Testimony

Testimony for Hearing 1/09:

Today we must mention again that 30% of survivors and families who make it into shelter are able to find housing. It’s another issue as to why they don’t make it and the subsequent deaths that are unverifiable as directly connected remains a serious concern.

Where the remaining 70% go has also been unverified, though it is known that many are faced with the unavoidable choice of returning to abusive households, to either become homeless again, or worse. This is a well known fact in the advocacy community.

What these realities do to mothers and their children is devastating in and of itself, if they are able to escape safely even once, let alone multiple times.

Widely available statistics conclude that 75% of most incidents occur while women and their children are attempting to escape, or thereafter, which either leads to homelessness, loss of support, return to the abuser, or more homicides.

We encourage you to consult on how children and women become legitimately disabled as a result of ongoing domestic turmoil over years of exposure to physical, emotional, and mental abuse, the most ‘minimal’ condition being ‘Complex PTSD’, which often goes undiagnosed or misdiagnosed.

Your research would not be complete without looking to Lundybancroft.com, and Legalabusesyndrome.org, where findings have shown after in-depth research that ‘conditions’ are natural responses to violence and abusive, biased litigation in both women and children that follow them through the rest of their lives, with profound long-term effects impacting the gamut from health factors to functionality and ability to seek or find living standards where a productive and improving quality of life can exist and thrive.

To make things worse, obtaining a ‘diagnosis’ or labels have proved to harm women in litigation for custody of their children, though their states were natural to the traumas they continue to endure. Mr. Bancroft goes on to say that the most expedient remedy for the conditions incurred by mothers and children is simply reunification, so they may heal and be given the opportunity of a life free from abuse by both batterers and the system.

A case last year involved a mother who had been put in a wheelchair by an abuser who went on to use her ‘disability’ against her as a form of unfitness as a parent to their children in a matrimonial custody dispute. These practices and others have been far from uncommon.

With these considerations strongly in mind, we are requesting another or improved, expanded category in housing developments, so that these families, who are most always women and children, may have more opportunities for lives free from abuse and to remain safe.