When Chris Kapp was growing up in the Midwest, her dad was the mayor of their small town.
“Everyone, from the police to the residents, loved him,” Kapp tells The Progressive. “To them, he was an amazing man. He did emergency crisis work. He turned the animal shelter into a no-kill program, and he supported refugees and asylees. But behind closed doors, he was a nightmare.”
Twice, Kapp reports, she, her siblings, and their mother tried to escape his physical and emotional abuse, fleeing across state lines where they thought they’d be safe. Both times her dad used his connections to track them down and bring them back.
Kapp left home the day after she graduated from high school. She is now a housing systems change advocate for the Department of Housing and Urban Development in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where she often works with survivors of domestic violence to help them secure safe housing.
“Because I am so cognizant of people leaving abusive situations, I’ve worked to create a protocol to protect them,” she says.
Experiences like Kapp’s are reflected in a growing movement to avoid involving police and the legal system in situations of domestic abuse. A new 120-page report stemming from a three-year effort by the Anti Police-Terror Project, Interrupting Intimate Partner Violence: A Guide for Community Responses without Police, cites a 2022 National Domestic Violence Hotline Statistics survey: 80 percent of survivors said police were unhelpful or made them feel less safe; 71 percent said they would have preferred to use other resources had they been available.
According to the report, “Fear of police involvement is a major barrier preventing people from accessing traditional domestic violence services such as emergency shelters, crisis lines, and safety planning, especially among survivors in immigrant communities and communities of color.”
“The folks who cause harm typically have experienced trauma and putting them into a violent institution—a jail—where they get no counseling or support services and then bringing them back into the community when they’ve served their sentences, is not working.”
Lead author Cat Brooks tells The Progressive that the need for the guide came out of a realization that for many people, calling law enforcement has backfired, putting them and their loved ones in harm’s way. “We want survivors to have self-determination,” she explains. “We also want to focus on the whole family unit. The folks who cause harm typically have experienced trauma and putting them into a violent institution—a jail—where they get no counseling or support services and then bringing them back into the community when they’ve served their sentences, is not working. Keeping everyone safe means addressing the needs and desires of everyone caught up in the cycle of harm.”
A 2022 report by the Center for Court Innovation confirms this: “Negative experiences with the criminal legal system have the potential to leave survivors retraumatized,” the authors conclude. “Historic over-policing and disproportionate use of carceral responses in BIPOC and immigrant communities make choices involving the criminal legal system fraught for survivors and those charged with IPV [intimate partner violence] in these communities.”
Many agencies are grappling with how best to respond. In August, the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence and the National Domestic Violence Hotline merged into Project Opal—a “transformational” and “survivor-informed” effort to “create systems change in the national response to domestic violence”—though it stops short of addressing the downside of police involvement.
Nonetheless, one of the goals of the project is to “develop strategies to address social and racial justice in the framework of intimate partner violence,” including “education, resources, tools, and proposed policies that advance marginalized victims and communities and ensure they also receive the highest quality and most holistic services and support.”
Sometimes this means assuring survivor identity is protected on government forms and applications.
“As soon as someone mentions domestic violence, their paperwork is completed anonymously so that it is impossible to hack in and find out their whereabouts, ” housing advocate Kapp tells The Progressive.
Reverend Sally MacNichol, the recently-retired co-executive director of the Harlem-based anti-violence and gender justice organization CONNECT, says that efforts to end violence are most effective when on-the-ground intervention networks link local residents to community-based agencies and support services.
“It’s like midwifery,” she tells The Progressive. “We do a lot of work in communities of faith because we’ve found that victims, particularly in communities of color, typically go to the mosque, church, or temple for help when they’re being abused.”
In addition to educating pastors, imams, rabbis, ministers, and priests, MacNichol supports “restorative” and “transformational” justice programs that bring the harmed person and person causing harm together to address the abuse and map out a path forward. Most U.S. states have some statutory support for restorative justice; restorative and transformative justice programs operate across the country, including in Hawaii, Massachusetts, and Minnesota.
These efforts, MacNichol adds, can be effective if both partners are willing to be held accountable and are open to addressing the lasting impact of negative behaviors. But it’s not a quick fix. “Restorative justice requires you to go to the root causes of the violence and pay attention to trauma,” she says. “It can take years.”
Erica Staab, executive director of the Healing Outreach, Prevention, and Education (HOPE) Center in rural Rice County, Minnesota, tells The Progressive that, in addition, restorative justice requires the survivor to be ready to repeatedly revisit the trauma. She also warns that the process requires a skilled facilitator.
“Survivors have myriad needs,” Staab explains. “At HOPE, we are survivor-centered and can connect the person to whatever help they require. Some want the abuse to end but don’t want to leave the relationship. Other people want out and need referrals to housing programs, food pantries, childcare, healthcare, schools, or employment. Our goal is to remove the obstacles so that they can live a violence-free life.”
For MacNichol, this means upending many deeply-held assumptions about what is, and what is not, acceptable.
“Ending interpersonal violence will take a massive commitment to seeing the world in a different way,” she says. “We will have to see conflict as disagreement, without an enemy consciousness. That’s an enormous change. Abuse and interpersonal violence would not be as widespread as they are if society as a whole did not think violence was an acceptable way to solve problems and tensions.”
The stakes are enormous. The Anti Police-Terror Project notes that more than one third of women in California, for example, will deal with intimate partner violence. “Roughly three people—mostly women—die every day in this country,” the APTP report reads, “as a result of IPV and ineffective police and carceral responses.”