Conversation to Transformation

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You're listening to locally produced programming created in KUNV Studios on public radio. KUNV 91.5. The content of this program does not reflect the views or opinions of 91.5 Jazz and More, the University of Nevada Las Vegas, or the Board of Regents of the Nevada System of Higher Education. Introduction of COVID into our society helped make more clear than ever before the

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importance of connectivity.

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We can systemize this whole thing. No one, no one is better.

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I guess maybe it was the intensity of fear and uncertainty that somehow simultaneously and magically magnified the intensity of compassion and innovation.

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Welcome to Conversation to Transformation. I'm Magdalena Martinez at UNLV. In the studio with me today is Elia del Carmen Solano-Patricio. And Carmen, I know you're really excited today. We have our guest, Liz Ortenberger, who is the CEO of SafeNest, the largest organization in our region dedicated to end domestic violence. Welcome, Liz. Thank you. Thank you for having me. We're so excited to have you here. So our conversations have revolved around the COVID experience in Nevada, right? And specifically talking to individuals and leadership roles that are, are and were leading our state out of this pandemic and out of this trauma, this crisis. Now, Liz, you are the CEO of Safenest. And we know that during the pandemic, a lot of folks were worried about what the implications may be for some of our most vulnerable populations, and that is people who are in violent relationships and the families associated with them. Let's start off with that, Liz. I mean, what was that like at the beginning of the pandemic for you in terms of your organization and the individuals that you served? Yeah, so we generally work with 20 to 25,000 clients a year on a served. Yeah, so we generally work with 20 to 25,000 clients a year on a non-COVID year. And what we knew going into COVID was the same thing that we knew after the October 1 shooting, is that we have an entire community that is triggered, that's the language we use, so stressed at the same time. And so COVID doesn't make people violent, right? Stress doesn't make people violent, but if you have a propensity for violence, which can be from a childhood experience, from growing up in a violent home, those kinds of things give you a propensity for violence. When you're feeling that stress and an entire community is stressed at the same time, naturally that stress is going to come out as violence and domestic violence rates are going to rise. And we see it again after large events. After 9-11, New York saw it in a large way. way, after natural disasters, you see the same thing, the first sort of community thing to happen is an increase in domestic violence. And it's all related to the stress and the propensity for people to use violence when they're stressed. I'm really glad you made that distinction, right? That it's a stress that unfortunately, causes individuals to perhaps react in different ways, right? They may not have good emotional regulation. And in the domain of domestic violence, we know that's an issue, right? Yes. Yeah, when we look at the root of domestic violence, and really kind of, you know, sort of think about power and control, if my life feels out of control outside of my of my home environment, it is not uncommon for mostly men, but we see women perpetrators of violence as well, to try to control their workings of their home. And if you don't have the tools to navigate that, or your experience as a young person was in a violent home, unfortunately that results in oftentimes believing that I need to use violence, a heavy hand, a heavy fist to make sure that my wife or girlfriend and kids are in line and that can very quickly become a domestic violence scenario. And, Liz, I know that Carmen is really interested in asking you some specifics related to issues around domestic violence and the intersection with the legal system and the justice system. Before we go there, though, a lot of our discussions with community leaders have revolved also around what did leadership look like for you during this time? That is, what was your leadership style or approach or your principles? What were they before the pandemic? Did that shift in any way, shape or form? And just some reflections around that. What did that look like

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for you?

