The story below is from our July/August 2021 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!
It takes many forms, but during the COVID-19 pandemic, domestic abuse in the Roanoke Valley has seriously intensified.
(The names of the abused quoted in this story are fiction, an effort to protect their identities, but the stories are not.)
Stacey Sheppard of Total Action for Progress doesn’t mince words. The public, she says, “is focused on the COVID-19 vaccine, not realizing how pervasive domestic abuse has become. This is a danger. Somebody is being beaten, killed. It’s in the news daily and with the epidemic, people are becoming numb to it. One in four women and one in seven men were being abused before the pandemic.”
And the pandemic has made it worse.
Although the Roanoke Valley’s various police departments haven’t necessarily shown dramatic increases in the incidents of violent abuse, the agencies that deal with the victims have.
In Salem, reports to the police of domestic incidents have increased noticeably and Salem Police Chief Mike Crawley says, “I think we all expected the occurrence of domestic violence to be a pandemic within the pandemic. While we have seen an uptick in mental health calls, I think society as a whole is doing a better job of identifying the factors that lead to domestic violence. Things like homelessness, drug addiction and mental health issues are all tied to the domestic calls our law enforcement officers see every day.”
Both Roanoke County’s and Roanoke City’s numbers are slightly down during the pandemic, but County Assistant Chief Chuck Mason says, “The Police Department was very concerned that, as the pandemic continued and people remained cooped up in their homes, there might be an increase in the amount of domestic violence. While the department did see an uptick with disturbance and disorder calls, we were a little surprised, and very pleased, that the number of domestic incidents reported in the county not only didn’t increase, they dropped off a little from the previous 12 months.”
While the city’s overall numbers were down, the most serious, aggravated assaults, increased from 35 to 69.
Real Cases
Martha saw red flags before the pandemic, but “dismissed them as normal.” Her live-in partner “hadn’t worked for years” and she supported him and her children driving a truck. She got him a job with the delivery company and he apparently began stealing packages. She reported him.
He stole money from her and bought drugs with it while he was under house arrest. She tried to get him out of the house, but his name was on the lease and she couldn’t expel him. He became physically threatening with knives.
The pandemic “made it worse,” she says. “Everything closed: shelters, clinics and the like and cops brought him back home, since this is his residence.” More threats and more complaints to the police resulted in no change. “Police decided he was not a threat to himself or anybody else and told me to keep an eye on him.”
In April of 2020, he drugged Martha and she got a protective order that forced him to leave. “The pandemic exacerbated” the problem, she says, “making it nearly impossible to break free. No matter who I contacted, no matter how often, no matter how extreme, there was nothing anybody could do in the middle of a pandemic. Everything was in lockdown or closed.”
Lori had seen the family abuse increase slowly before the pandemic struck, but it “sped up the inevitable” with the family being isolated at home. “It was mostly verbal before the pandemic,” she says. She and her husband were both working full-time then. He had abused his daughter, 18, until she ultimately left and Lori went to a minister for counseling.
After the pandemic began, she started working at home and her husband took care of the children (all of them his from a previous marriage), supervising their schooling. It didn’t work well, Lori said. “He became irritable and A students began missing assignments.” He was abusing the entire family. Her husband’s already low self-esteem became worse and “he couldn’t help the anger.”
She went to TAP’s Domestic Violence Services and stayed for a month. She finally left him for good, taking his younger children with her because the abuse became more physical and was aimed at the younger children.
Unsafe Environments
Community nurse Lesley Butterfield says abuse doesn’t always end with separation of the parties. “Post separation abuse is sometimes—and I mean only some of the time—worse than the actual mental abuse in the relationship. It’s a slow drip of mental torture. I’ve watched close friends go through this and it’s awful to watch and nearly impossible to argue in court.”
Laura Beth Weaver of the Women’s Resource Center in Radford has seen “caseloads during the COVID-19 pandemic reach their highest level in five years. Hotline contacts have increased by 25% over 2019 levels, and the number of individuals sheltered on average is about 12% higher than in 2019.”
Teresa Berry, who directs SARA, a protective program for the abused, says, “We have seen an increase in calls for our services during the past year and attribute much of the increase to the social and economic impact of the pandemic. In 2020, we served 725 survivors through counseling and advocacy services, which was a higher number than we’ve seen in recent past years. We saw roughly a 25% increase in survivors seeking services.
“This increase was not surprising to us given that, statistically and historically, the rate of violence and abuse goes up when unemployment goes up and the economy is not doing well. That combined with people being confined to their homes due to COVID-19 has created some difficult and isolating environments for many, and for some, very unsafe environments.”
A Perfect Storm
Berry says that “weddings and funerals bring out the best and worst in people. You can now add pandemics to that. I never wanted to see people fight over a roll of toilet paper … This has just been a perfect storm.”
If there has been a positive outcome at SARA, says Berry, it is that volunteering for the program is up substantially and so is income. “I am humbled by the [increased] giving that has come from it.”
Digna Marreno, resident program manager at the Salvation Army, and Captain Jamie Clay say their actual response numbers for domestic violence have gone down during the pandemic, but that can be misleading. The requirement for social distancing has mandated that they make fewer beds available, so the actual treatment on a relative basis is up substantially.
