in the National Research Council’s Elder Mistreatment: Abuse Neglect, and Exploitation in an Aging America, is also the director of legal studies at UV’s Institute of Law, Psychiatry, and Public Policy.

Working with the state’s APS program, investigators will interview elders who have recently been victimized, their caseworkers, and their caregivers about what happened and why, the state’s response, and how effective those interviewed thought the response was. The study aims to shed light on how financial exploitation compares to other forms of abuse and to get different parties’ perspectives on cases. Interviewers will include students from the law school and grad students in psychology and counseling.

Thanks to Readers for the Following:

Special thanks to researcher Ola Barnett for her detailed and thoughtful response to my January 7, 07 post, The "De-feminization" of domestic violence and what it means for elder abuse. Ola is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Psychology at Pepperdine University and the co-author of Sage Publication’s Family Violence Across the Lifespan: An Introduction. To read it, use the “blog archive” on the right to retrieve the original post and scroll down to comments.

Thanks too to Elizabeth Podnieks, Assistant Professor of English at Ryerson University, for alerting me to the July-August bulletin of the International Committee for the Prevention of Elder Abuse (INPEA), which describes the first World Elder Abuse Awareness Day. Events ranged from balloon races in the UK, to quilt-making in Canada, to wearing white socks in South Africa. The bulletin describes other events in Uganda, Sweden, Gambia, Nigeria, Israel, Albania, Korea, Ireland, India, and Cameroon, which included theatrical performances, proclamations, and educational events. The bulletin is on INPEA’s website at http://www.inpea.net/index.html

And to Laura Ivkovich, Program Specialist for the Office for Victims of Crime who alerted me to the “Enhanced Training and Services to End Violence and Abuse of Women Later in Life Program. The application deadline is February 7, 2007. For more information, see http://www.usdoj.gov/ovw/docs/enhanced121806.pdf

And to Joan Allen, coordinator of the Ventura County Financial Abuse Specialist Team, for sending "Fighting Financial Fraud," a new video the team produced with funding from the Archstone Foundation. Four scenarios are presented in which elders fall prey to identity theft, an investment scam, a door-to-door sales scam, and telemarketing fraud. In each case, victims are given a “second chance”; the scenes are replayed and the victims avoid abuse by taking simple precautions. The CD is available for viewing at www.seniorconcerns.org

The “De-feminization” of Domestic Violence and What it Means for Elder Abuse

In 1994, the San Francisco Consortium got a grant from the Administration on Aging to develop services for older battered women. I was delighted. A few years earlier, I’d collaborated with the Family Violence Prevention Fund on a series of talks on elder domestic violence for aging and DV service providers. Since nobody knew much about the subject then, my co-trainer from FVPF talked about DV for half an hour, and I talked about elder abuse for the other half. It was in the car on the way home that we tried to figure out the connections.

Amazing things happened. Once, I heard that a woman who worked at an agency we’d just presented to had refused to attend. Afterwards, others approached her to ask why. As they’d expected, she was a victim herself, terrified, and unready to deal with it. The short story is that with their help, she relocated and got a job with a sister agency in another city, all in a matter of weeks. When I called my co-trainer from FVPF to tell her the news, her response was, “Yeah, we get that a lot.”

Since our field was struggling to understand why so many clients refuse help, I was tremendously impressed by her insights into why battered women do what they do, when they do it, and why. Grounded in feminist ideology, traditional DV theory blames deeply-rooted, gender-based inequalities and discrimination for why men batter and get away with. It recognizes the intense cultural, psychological, and economic forces that trap women in violent relationships. And, that violence doesn’t occur randomly; it follows predictable patterns, which, when understood, suggest ways to help.

Once we got the AoA grant, we pulled together an advisory committee of reps from the DV and elder abuse networks. At our first meeting, we tried to come up with a working definition of DV. Someone proposed one that was commonly used at the time: “An escalating pattern of violence by men against their intimate partners to gain power and control.”