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Yeah, you know, I've heard a lot of the phraseology that leaders have used if we had to pivot, we had to do this, we had to do that. And honestly, we didn't need to pivot, we were already in the space that was going to be inundated, there was nothing new that we needed to do. What I had to sort of do as the leader was a keep my hundred plus staff calm and engaged, and with the resources that they needed. So we really, you know, I think I told Congresswoman Lee, we ran into the fire with our masks on because we knew that our community, our client community, and that includes abusers, survivors, and children affected, were going to need us in a big way, and we were not the ones that could stay home. And so we moved to weekly all-staff meetings so I could continually update staff on any changes in protocol. We made investments where we thought we could, but we also made strategic decisions that fall to me that we did not ask the health department to come in and do, and to give us an assessment because they would have made us, they would have sort of asked us to take down the capacity of our shelter. That was not going to be possible. I mean, we were, not only was our shelter full, we needed more beds and we were using hotels at the time. So strategically, we made decisions not to follow the rules as well. Interesting. Yep. And then the other thing that I would say I grew and it was already a space that I was involved in, but I grew in it was that empathy and understanding for my staff who are moms. A lot of the people who work for me are female. We know that moms pull the larger portion of the child care, right? That's just the way it works, the third shift, we call it. But we needed to make, with school closed, we needed to make some really clear decisions about how we were going to support the moms on staff. So we actually paid for child care, for staff that needed to work to have their children in a YMCA or a program, Boys and Girls Club, that was open during COVID to do the schooling. We started a whole system of split shifts. So we got much more engaged with what our moms needed, because they were the ones who were really like, this was difficult for moms. And as a single mom, this was the, like, work was fine. We dealt with things we deal with in our world of domestic and sexual violence. The things that made me cry were at home schooling, dealing with my kiddos, worried about my kids falling behind, worried about leaving them at home and having to go to work. So we wanted to make sure we we put the resources around our staff so they could be proud of the place that they worked and they could be focused on what they were doing because we needed a hundred and ten percent of their attention when they were when they were on on duty. Oh wow, that really is amazing that you had to respond in such a way that was immediate. And what of that has remained in terms of your approach to leading safeness? Yeah, so you know, actually that's a great question. We were actually just updating our team member handbook and that question about kids came up again, right? There isn't enough child care. We know this, right? We know that in our community, we are not resourced correctly. And we're not resourced correctly for particularly single moms. So what we sort of rallied around as a leadership group was, how do we support moms? And so we don't have a blanket no kids in the office policy. We have a let's work with your supervisor and figure out how we can make this work sort of space. But it also has influence like when we go and speak to the governor's office on workforce development, for example, we are front and center talking about the needs of single moms. And I would say my experience with my staff, but also seeing my clients struggle in this space. You know, we we expect single moms to hold the whole but we do not give them the tools, particularly a single mom who's living on the fringe economically. And so we're leaving 50% of our, well, the proportion of our workforce that is single moms, it is not insignificant, behind. And then we're wondering, why did she bring a violent person into that relationship? Why was there a rotating door of men in that relationship? We're not asking, what did we not resource her with correctly such that she had support? Every single homeless study that we have done in this city on a large scale has never had a provider like Safe Nest at the table. And Deacon Tom does incredible work at Catholic Charities. He and I have a great relationship. Deacon Tom is focused on male homelessness. So when we're looking to him for the answers for homelessness in his organization, it's got a male bias to it. When are the voices of women, women who have to experience homelessness, single moms living on the fringe, going to elevate our community? And it's when leaders like those of you and myself really start to stop blaming and shaming and saying, we need to create a resource infrastructure that works for our most vulnerable and our most vulnerable are single moms. And by the way, when we invest in a single mom, we're investing in those kiddos and we're we're ending those cycles of poverty differently than we when we just look at homelessness as one large population because male homelessness and single male homelessness is very different than single mother homelessness. And now your organization doesn't just focus on single mothers and children and talk a

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little bit about that.

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Yeah.

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So we work in the entire space of domestic and sexual violence, which includes trafficking. And we do a lot of the services that people expect, run a hotline, run a shelter, do all those kinds of things. But what we also do is work with abusers and perpetrators of violence. And the reason that we do that is because what I talk to people about in the larger domestic and sexual violence movement is if we have to create a system where helping somebody escape or giving them a pathway free from violence in their relationship is not creating a slot for a new survivor. And that is why we persist in working in the perpetrator space because the answer to ending domestic violence is not with only survivors. We can end it on a micro level for one survivor. We can end it on a macro level when we really start talking about abusers. And then when we get further into that prevention space, it's really talking about kids, specifically young men, that are most at risk of repeating these cycles of violence. And that's, that is where true and meaningful change will come to for our community.

