The State of California’s inability to rein in expenses and balance its budget in the face of precipitous drops in revenue due to the recession, Governor Schwarzenegger has eliminated funding for DV shelters according to this article (Sandie06, 7/31/09).  That doesn’t mean all shelters will close or even that most of them will.  They still have federal funding and private donations to rely on.  Still, the article linked to says about half of the 94 shelters affected statewide may be forced to close.

The article is about what you’d expect; it reports the governor’s decision and then jumps to quoting women who have been abused and shelter operators bemoaning the loss of funding. That’s all reasonable enough.  But, in keeping with the apparently required narrative that DV only happens to women and is only done by men, the piece neglects to mention certain things.

One thing it fails to mention is that the federal government openly admits that the shelters it funds (a) give no data at all on what they do, how they do it, who they provide services to, what those services are, who they reject, etc. and (b) have established no criteria by which to judge whether they actually reduce DV or not.  Go to the White House Office of Management and Budget website and check out the Family Violence and Services Program.  There you'll find that the program is rated as "Not Performing." 

In short, the federal government is pouring hundreds of millions of dollars each year into a vast system of shelters whose functioning it knows not the first thing about. That would be outrageous in any other industry, but with domestic violence, it’s business as usual.

The point being that maybe Governor Terminator is on to something. If the feds don’t know what the shelter system is doing with its money, then I doubt the Golden State does either. Maybe Schwarzenegger is going to demand an accounting from the shelter system in exchange for any future renewal of funding. The article doesn’t say, preferring to hew to the accepted narrative.

But consider this: whatever the motivations behind the governor’s decision, remember that he’s a politician and, whatever else may be true, he considers it politically safe to cut 100% of state funding for DV shelters.  The article missed it, but THAT’S news.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 31st, 2009 at 10:47 am and is filed under Domestic Violence/DV System.