Immediately, the elder abuse folks wanted to tinker. “But adult children abuse their parents, and it happens in the home, which makes it “domestic,” they argued. “And it’s often related to financial abuse so we should include that too.” Things heated up quickly, and I imagined the project going belly up. The deadlock was eventually broken when we started talking about cases, (incidentally, I've always found this to be an effective antidote to turfism). Other AoA-funded projects were having similar struggles with varying resolutions. One project, for example, included abuse by male offspring but only if it met the other DV criteria.

Today, we wouldn’t be having the same debate. Definitions of DV have changed radically over the years for several reasons. As DV programs reached out to women of color, they met resistance from many who argued that while sexism plays a role in family violence, other social injustices do too. The Sacred Circle National Resource Center, for example, emphasizes the role of colonization and the disruption of family life in family violence among Indians. Duluth’s Domestic Abuse Intervention Project changed its definition, conceding that “all forms of institutionalized oppression, including racism, classism, heterosexism, and ageism increase the vulnerability of women…” Gay and lesbian advocates challenged traditional gender-based theory by exposing violence among same-sex intimate partners.

The elder abuse network has contributed to this “de-feminization” of DV. Much of the literature on elder DV cites prevalence studies showing that spousal abuse is the most common form of elder abuse. The same studies show that men are at somewhat greater risk. What they don’t explain is that these studies include dementia-related violence, which is clearly not DV.

More recently, men’s advocacy groups have claimed that men get abused too, by women, with some claiming that men are at equal or even greater risk. Critics argue that most of these studies use the same research tool, which has serious limitations. For example, it leaves out important forms of violence, including sexual assault, stalking, and intimidation, and fails to differentiate between offensive and defensive acts. Still, these groups have gained traction. They have initiated lawsuits claiming unlawful gender discrimination by DV programs that don’t serve men, and a 2005 amendment to the Violence Against Women Act specifies that “any grants or other activities for assistance to victims of domestic violence, dating violence, stalking, sexual assault or trafficking in persons shall be construed to cover both male and female victims.”

All of these pressures and challenges have obscured the definition of DV to the point that many prominent groups have abandoned the term altogether, replacing it with "intimate partner violence," "violence against women," "late-life domestic abuse," and other terms that are equally obscure. I find this lack of clarity troubling since DV laws like mandatory arrest and no-drop policies are powerful tools that should only be used for the purposes they were intended for, empowering the disempowered.

While nobody would argue that men are abused by women and deserve protection, the whole point of the DV movement was that radical reforms were needed to counteract historical injustices that rendered the tradition system ineffective. Clearly, those who have not experienced these injustices don’t need special protections. Many believe that the "battered men’s movement" has less to do with a genuine concern for male victims and more with political agendas regarding family courts and other anti-feminist concerns (some men's advocacy groups were originally formed to address issues like child custody). This backlash threatens what are already over-extended resources for battered women.

The elder abuse network is divided when it comes to the role of gender and other societal forces in elder DV (and elder abuse in general). Some have criticized us for being “gender neutral,” and others have called for discussion about the cumulative effects of gender, age, race, and class in raising older women’s vulnerability.

Others reject feminist and social justice analyses altogether. Much of the mainstream literature on older battered women is devoid of any references to feminism, gender, or social justice. I believe that’s a mistake. To assume that these factors don't affect risk or victims’ ability to protect themselves, assuming instead that abuse is only about interpersonal conflict, is myopic and does a disservice to the elderly women we serve. Not to mention compromising hard won battles fought by our colleagues in DV.

The DV movement is in a state of flux. In addition to the backlash from men, there is debate within the field. Victim dissatisfaction with criminal justice responses and such problems as the escalating number of women being arrested as co-combatants, which I’ve talked about in earlier posts, have led some to suggest that greater attention to other approaches is needed, including helping abused women attain financial self-sufficiency.

There has been little debate or discussion within our field about any of these issues or even about what we mean by the term “elder domestic violence.” I believe there should be. How things shake down in the DV world, and where we stand in relation to it, will have significant repercussions for those we serve.

I'd welcome your comments.