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Yes, yes. Now, Carmen, Liz, as a crime scholar, I am honored to have you here and to be able to have these discussions with you, particularly the one around perpetrator and abusive patterns that that they they just keep recycling. Right. They they witness them as children and they continue to perpetuate them thinking that it's really about not blaming the victim anymore, but making the abuser really reflect and ask themselves, at what point did I think that it was okay to traffic someone? At what point did I think it was okay to hurt someone because I witnessed it? Can I not think deeper than that? You know? So I think it's really innovative that Safe Nest is doing this. I haven't heard of any other organization working in this space, besides criminologists, right? Where we can get access. I wanted to ask you something very specific about gendered responses and the services that you provide. So I had the awesome opportunity to support dissertation research and interview advocates from all over the country. So organizations just like SafeNest all over the US and ask them, what did you think was a shortcoming in your training? What do you think was the strong suit? And one of the trends that we found was that they thought they needed more support in the LGBTQIA space and with regard to responses to men who are victims of abuse, right, because that happens as well.

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It does. Actually, 15% of our clients are male victims, and only about 1 to 2% of our clients would identify as gender non-binary or in that LGBTQIA plus space. So we, you know, here's the thing that I tell my advocates is it's really difficult to hold the whole, right? Like we can't do everything and be everything. So the question is not so much yes, yes, everybody needs to have training and we and we bring folks in for that. But at the end of the day, a trans victim is not going to disclose to a safeness advocate, typically, right, that would be unusual. But they are going to disclose to the gender justice program or at the center. So that's why we work in partnership, right. And so we have a program called the Preferred Provider Network. We talk to pastors, wives, we talk to everybody. They take a simple four-hour training from us. They're then able, somebody discloses to them, they're then able to bypass our hotline and get a bed in shelter immediately, and they can continue to advocate with that client in our confidential shelter location. And we don't want that gift to be diminished because we have some silly rules that don't make sense for the survivor. If you disclose to the pastor's wife and you have a relationship there, she should have access to get you safety. We need to empower the community to make sure they have access. And what we want to make faces, there's a lot of danger within the time that a survivor gets ready to leave and within really the three months after they've left and sometimes up to 12 months depending. That's not the person you need sleeping on your couch. Like that's, I get, like everybody's heart goes into the right place, but let's get them fully safe and that's in a confidential shelter like what we provide. And so that's what that Preferred Provider Network program does. We have 50 collaborative partners in that space, but that is how you tackle that. I don't disagree. I mean, I think my staff could probably use more training on everything. The thing that becomes difficult, though, right, is when we don't have a high number of trans folks or folks within the gender non-binary space who come into services, it's hard to keep that training fresh and it's hard to remember. And we had a fantastic sort of learning moment a couple of years ago in that space and we recognized, okay, we need folks who regularly advocate with a gender non-binary individual to walk beside us. We can handle the day-to-day, we can get you your meals, we can get you, but we're not the right fit to make sure that you're getting what you need because it's not our area of expertise. And that is why partnership is so very critical in this work.

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That's amazing, Liz. It's not just about surviving, but about thriving in a space where you feel safe, right? My next question is about your advocates and their kind of their daily activities, right? I know that they're in the courtroom a lot and that's an interesting space to be, right? Because they work for a non-profit. Everybody else in that room is a public employee. They're in the court system. And so I'm curious to know what are your thoughts on the way that the court system handles DV issues, domestic violence, interpersonal violence issues, trafficking issues, your opinions around funding mechanisms and kind of the marriage between the public sector and the nonprofit sector.

