Family Justice Center Opens in Georgetown, South Carolina
August 9, 2011
By Gina Vasselli

The phone rings at a domestic violence center. The secretary picks up and hears a woman say she’s being chased by the man who abuses her. She’s in her car and he’s following her.

The secretary, a former police dispatcher, goes into emergency mode, directing the woman to the center’s building on Highmarket Street while she gets someone else to call the police .

The victim’s car comes whipping into the parking lot and as the large steel door of the center closes behind the woman, her abuser’s car pulls into the lot, and is quickly chased by local law enforcement, sirens wailing.

It’s like a scene out of a movie, but it actually happened, and in Georgetown.

It was an unusual case, but was one of the almost 200 to come through the doors of the Family Justice Center since it opened in January.

The idea for the center, based on a national model that places many resources for domestic violence victims in a single location, came more than five years ago in the spring of 2006.

At that time there were a rash of very serious domestic violence incidents, including three deaths linked to domestic violence within a five day span in March of 2006.

Carol Winans, one of the founding members, heard a volunteer from Citizens Against Spouse Abuse, or CASA, talk at a lunch about the need for the community to get more involved and behind the efforts against domestic violence in the area.

“She said what was needed was community involvement in helping them help these people,” said Winans. “But she said she had spoken at meetings like that before and the audience told her they would help. But within a month or two that help had dropped away. I remembered promising her that we would help her and we would not go away. We kept our word.”

What would become the Family Justice Center began as a committee of the Georgetown County League of Women voters.

“We spent the better part of a year studying it and talking to people. We said ‘OK. If everything is going how it should be and if we’ve got it handled why are the stats so bad?’” said Gillian Roy, another founding member.

“We were just naive enough to think we could do something,” said Roy.

And now, more than five years later, the center is up and running, partnering with more than a dozen different agencies to bring services to victims.

Victims like the 28-year-old woman who came to the center last week.

The mother of three girls, 9, 4 and 1, talked to the center’s case manager about her fear since the father of her youngest daughter got out of jail.

She says she hopes to find a way he can be involved in his daughters lives and then tears up when she talks about the moment she realized she had to leave the father of two of her children and move back in with her mother.

“My oldest, she said to me ‘Mom, I don’t want to see you like this’. Oh that was hard. I cried and cried,” she said.

She says the family justice center has given her strength she didn’t think she had and she is determined to stay away from abusive men.

“I’m stronger than I thought I was,” she said. “I’m a lot more careful. I don’t put up with any of that now.”

A major issue with domestic violence is keeping victims away from their abusers. The idea for the first Family Justice Center, in San Diego, came from attorneys who were seeking a way to keep their clients from pressing charges against their abusers and then recanting their stories, sometimes hours later.

It’s an issue with domestic violence everywhere, said 15th circuit solicitor Greg Hembree.

“The charges are made, the two people make up and then the victim is at the bond hearing asking for the charges to be dismissed, begging, pleading, cursing,” he said.

The goal for justice centers across the country is to reduce the occurrences of victims returning to their abusers.

But it’s something Linda Collins, the case manager for the Georgetown center, said she deals with every day.

“You don’t stop them. You give them options and the process for leaving,” she said. “I can’t make their decision for them. They have their reasons to stay.”

The statistics for the area have improved over the last few years, Hembree said, going from a high of around 1,100 cases to last year’s 762 cases.

But he said it could be a lot better.

“We’re trying (the family justice center) out in Georgetown County. It’s an experiment. It’ll be some time before we can tell how much of an impact it has,” he said. “It also might be a matter of funding.”

And funding is what Roy and others at the center are now focused on.

“We don’t have a dime. It’s a miracle we’re here,” she said. “Now the goal is sustainability. The doors are open but how do we keep them open.”

Roy said the center is hoping that as the economy turns around they’ll get more “buy-ins.”

“Right now we’re using duct-tape and string,” she said, laughing. “We’re got a few angels in the community and you try not to be in crisis management all the time.”

She said she knows that some are waiting to see what kind of success the center has before “buying in.”

“People will believe it when they see it,” she said. “But for us, we believe it so we see it. And when you see the survivors…what wouldn’t I do to help them?”