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Domestic violence care providers called attention to heightened danger for those experiencing abuse during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, as individuals spent more time at home with their abusers and access to resources was strained. This Michigan Advance series aims to shed light on what victims of domestic violence are facing and the hurdles care providers are facing now.
It takes a lot of planning for a survivor of domestic violence to make a call for help to a shelter.
They have to wait for the perfect moment of privacy to call and then gather up important documents, sentimental items and their children. They also have to prepare to leave things behind, said Lori Kitchen-Buschel, executive director of First Step resource center in Wayne County.
“What haunts me is how hard it is to have a safe moment to make that phone call when you need to leave, because it’s a lot. And then when they do and they hear that we’re full. … I just, that haunts me. So until we can eradicate violence from our community completely, we have to have more beds for those in need,” Kitchen-Buschel said.
There are about 200 families a month who call in to First Step who will not be able to be provided shelter there, Kitchen-Buschel said. She says “families,” not individuals, because most survivors seeking shelter are bringing their children.
For every four families experiencing domestic violence who call for help, only one will be able to be housed at First Step, Kitchen-Buschel said. And while paying for some survivors to stay in hotels temporarily is “a great Band-Aid,” she said, but it’s not financially sustainable and doesn’t provide the same supportive environment for healing and safety that can be provided in-shelter.
Surrounding counties often bear the burden of trying to accommodate the booming need for shelter from Wayne County, Kitchen-Buschel said, making it more challenging for them to fit the existing overflow of need in their localities.
Domestic violence is widely regarded as the leading cause of homelessness for women and children nationally. In Michigan, about 8,000 people are experiencing homelessness on any given night, the National Alliance to End Homelessness estimates.
The United States Department of Health and Human Services agrees with an assortment of research findings such as more than a third of women who have been victims of domestic violence will experience homelessness in their lives and more than 80% of mothers experiencing homelessness have been victims of domestic violence in their lives.
The U.S. Department of Justice calls attention to multiple studies that have found between 22 and 57 percent of women and children who are experiencing homelessness became homeless due to domestic violence.
And Michigan domestic violence survivors are facing a full-blown housing crisis.
About five times as many survivors sought out shelter in 2022 than in 2021, according to data from the Michigan Coalition Against Homelessness. In 2022, demand for shelter for survivors of domestic violence was twice as high as the number of bed spaces in shelters across the state, coalition Director of Public Policy Lisa Chapman told the Advance.
During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic from 2020 to 2021, domestic violence shelters across the state faced a 5-to-1 ratio of people seeking shelters and bed space available, Michigan Coalition to End Domestic and Sexual Violence Executive Director Sarah Prout Rennie said. She has been hearing from the coalition’s 73 domestic violence service providers and said she’s confident the situation is getting worse.
As the pandemic ended, housing affordability took a big hit. Michigan saw some of the highest rent increases from 2022 to 2023 in the country, according to Rent.com.
There’s simply a statewide lack of affordable, safe housing, said Betsy Huggett, who acts as director for Sault Ste. Marie’s Diane Peppler Resource Center. In Chippewa County, Huggett said rents for everyone have been unbearable since the start of the Soo Locks project in 2022, when a large portion of housing was taken over by project workers and landlords saw an opportunity to price gouge rents far above wages of other industries.
“There is no guarantee of safe housing if they leave their perpetrator, if they leave the batterer. There is no guarantee that they will be able to find safe housing that they can afford for them and their family,” Huggett said.
That leaves many domestic violence survivors — and their children — in a precarious position. Some who leave experience homelessness — which comes with its own dangers — while those who remain in the same living situation with a perpetrator continue to endure violence there.
In 2022 and 2023, the Diane Peppler Resource Center supported around 2,000 nights of shelter to survivors and their families each year, Huggett said, through a mix of community partnerships and motel stays. But it’s not enough to keep up with the need.
And with temperatures dropping in the state, Huggett said Michigan’s harsh winters create yet another way for abusers to assert control over survivors.
“Especially here in the Upper Peninsula — where we have decent weather four out of the 12 months of the year — but the other times, it’s incredibly cold. It’s snowing; it’s sub-zero temperatures. If somebody is unhoused and we have a huge lack of housing in our communities, then they’re going to get a basic need met by basically not fighting the person who’s offering them warm housing for the winter,” Huggett said.