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Yeah, so we have lots of different kinds of advocates. I think you're talking specifically about our criminal justice advocates. So I'll, I'll, I'll reference the question that way. So it is complicated. And it is complicated for the courts, and we live in a state that's generally under-resourced. So to give you an idea, last year there was 20,000 domestic violence charges, criminal charges, just over 1,000 rape charges, and 200 sex trafficking charges in the county, in Clark County. DA Wilson works very hard, and his team works very hard. That is a tremendous number of cases. So we aren't resourced correctly. We also know from research that we did in partnership with UNLV that came out in 2022 that the number one thing survivors are looking for is the abuse to stop. The number two thing they're looking for is to be believed by the justice system is set up. It does not create a space for you to feel believed, to feel, which is why our advocates are there, right, to feel that your story is legitimate. We don't have a judiciary that's completely trained on understanding. What does a brain injury look like in a domestic violence victim? What does a strangulation tied with a brain injury look like? Why couldn't she or he tell a linear story? Why are there pieces of their testimony that are missing that they remembered later? And we have a very adept public defender's office that now that we are in a jury trial situation will wait and wait and wait on a case. So you might not have your criminal case heard for two years. Most survivors want to move on. And that criminal case lagging behind them is not helpful for their healing. So we don't actually advocate either way. We give survivors the sort of landscape of what the justice system can do. The other thing that we talk to survivors about, you know, what's the upside of prosecuting your offender? And really, I think that's a fair question, right? Like, what's the sales pitch for you to go through this horrible process where you are judged by a jury, where you, you know, you have to continually share your story, you have to relive your trauma, and eventually, by the nature of what it does, be judged. Is there an upside to that? Or is it time for us to look? And Nevada could do this, I think Clark County could be a, we could even take a smaller community say Pahrump and pilot something different and say what could look different here. The term restorative justice is bantered about. The problem with this restorative justice is it requires the survivor to take some ownership, which is not something I would advocate, right? Like you don't need to take ownership of your traffickers trafficking of you. That's not a requirement. So, but what can we find there that would create that landing for a survivor? In the face of persecution and being told that you're doing this because you want custody or you want money or you want your undocumented status to become documented, we have provided very little space for a survivor to proceed with prosecution with dignity and healing, and that's missing. So I hope as you go into your PhD program, smart people start to think, how can we create a different system that meets the needs of the survivor? It doesn't mean that you're believed right off the bat, there's a reason why we have a criminal justice system. But what can we do differently to create a space where survivors are heard and we don't have 95% recants and no-shows, right?

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You're exactly right. It's a balance, and that's the operative word there, balance about protecting due process for defendants, but also providing a trauma-informed space for victims and survivors, right? Because there is a distinction between the two and they can apply to the same person. You can have been a victim and become a survivor. Thanks to the support of organizations like SafeNest. My next question is, it falls along those lines because you mentioned a lot of data points that I think are important, right? But as a researcher, I am interested in knowing how accurate and effective those data points are, where do they come from, how do we measure them, and what can we do

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better?

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Yeah, great question. So the data points that I gave you around the 20,000 charges, that comes from the Nevada crime stats. So that's publicly available to search information on the database. It's actually pretty dynamic now because it's in real time. It used to take me like a year to get data. I was like, oh, this is fantastic. Anything that I cite from Metro stats, which I don't know if I have in this conversation, comes from Metro. We get a monthly report in our partnership with Las Vegas PD, how many DV calls they had and how many arrests they made. So those are pretty solid. The 95% is that you're hitting on a great point, is not a tracked number. That comes from a meeting that I go to quarterly with the court system and that was the number that's bantered about, about is about 95% no-show. So here's what we know in domestic and sexual violence. We know up to charge, but beyond charge, we don't know how many plea downs, plea outs, how many perpetrators were given treatment, like how many were prescribed treatment as part of their experience. We don't know how many convictions there ultimately were. We don't have any of that tracking. And I don't want to throw Nevada under the bus because that's also true in other states that that's not tracked. But here's the here's the problem, right? What do we want our success metrics to be in the largest expense our state has? Right? If we are to do the math on domestic violence, how much the police spend on it, how much then the court system spend on it, how much we get funded by it? We've got to be over a billion dollars. It wouldn't take a whole lot for me to get there. And we have absolutely no metrics to know whether or not the justice system is working. I would say the metric I care most about is the 95% recant and no-show. Let's actually get our hands around that because that's an indication of whether or not our criminal justice system is creating a pathway for survivors to find justice if they're seeking it. And that would be the most, for safeness, that would be a really important metric. Whether or not there's a conviction is important, but there's a lot of nuance in that. And now that we're in a jury trial situation, there's more nuance, right? How do 12 folks who don't work in this field navigate understanding and without the judgment of, well, I don't understand why she didn't leave, right, which is the common.

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Yeah, that's a tough one. And there, you actually bring up a really great point about understanding. And for anyone who doesn't work in this space, there are terms that need to be understood, right? For example, we just talked about the way that agencies reports to one central repository, but there are nuances, I'm sure, right, Liz? So for example, can you talk to folks about what a lethality index is? Yeah, what that means for agencies?