Meditations on Mediation

My old friend Fred Hertz is arguably the nation’s leading expert on “gay divorce.” A lawyer, he represents partners in break-ups and has written a book on the subject, been interviewed on NPR, appeared on Oprah, and is frequently quoted in the press.

So, I was more than a little surprised when he told me recently that he doesn’t want to litigate cases anymore but instead, use his skills to help couples stay out of court. After spending years handling mostly property ownership disputes, he’s concluded that conflicts involving people in personal relationships are better resolved through mediation than the adversarial process. Even in “successful” cases, where his clients prevail, they often come out feeling bitter and disappointed.

I’ve been interested in the use of mediation in elder abuse cases for years despite the bad rap it’s had in our field. The negative bias is a spillover from domestic violence theory, which holds that power differences between women, the victims in most cases, and their male batterers make mediation inherently unfair and dangerous. That’s because of institutionalized inequalities and barriers to justice, resources and protection. But most elder abuse cases don’t involve societal injustices. When you take that factor out of the equation, what's left are the inequalities and unfair advantages that exist between individuals, which aren’t nearly as insurmountable.

Fred’s cases often involve extreme imbalances of power with respect to personality, money or class. “When I ask clients why they contributed to the purchase of homes but never went on title or why they contributed more than their share, they often tell me that’s how their partners said it was going to be and they were too intimidated to refuse." Sounds to me like a lot of the elder abuse cases we see.

According to him, mediation is often the best way to resolve these imbalances, especially for the weaker person who has the most to gain. As intimidating as it can be, it’s much safer and cheaper than litigation. He cautions, however, that whenever serious power imbalances exist, mediation has to be structured in a way that protects weaker parties, which usually means that they have advocates present, or at a minimum, mediators who are willing to take on this challenge. “Traditionally, mediation hasn’t been used in cases that involve any sort of intimidation or fear on one party's part, so mediators need special training and different protocols.”

Reticence toward mediation extends beyond the elder abuse network into the broader aging services community. That's according to the Center for Social Gerontology of Ann Arbor, Michigan, which has been pioneering the use of mediation as an alternative to guardianship since the early 1990s. In 2001, they released a four-state study, which found that mediation was effective in helping disputing parties in guardianship cases reach agreements in three-quarters of cases. They’ve also explored the use of mediation in elder/family caregiver conflicts. Despite the promise it holds, mediation has been slow to catch on, which prompted the Center to form the National Elder Mediation Network earlier this year.

Just as we can’t apply one-size-fit-all interventions to the widely divergent cases we see, neither can we afford to reject interventions wholesale. Instead, we should be exploring when mediation is appropriate and when it’s not. It would be a shame to let misplaced biases get in the way.

Follow-up on Government-Subsidized Elder Abuse

Although I welcome feedback, apparently my blog doesn’t. Seems it’s been rejecting comments. I’m exploring how to fix the problem, but in the meantime, I wanted to pass along an item from Lori Delagrammatikas, program coordinator of Project Master at San Diego State University’s School of Social Work:

Riverside County (California) convinced an IHSS administrative hearing judge to deny a client the right to continue to use an abusive independent provider using the argument that the purpose of the IHSS program is to maintain the client safely at home. (Clients who have complaints about state benefits and services can request hearings, which are presided over by administrative law judges from the California Department of Social Services. Clients [and their advocates] and representatives from their counties present their sides.)

This was a domestic violence case and the boyfriend was not only the IP but also the client's authorized representative. He was very violent, and when he came to the hearing, he was verbally abusive to the hearing judge! It was obvious that paying this particular provider caused the client to be "unsafe" at home, undermining the purpose of the IHSS program. Unfortunately, the judge's ruling was for this individual case and did not set a precedent for other cases.

I’d be interested in hearing about what’s happening in other states.

Georgia Anetzberger, assistant professor at Cleveland State University, wrote suggesting the need for an in-depth article on this topic and more research. Georgia, by the way, did some of the seminal research on family abusers and has continued to do cutting edge work for over two decades. I fully agree about the need for research, especially studies to help identify high-risk IPs, which could serve to educate administrative hearing judges (and others) and alert consumers to risks.