“We haven’t been able to use half our beds,” says Clay. “But we never close our doors. We’re simply serving more people with fewer beds.”
Clay says that the loss of jobs has created “a huge change in the number of hotline calls.”
The surge was sudden, says Clay, and there was learning among the staff on the go.
“We made stays [at the Salvation Army facility] longer than before” and the effort was to set up permanent housing for the abused seeking refuge. Normal stays are up to 60 days, but they can be longer now. The SA helps its clients with housing, education, counseling, and skills as a parent. “We look at them holistically,” she says.
Clay says that before the pandemic made it to Western Virginia, “I was watching it overseas, seeing what was happening and what we could implement here.” She says “evidence-based information” helped create a game plan. The staff at SA has 10 professionals, half of them part-time, in three shifts.
“Some shelters closed their doors and didn’t take new residents,” she says. “We didn’t.”
Disaster Preparation
The Salvation Army, says Clay, “has been involved in disaster preparation since 1900” and that has served it well during the pandemic.
Stacey Sheppard, who heads Total Action for Progress’ domestic violence response group is no rookie at this. She spent 21 years with the Salem Police Department and has been at it for five with TAP. She knows the lay of the land.
Before the pandemic, she says, “we had two or three calls a day on the 24-hour hotline. That’s up to eight to 12 now. It’s almost more than we can keep up with.”
Abused people, she says, have found a silver lining with the pandemic. “They are coming out of isolation, deciding they don’t want to stay with the abusers,” she says. “They’ve fled in droves. That’s problematic for a small agency that didn’t anticipate it and hadn’t planned for it.
“We are looking at the pandemic as a mass casualty incident. The violence has definitely intensified. There’s more of it and it comes in different levels: financial, emotional, physical. There are more assaults now than before, more violent abuse.”
TAP has “a direct line with the Roanoke City Police Department,” says Sheppard, “and that partnership really helps.”
One of the significant problems Sheppard sees is that “before the pandemic, exit strategies [for abusers] existed that don’t exist now. People are staying with their abusers for many different reasons, financial being primary. Financial control, not being allowed to work, to have a checking account or credit cards adds a transportation barrier. It is a form of slavery.”
TAP works with more than just the abused person, but also with the family. It provides food, child care, resume writing, housing inquiries and employment, among other things. “Some of the kids are abused,” says Sheppard, so there is some legal advocacy. “Safety is the No. 1 problem.”
And safety in a pandemic is the real challenge.
Can Men Be the Abused?
(Real names are not being used here, in order to protect the abused.)
“People believe men beat women, not the other way around,” says the sister of a Roanoke Valley man who was killed with a shotgun by a wife with a history of abusing him.
A recent accounting of TAP’s Domestic Violence Services showed that there were 288 women and 88 men helped during a recent period. That’s 23.4% male victims.
Matthew was killed by his wife some years ago after years of abuse by her. He was 6-foot-4 and she 5-foot-4 and from a wealthy family. She was charming and cultured and almost nobody believed she was capable of abuse.
“It didn’t appear Matthew could be abused,” says his sister. “He didn’t fight back, but there was considerable physical abuse. … She was quite charming, and I don’t think anybody who met her would think her capable of abuse.”
She says size isn’t the determining factor in abuse. “I’ve done some dog rescue and the size of the dog doesn’t make that much difference. It is the personality and attitude of the abuser that counts.”
Matthew’s wife, says the sister, “was alcoholic, narcissistic and had a serious personality disorder. … The jury [in her involuntary manslaughter case] didn’t believe a small, white woman could do such a thing.”
She was convicted, given eight years for the time already served and had the rest [of the sentence] set aside because of good behavior, says the sister. After being convicted, the wife inherited all of Matthew’s money and property.
Matthew had finally reached the end of his rope and filed for divorce. The wife later showed up in the middle of the night and walked through a door he had not locked. She shot him with a shotgun in his bed and claimed the shooting was an accident.
The sister says the wife was “controlling and the last couple of years of the marriage, her alcoholism got bad. They had been married close to 20 years and she had always viewed our family as beneath her.”
Emiliano, who is Hispanic and lives in Roanoke, was raped during a visit to Mexico when he was five and “it took me until the age of 22 to realize that it was not my fault. I tend to want to be sexually promiscuous because I feel that the experience changed my thought process about being sexually active.”
Growing up, “our house was full of life unless my father was drinking or using. … He would come home angry and want to cuss and take it out on my mother and me. … Over the years I had been slapped across the face, hit across my back and there were countless whippings with a belt and even an extension cord. …
“My father started his mental abuse once he realized that the whippings were no longer scaring me. He would threaten not to do things for us when we didn’t do things exactly as he wanted. … I never realized how much his yelling affected me until one day when he called me to tell me that my mom had left and he was going to kill her.”
“There are a lot of social stigmas for men seeking help for abuse,” says Teresa Berry, director of SARA, which counsels abuse victims. “A lot of men we see were abused as children. Women can be just as physically abusive as men. We’re just glad people are calling us” for help.
The story above is from our July/August 2021 issue. For more stories, subscribe today or view our FREE digital edition. Thank you for supporting local journalism!