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Yeah, so I wish states reported to one central repository, right? That is that that would be fantastic. And I Governor Lombardo talked about some of this in his state of the state address, consolidation, and really getting our, our hands around what is happening in the state, because we send in a report to the state on four different grants, it's all grant funded, but they're numbers. They're numbers about how many bed nights, right? And they don't, they talk about what we do so that we get the proper funding from the different mechanisms, but they don't talk about where the gaps are, right? Which is like, oh, that's where our next funding should be. So I wish there was a central repository. A lethality index is a, so Jackie Campbell is a researcher in our field. She's been doing this work for 30 years. She developed the domestic violence lethality index, which was really to help law enforcement quickly go through a series of 10 questions to define whether or not the victim was in lethal danger of homicide. We We use it as a screening mechanism for our shelter. We educate around it. It's how we train our partners on what lethality looks like. Our police departments use it as well, and there's two versions of it. There's the lethality index, and then there's the DALE, is the other piece. We actually just moved over to the DALE, which is same questions worded a little bit differently and weighted differently in the how they're scored. But that's really what it is. It's a mechanism to determine lethality.

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Thank you for explaining that, Liz. That was really complicated. And some of it, new information that I really hope to learn more about. I'm sure that you speak to a lot of listeners who might have been victimized in the bud?

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move forward? How do you want to really nip this in the bud? Yeah. So working with youth is the most critical piece, right? When their frontal lobe is developing, all of those things that happened before 25. It's sort of like if you're a finance person, we're looking at return on investment. If I invest $50 in a in a child who can learn and has the elasticity in their brain to adopt different patterns, that's gonna take me $5,000 with a mature perpetrator. So when we work with children, really what we're talking about a lot is that abuse is a choice. Hollywood does not help us, the internet does not help us, all of these things don't help us because they show these overly emotional outbursts with no consequences. Like how many times did Mel Gibson walk away from a exploding building? There's no consequence for his, you know, his emotional outpouring. Young men, particularly young women as well, but young men, particularly young men who have been in violent circumstances, need to be able to understand that that violence is a choice. And when we do batterers treatment, we do 26 classes, and one of the classes is all about the anger scale. And we talk about when do you start to feel like we go through, like when do you feel frustrated and how does that scale look for you? And every abuser that's in that class will say, I wish I would have learned this when I was younger. Because nobody talks to men about their emotions being a choice, right? Like it's a choice to be violent. And we know it's a choice and we hear these arguments about blind rage. Every time that there's research around this what we see is that when we say it's blind rage and the room is destroyed, 95% of what's destroyed is her stuff. So you can't tell me there isn't a split second of decision-making when you didn't pick up your grandma's vase, you picked up her grandmother's vase and chucked it against the wall. It's a choice and really it's about understanding I had a bad day at work, I'm going to go have a couple beers with my buddies, and then when I get home I have to not be frustrated anymore. What am I going to do to relieve that tension because it's not okay to come home and take it out on the family unit. So there's a lot of complexities in there and I don't want to minimize violence for anybody because it looks very different in different situations, but working with young people to talk about choice and that they do not need to repeat the cycles that maybe that they're witnessing and that there's a lot of great pathways they can take and that it's not too late to change. We've had abusers give fantastic testimony about the abuse that they've perpetrated on their loved ones and then about the defining time for that choice. Liz, we're so appreciative of you and the organization that you're leading right now. That is SafeNESS CEO, Liz Ortenberger. And we hope that our listeners today have gotten new insight into the work that you do, the pandemic and how you continue to serve many of our community members. Thanks so much, Liz, for joining us today. Thank you, Carmen. Really appreciate all the listeners today. Thank you, Liz, for reminding us that we do not have to be

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victims of our circumstances, right? Yes. Thank you so much for coming today. All right. Thanks so much, everyone. Thank you for tuning into this episode of Conversation to Transformation, Opportunities Born from the Pandemic. This podcast is made possible through the Lindsay Institute at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. For more information, please follow us on social media and of Nevada Las Vegas. For more information, please follow us on social media and visit our website at www.unlv.edu slash Lindsay Institute.