I’ve also received many positive comments about the blog, suggestions for publicizing it, and ideas for future topics. Thank you all, and I’ll make every effort to oblige. Also, feel free to comment and let me know if you have problems doing so.
Lisa

Offenders, Victims and Restorative Justice

Last month, I presented at the Offender Treatment, Victim Services, Restorative Justice conference in Miami, which was sponsored by the Institute of Evidence-Based and Best Practices. The conference was a bold one–it’s not that usual to bring victims’ and offenders’ advocates together, and when you throw in sessions on applying restorative justice (RJ) to domestic violence (DV), you know they were pushing the limits.

RJ draws from traditional Indian justice traditions. Rather than treating crime as a matter of guilt and innocence, it frames it as harm that affects not just victims, but offenders and the broader community. It assumes that certain conflicts, particularly ones involving families, are best resolved by repairing and improving relationships and controlling risk, rather than simply punishing offenders. It offers victims, abusers, and the community opportunities to come together to consider why crimes happened, what can be done to repair the harm, and how to prevent future harm. It also holds that society has an obligation to help offenders make amends and reintegrate them into the community. RJ isn’t a single technique but a variety of alternatives ranging from mediation to peacemaking courts to family conferences, which can be carried out with court involvement, under court supervision, or as an alternative to court intervention.

Critics see RJ as “light on crime,” offender focused, and dangerous to victims. Anti-DV advocates hold that mediation is impossible between victims and abusers because of imbalances in power. Others claim that involving victims’ and offenders’ friends, support systems, and communities, which is done in conferencing, won’t work because these networks may actually support, rather than discourage, DV.

Supporters counter that RJ often demands accountability where the traditional system doesn’t, particularly in cases involving first time or minor offenders who typically deny their guilt, get off with warnings, and never assume responsibility for what they’ve done. One of the speakers, Donna Coker, a nationally known expert in domestic violence, is among those who suggest that RJ approaches can and should be added to the arsenal of anti-DV tools. She’s written extensively on the limitations of criminal justice approaches to DV, including the “unintended consequences” of mandatory arrest policies. Because the laws fail to distinguish between one-time versus chronic and minor versus severe violence, they’ve resulted in dramatic increases in arrests of women, particularly women of color, as “mutual combatants.” This is in spite of research suggesting that most are acting in self-defense. Recent studies on recidivism also contradict early research that showed that arresting offenders reduced DV—the newer studies suggest that arrest reduces violence in some cases but increases it in others.

Coker and others urge caution in using RJ with DV and emphasize the need to ensure that women are safe and not being overtly or covertly coerced to participate. Among the advantages of RJ are that it offers victims a greater voice in the process, can potentially disrupt social and family support for battering, and provides women with opportunities to engage their families and friends in confronting their abusers.

What does all this have to do with elder abuse? I don’t really know. But the fact that so many elderly victims refuse to initiate punitive action against abusive family members for fear of loosing their relationships makes me think that RJ deserves our attention. I’ve been following the few elder abuse programs I’m aware of that use RJ and was pleased to hear that the director of one, Arlene Groh of Community Care Access Centre of Waterloo Region Ontario, will be presenting at the NAPSA conference in San Francisco in September. Another exciting model project was conducted by the Jamestown S’klallum tribe in Washington state, which uses family conferencing to address conflict in caregiving systems.

We’ve made huge strides in improving the criminal justice system’s response to elder abuse in recent years, which is critical. I don’t see RJ as a threat but rather, as providing opportunities for getting more juice out of the criminal justice system by supplementing court authority with the power of family and community relationships. While the research is sparse, there’s evidence that RJ approaches increase restitution rates and reduce recidivism. Victims’ satisfaction rates are higher. The Miami conference was billed as the “first annual” and I strongly urge anyone who’s interested in expanding the scope and focus of elder abuse prevention to watch for the next one.