A Silent Epide mic FavorHouse offers support for survivors of domestic abuse L
ook around the room. One in three of the women and one in four of the men around you will have experienced some sort of physical domestic abuse in their lifetime. The third woman standing in line behind you or the fourth man sitting down the row. The national statistics, according to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, report nearly 20 people per minute are physically abused by an intimate partner in the United States. This includes people in our neighborhoods, people we go to work with, people we meet at the store, friends and family. The Escambia County Sheriff ’s Office reported nearly two thousand separate incidents of domestic violence in 2017. “It’s the least talked about crime that we have and it’s much more socially acceptable to be a substance abuser than it is a battered or survivor of domestic violence,” Sue Hand, the executive director of FavorHouse, said. “There still seems to be a taint to the domestic violence survivor because some community members still look at it as though why didn’t she leave? She could leave anytime she wants to. She can do this, she can do that. So they keeping putting the responsibility back on the survivor, and perhaps she’s a mom,
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she has children, she may have elderly parents in the home, she hasn’t worked for ten or fifteen years, she’s not able to support her family group. So she stays for the good of the whole. People still look at the survivor as the one who has the opportunity to leave but we all know from experience and from statistics that the most grievous time and dangerous time for a survivor is when they leave, because at that time the offender, the batterer loses the ability to control the family. It’s all about power and control in the family unit or an intimate partner relationship.” FavorHouse is the only certified domestic violence shelter for Escambia and Santa Rosa counties. Along with providing a safe place for those escaping domestic violence, FavorHouse also advocates for survivors and victims through outreach efforts and educational classes, even offering abusers classes on different ways of coping with their anger or their impulses to be violent. Even with their efforts, domestic violence continues to be an unspoken part of the community, with many not knowing that there are resources available for victims.
“As I’ve been working with the agency, I have found that there’s a lot of people in our community that don’t know that our services exist,” FavorHouse’s President of the Board Kate DeBlander said. “A lot of the younger women don’t realize what we have available.” As terrible as physical abuse can be, it is almost always preceded by another form of abuse, emotional abuse. Because it’s harder to see the hurt inflicted on a person who has been talked down to over and over and over again, emotional abuse is even more difficult for people to understand and accept as an unacceptable part of any intimate partner relationship. Unfortunately, this silent epidemic can lead to physical violence when words stop being as effective in bringing down the victim. “The emotional abuse really tears a person down, wears them psychologically, and they really do need assistance and support counseling and perhaps in some cases therapy to overcome the demeaning,” Hand said. “If you constantly have somebody tell you that you’re not worth anything and nobody wants you and you’re nothing, I mean, that would break my heart.”