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Thursday, June 08, 2000
By Bob Batz Jr., Post-Gazette Staff Writer
In the effort to check violence against women, the federal government has been picking up the check. Progress has been picking up, too, right down to state and local levels.
In the past five years, the United States has appropriated more than $1.6 billion to implement new initiatives to train criminal justice professionals and help victims -- most of it via the Violence Against Women Act and the Justice Department's Office on Violence Against Women.
These positive steps helped earn the government a "B minus" for action on violence against women from a national women's group.
That momentum is being embraced by people throughout Pennsylvania who want to keep moving forward with developments such as a statewide professional training bank, countywide coalitions to coordinate responses to violent crime, even an on-campus victim advocacy center.
The national group, US Women Connect, is participating this week in a U.N. conference on the worldwide status of women. The gathering is reviewing progress made on a dozen "critical areas of concern" identified by the 1995 U.N. Conference on Women in Beijing.
There, violence against women was broadly defined as "any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual or psychological harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty" -- everything from domestic violence to international trafficking.
On the report card USWC prepared for this "Beijing +5" conference, the United States did better on violence than it did on most of the other issues. But USWC graders note that the nation still needs improvement in many areas.
"There's much, much work to do," says the group's spokeswoman on this issue, Olivia Puentes-Reynolds. The San Diego resident is part of the California Women's Agenda, a group taking the lead in assessing progress in women's and girls' rights and empowerment.
She can talk for a long time about good things that have happened since the Beijing conference. But she can talk even longer about what more advocates want to see happen. At the top of that list is for Congress to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act, which expires in October.
The act, passed in 1994, just before the Beijing conference, is credited with changing how the country views and treats domestic violence, sexual assault and other crimes against women. For instance, it created new federal criminal offenses for crossing state borders to stalk or commit domestic violence. It also created the National Advisory Council on Violence Against Women, co-chaired by Attorney General Janet Reno and Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna E. Shalala, that is due to release an Agenda for the Nation on Violence Against Women.
But as Puentes-Reynolds stresses, new strategies won't go anywhere without continued funding. She says USWC would like to see the act made a permanently funded law. They'd like the same thing for the advisory council. "If we don't have those [institutions] in place, then the work is going to be lost."
There's been so much work, by so many groups with acronym names, that it can make one's head swim trying to take it all in.
But you can focus on the money.
The Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency administers the act's grants here. According to spokeswoman Alison Delsite, the state's total since 1995 is $25.8 million (A few programs have been funded directly by the Justice Department, such as construction of a Victims Advocacy Center at California University of Pennsylvania through a $250,000 grant last year.)
This year, Pennsylvania's "STOP grants" (for "Services Training Officers Prosecutors") totaled $5.9 million. They were distributed to 46 of the state's 66 counties to develop coordinated approaches to reduce domestic violence and sexual assault crimes. Allegheny County received $150,000, which is being shared by the district attorney's office, law enforcement agencies and six providers of victims' services.
Attorney Lorraine Bittner is the legal systems advocate for the Women's Center and Shelter of Greater Pittsburgh. In fact, act money helped hire her in 1996.
The local coalition also includes Pittsburgh Action Against Rape, the Center for Victims of Violent Crime, Alle-Kiski Area Hope Center, Crisis Center North and Womanspace. In the past four years, the coalition has helped make gains that have improved women's lives, including the establishment last year of the district attorney's domestic violence unit, which is dedicated to prosecuting such cases -- about 950 last year.
"It's been one of the biggest steps forward in this county," Bittner says.
The coalition, which met for four hours on Tuesday, also has developed evidence collection checklists for police and has helped train city officers. Next, they'll work on guiding local police departments with their policies and procedures.
This kind of work was happening before 1995, Bittner points out. And a lot goes on outside the act, inside schools and hospitals. One new grass-roots program to train police officers and community workers to recognize signs of domestic violence is called "Moms & Cops." It was put on for the second time last week in Braddock by the Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic and other groups, including the Pittsburgh police sex assault and family crisis squad.
Domestic violence response programs started under the act are being continued without act funding, said city force Cmdr. Gwen Elliott. "The only thing I thought was missing from the grant, and still is missing, are funds to deal with the children of abuse."
Bittner has complaints, too, such as how the county's STOP money doesn't go too far when divided amongst so many groups. But she, like others, gives a lot of credit to the Justice Department, saying the STOP grant program "brought a bigger group together to look at this in a countywide way."
Such consolidation of resources is happening elsewhere, too.
At the state level, $269,000 was granted this year to the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Domestic Violence to work with the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Rape and the Pennsylvania District Attorneys' Institute to establish a "trainer bank" to provide specialized training for criminal justice workers.
Next month, the anti-rape group will open near Harrisburg the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, funded by $700,000 a year from the federal Centers for Disease Control. The center will aim to influence research, public policy and attitudes. That makes it the second such national clearinghouse located in this state, since the domestic violence coalition runs the National Resource Center on Domestic Violence.
The state also has passed several new laws aimed at helping women, including one that extends the maximum duration of protection from abuse orders from 12 to 18 months.
"Pennsylvania has really taken a lead in a lot of these issues," says Brenda Kagle, president of the 50-member Western Pennsylvania chapter (and national vice president) of the U.S. Committee for the United Nations Development Fund for Women.
As the USWC's Puentes-Reynolds points out, "We're still not at a point where we've stopped the violence. The violence continues." Another priority she stresses is more grading -- that is, evaluation -- of existing programs.
Kagle, of Swissvale, who attended the 1995 conference, notes how things have improved in the past five years: "There has been quite a bit of awareness on these issues. People are talking about this now, where they never did before."
Violence PG Graphic: Women & Violence in the United States