With the help of a faith-based restorative justice program in Los Angeles I was able to choose forgiveness and find healing for myself and my son.
I made a decision that I was not going to raise my son with hatred. I was going to show him grace in an empowering way. It became my goal to bring about restoration.
Trixie is a young woman in her mid-20s who recently left an abusive relationship with a boyfriend. She came to my workplace, Walnut Avenue Family & Women’s Center, in Santa Cruz, seeking help from our restorative justice program.
What she was looking for wasn’t an accountability process for her abusive ex-boyfriend, but a means of addressing the trust broken by her friends who didn’t believe that the abuse was real.
Victims of Crime Act funding is the largest funding source for victims’ services throughout California and the country. But it’s in jeopardy.
If California doesn’t allocate additional funds, grants to victim service providers will face a devastating 30 percent cut.
Domestic violence is a problem that exists in all communities irrespective of culture, religion, sexual orientation, income or immigration status.
Yet, despite its prevalence, we are facing federal budget cuts for programs that help domestic violence survivors and try to prevent future abuse.
Family Justice Centers are designed to provide one-stop support for victims of domestic violence, sexual assault, elder abuse, child abuse and human trafficking.
The goal is to make it easy for violence survivors and their children to get all of their needs taken care of in one place, and to spare them from having to visit multiple locations and retell their stories repeatedly.
Our governor could take two steps right now that would bring together the committed players in domestic violence prevention, help identify and fill in gaps in support, and put the state even further along the road to meaningful leadership in preventing intimate partner violence.
In California, 58 percent of adult residents have been impacted by domestic violence directly or through a close friend or relative.
My criminalization and incarceration has led me to a serious awakening of how corrupt and broken our justice system is.
The system incarcerates Black and brown people like me at a much higher rate than those who are white, and often hands us disproportionately longer punishments.
Domestic violence survivors often need mental health care. Like veterans of wars, these survivors have often been subjected to prolonged periods of extreme stress and fear for their safety.
Mental health care can be hard to access, but solutions exist.
LA County’s DCFS removes between 4,000 and 6,000 kids from their homes every year and places them in foster care.
Of those removed, social workers disproportionately place children of color and those who live in the lowest-income communities in foster care at higher rates than their peers in wealthier, whiter neighborhoods.
To experience a world free from violence, California must invest in the necessary funding and resources to prevent it.
However, with one-time funding for sexual and domestic violence prevention set to expire in April 2024, effective prevention programs will become more difficult to maintain.