The housing crisis can help perpetuate the cycle of violence, experts say.
“Experiencing homelessness or even the threat of homelessness can be weaponized against survivors and keep them locked into abusive situations,” University of Michigan researcher of gender-based violence Sarah Peitzmeier said.
Peitzmeier conducted research that found that one out of 10 women and transgender/nonbinary individuals in Michigan saw an increase in severity in intimate partner violence (IPV) during the COVID-19 pandemic. And she found common threads between higher levels in violence and other factors like housing.
“It was much more likely to experience increased IPV among people who couldn’t afford their rent. If you can’t afford housing, maybe you have to live with your abuser because you don’t have other options potentially,” Peitzmeier said. “I think that really speaks to the importance of some of the rent moratoriums and all those housing policies that promoted housing during the pandemic. … Unfortunately, a lot of them have been sunset at this point. Those are really important to addressing some of those underlying vulnerabilities to intimate partner violence.”
The demand for shelter by domestic violence survivors in SafeCenter is triple the facility’s capacity, Gottschalk said.
There are no homeless shelters in Shiawassee and Clinton counties, SafeCenter Executive Director Hannah Gottschalk notes. And with much of her service area composed of small towns, motelling isn’t always a safe option for survivors that don’t fit in-shelter. ,
“Assailants know where all the motels are and the doors open out to the outdoors,” Gottschalk said.
It’s a similar challenge in tribal communities, said Rachel Carr-Shunk, executive director of Uniting Three Fires Against Violence. Rural and tribal communities historically have less access to housing, law enforcement, health care and other community partners critical for survivors safely leaving abusers.
There are only two shelters for Native survivors in Michigan, Carr-Shunk said, and both are in the Upper Peninsula. Nationally, although there are 574 federally recognized tribes in the U.S., there are less than 60 tribal specific domestic violence shelters, the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center estimated in 2020. Carr-Shunk believes now there could be less than 40 shelters nationally.
“There are similar needs across all survivors, but for native survivors, there are also additional considerations that it’s hard to understand in a non-native world; The experience of historical trauma or generational trauma, jurisdictional issues that might arise if an incident occurs on reservation or on tribal land,” Carr-Shunk said. “There’s just these different experiences that impact survivors and when a shelter has those tribal, culturally responsive services, it takes away that barrier that a lot of survivors face when they’re seeking services.”
Just one of many barriers for leaving an abuser is having to coordinate how to get shared children out of the situation and into safe housing, Avenue Family Network Chief Strategy Officer Robin McGinnis said. At one point in the summer, the Avenue’s Cora Lamping Center in Berrien County had 17 children residing amongst the shelter’s 23 beds.
“Finding safe, affordable housing for families is nearly impossible,” McGinnis said. “It’s around the country. I mean, having worked in Chicago, that was always the issue … finding affordable, safe housing. You can find a dump in a high-crime area, but do you want to live there with your kids? So it’s a national thing.”
Shelters around the state stand ready to answer calls and if they don’t have room in-shelter, they will look at alternatives to get people safe. But the interruption to living a safe and healthy life that domestic violence presents is unavoidable, Huggett said.
What haunts me is how hard it is to have a safe moment to make that phone call when you need to leave, because it’s a lot. And then when they do and they hear that we’re full. … I just, that haunts me. So until we can eradicate violence from our community completely, we have to have more beds for those in need.
– Lori Kitchen-Buschel, executive director of First Step resource center in Wayne County
“It’s not that they have to live their Iife after this, they have to live their life during this. Because life doesn’t just stop because they’re in this process,” Huggett said. “They still have to find a job or keep working at a job or try not to lose the job that they have. They still have children that they have to take care of. They still have their bills to pay and things like that. They still have their obligations they have to meet when they’re in this process.”
There’s a lot of misunderstanding about what domestic violence looks like and how closely it often intertwines with homelessness, said Johanna Kononen, director of Law and Policy Survivor Law Clinic at the Michigan Coalition to End Domestic and Sexual Violence.
Similar stigmas exist between homelessness and domestic violence — that somehow the person experiencing either did something to warrant that experience.
“The insidious nature of domestic violence and the way our society has viewed it, is something that we’re working to change, ” Kononen said. “They are two intertwined problems. … Homeless service providers are serving survivors of domestic and sexual violence whether they know it or not.”
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