You’re
a victim of domestic violence and you’ve finally decided to get help. You need
to get out. Now. You contact the Monroe County
Department of Human and Health Services and you and your children are sent to…
the Cadillac Hotel?!
“That place is horrible. That’s the
last place you want to send a battered woman,” says county legislator Carla
Palumbo. “That’s the sleazeball zone — drug
addicts… It’s just horrifying.”
But it does happen.
“Sometimes they end up at the
Cadillac Hotel because [the county] didn’t call us to get the woman in, to see
if we have a bed,” says Cathy Mazzotta, executive
director of Alternatives for Battered Women. “If they’ve called us and there’s no openings, then we’ll work with them to do the
alternative, which, in very extreme circumstances, would be the Cadillac.”
The bright bank of artificial
flowers in the hotel lobby is a shock of color imprisoned by dingy wood walls
and a carpet dotted with discarded gum.
A woman leans over the counter,
engaged in conversation with a hotel clerk on the travails of pop star Michael
Jackson.
“Why do people continue to leave
their children with him?” she asks.
“Because they want him to molest
them,” the clerk responds. “It’s big bucks!”
The clerk’s partner behind the desk
— his back turned toward the lobby — smokes despite the red “No Smoking”
sign on the wall a few feet away.
Everyone who
applies for public assistance from DHHS is screened for domestic violence, but the
problem might not surface in the interview.
The county uses the hotel at 45 Chestnut
Street as a kind of “warehouse” for the
homeless and people who can’t get in at other shelters, mostly due to
behavioral problems or because the shelters are at capacity, says Patricia
Connelly, manager of the county’s division of financial services.
The county, Connelly says, has “gone
to great lengths to reduce occupancy” at the Cadillac by increasing capacity at
other shelters, but it hasn’t been able to eliminate the need for the hotel
entirely.
“It’s just an unacceptable way to
treat human beings,” says legislator José Cruz. “We have to be able to do
something.”
Placing a battered woman at the
Cadillac does almost nothing to improve her situation because the hotel lacks ABW’s programs and services. It may also put her in danger,
because the hotel doesn’t have ABW’s security.
“It’s a welfare hotel,” Mazzotta says. “Granted, it may be a viable resource for
some people, but if you’re a mom with kids, that’s going to be kind of a scary
place to be.”
Leaving a batterer is often a
victim’s first exertion of power in the relationship, Palumbo says, so security
is crucial.
There is
another interesting
— or disturbing, depending on your point of view — aspect in the way the
county treats victims of domestic violence. State regulations provide for a
90-day stay at a certified shelter. That can be extended by 45 days in some
cases.
“Our county, for whatever reason,
has limited it to or tries to limit it to a 30-day stay,” Mazzotta
says. “New York City does 90 days
without blinking an eye. So does ErieCounty. In general,
I hear about a lot of other counties that do 90 days, because they go by what’s
in the regulations.”
According to the state Office of
Children and Family Services, the average length of stay in bed nights at
domestic violence shelters in New YorkState (excluding New York
City) was 35 in 2001 and 25 in 2002.
But the office says that
length-of-stay policy can be individually determined through contract
arrangements with a district and a provider.
Calls to MonroeCounty
communications director James Smith were not returned. But speaking to a
meeting of the county’s Human and Health Services Committee on November 17,
Sherri Wood, the county’s acting director of Human and Health Services,
answered in the affirmative when Palumbo asked her if the county provided for
only a 30-day stay at ABW.
That’s incorrect, according to Mazzotta.
“It’s not part of the contract,” she
says. “It can’t be, because that would be illegal. It’s something that people
have just done for a long time without really thinking about it. The
institutional memory gets lost on this stuff.”
ABW sheltered 729 women and children
last year. It’s important to have the 90-day option, Mazzotta
says, because of the nature of domestic violence.
“It may take a while for a woman to
get the stuff she needs in place for the court. A lot of times they leave and
they have nothing,” she says. “They have no identification papers, they don’t
have birth certificates, they don’t have social
security cards for themselves or their kids. We have to help them get all of
those things.”
The process can be slowed, too, by
the courts or by how long it takes the victim to find adequate housing, a job,
or to receive benefits.
“Most women probably don’t want to
stay in a shelter 90 days, but a lot of systems have to get into place,”
Palumbo says.
The county does extend stays in some
cases, Mazzotta says, but since the reorganization of
social services earlier this year, the pressure has really been on to hit the
30-day mark.
“It used to be more flexible,” she
says. “They’ve gotten much more rigid since they started cutting social service
programs to the bone.”
If ABW feels strongly a woman needs
to stay and the county won’t pay, ABW will sometimes “eat the cost,” Mazzotta says.
“You can’t put your shelter
providers in that kind of situation, because pretty soon there won’t be a
shelter to send people to,” she says.
The average length of stay at ABW is
anywhere from 12 to 21 days, Mazzotta says. And that’s with the staff really hustling to
get the women out of the shelter.
Mazzotta
is working with the county to try to educate DHHS on why extensions might be
needed.
“There are good people in the county
who want to do the right thing. It’s not like they don’t care,” Mazzotta says. “I think they’re all trying to balance the
fiscal stuff with the service delivery. But we don’t say people need extensions
for no reason at all. I’m not saying we should just automatically say 90 or 135
days. But we need that option.”
This article appears in Nov 26 – Dec 2, 2003.
