Artwork created by WomenShelter clients during guided art-therapy sessions” captionposition=”bottom-left” lightbox=”off” floater=”on” floaterposition=”left” floaterdirection=”none”] By: Cory Bilicko
Managing Editor
Ever since a small but dedicated group of women began working from TV trays inside a donated house in 1977, WomenShelter of Long Beach has helped thousands of families cope with challenges resulting from domestic abuse, according to the organization.
It was in that year that Virginia Beavon Corbett Briggs, a local psychologist and activist, donated the home after she had realized that her clients who were victims of domestic violence had no place to go when they decided to leave their batterers. The four-bedroom, 11-bed shelter was one of the first of its kind in the region, during a growing movement to assist battered women and their children.
Now the nonprofit’s staff is preparing to celebrate its 40th anniversary with a gala to raise funds for its services and bestow three awards to community members who have supported the organization.
At the Feb. 26 event, WomenShelter will honor: Los Angeles County Sheriff Jim McDonnell and his wife Kathy with The Protector Award; the Walker Family of F&M Bank with The Philanthropist Award; and the Cherese Mari Laulhere Foundation with The Legacy Award.
Mary Ellen Mitchell, who has served as the organization’s executive director for a year, said about 130 clients are currently being served.They participate in group or individual counseling, depending on their needs, but WomenShelter also offers support for youth and organizes those counseling groups based on specific age categories.
“We try to empower them so they don’t go back to the situation they came from,” Mitchell said Monday, during an in-person interview at the WomenShelter resource center in Bixby Knolls.
But, despite the name the organization has had for four decades, WomenShelter also assists men in domestic-violence situations.
Tatiana Dorman, associate director, who also participated in the interview, said WomenShelter was one of the first domestic-violence shelters to assist men, but the date when that extension of service began is unclear.
“I think it’s been an inclusive policy from the get-go,” Dorman said.
Mitchell added that, although the organization has never turned men away, it wasn’t until relatively recently that more men have come forward seeking assistance.
“We’ve never excluded men, but I think it’s probably been more recent that they’ve come forward and asked for help, and we’ve never said no,” Mitchell said. “And our name— WomenShelter— that’s kind of an issue that we struggle with: ‘Should we change our name, because we don’t just take women?’ We take anybody who needs help […] We’re just trying to decide whether to keep the name or change it, but we don’t want to lose the connections that people already know of us.”
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one in seven men age 18 and older in the US has been the victim of severe physical violence by an intimate partner in his lifetime, and one in 10 men has experienced rape, physical violence and/or stalking by an intimate partner. In 2013, 13 percent of documented contacts to the National Domestic Violence Hotline (NDVH) identified themselves as male victims, according to that organization.
Although men make up a smaller percentage of callers to the hotline, the NDVH estimates there are likely many more of them who do not report or seek help for their abuse, including: the fact that men are socialized not to express their feelings or see themselves as victims, pervading beliefs and stereotypes perpetuate the idea that men are abusers rather than victims, and abuse of men is often treated as less serious.
In fact, the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN), the nation’s largest anti-sexual violence organization, estimates that about 3 percent of American men have experienced an attempted or completed rape in their lifetime and that one out of every 10 rape victims is male.
[aesop_image imgwidth=”500px” img=”https://signal-tribune.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Screen-Shot-2017-02-02-at-2.11.44-PM.png” align=”right” lightbox=”on” caption=”The WomenShelter’s resource center includes various rooms to address the needs of its diverse clientele, such as an area for children to play and receive counseling sessions.” captionposition=”right” revealfx=”off”] Dorman also pointed out that WomenShelter has a history of helping those in the LGBT community.
The independent, nonpartisan policy institute Center for American Progress claims that domestic violence among same-sex couples occurs at similar rates as that among straight couples but gay victims often do not receive the help they need. The Center attributes this difference to the lack of legal recognition of same-sex relationships, law enforcement’s failure to identity and properly handle domestic-violence cases involving people of the same sex, and the shortage of resources available to victims of same-sex partner domestic abuse.
“Anybody that needs help— they can just walk in, and we’ll find a counselor to help them,” Mitchell said of the resource center.
The organization’s shelter is a different story, however.
“The shelter is different in that nobody just walks into the shelter,” Mitchell said. “It’s in a confidential location.”
Mitchell explained that clients are found through the 24-hour crisis hotline, police departments or other shelters.
“Normally, if somebody comes here (to the resource center) and they’re in that situation, we try to provide them with a safety plan— how to get out of the situation that they’re in— and, normally, they would not go to our shelter. They would go to one in a different city because we don’t like to keep people in the same city because it’s dangerous. If the abuser is here also, we don’t want [the victim] found.”
The organization’s services extend beyond helping women and men to also focus on younger victims. One of the WomenShelter employees who directly assists that demographic is Eydie Pasicel, director of Youth Services and Outreach Education. Pasicel, who has been with the organization since 2010, leads group counseling with children and transitional-age youth. She said one program that has been quite successful is BARK (Beach Animals Reading with Kids), which encourages children to increase their reading skills and self-confidence by reading aloud to certified therapy dogs.
“It’s so great for this population because our kids are so stressed out— you can imagine,” Pasicel said. “And I had one child who didn’t even want to participate. You could tell he’s been bullied. He has a stutter. He’s a little bit overweight. And so he stayed really quiet through group [counseling]. But ever since BARK started coming, he would read to the dogs so happily… It was just the sweetest thing.”
Pasicel also lauded other programs the WomenShelter has been implementing, including those that use art as therapy, such as A Window Between Worlds and The Theatre of the Oppressed.
“Some kids don’t want to talk about these traumas. It’s really hard to talk about,” Pasicel said. “So, instead of having them talk about it, we can have them release some of this emotion through the art or with their bodies and make it kind of fun— a safe place. And stuff comes up, and we’re there to support them. But oftentimes they’re laughing and really enjoying themselves and still able to, like, ‘vomit’ out that negativity or at least get a vocabulary for what they’re going through. Oftentimes, that’s why kids are acting out. They have no idea how to express what they’re seeing. They’re just feeling all the emotions, and they get stuck there. Next thing you know, they’re doing something they’re not supposed to be doing.”
To address the various issues children face, as well as their different forms of expression, Pasicel is trying to implement a number of therapeutic approaches.
“In a nutshell, I’m just trying to grab healing modalities, bring it to the group and give them something to smile about, to bond about, to gain that trust again,” she said. “That’s something about a domestic-violence child— they just don’t have that, and that’s so important to our human development, to our brain development.”
The WomenShelter’s 40th anniversary celebration will take place Sunday, Feb. 26 at 5:30pm at the Long Beach Convention Center Pacific Gallery. Ticket and sponsorship information is available at womenshelterlb.org/40thgala.
