Advocate for male abuse victims was one himself

http://www.seacoastonline.com/news/12142003/news/65497.htm

By Jesse J. DeConto jdeconto@seacoastonline.com

NEWMARKET - Large 2 bedroom apartment, bright, sunny. $795/month. Also, 4 bedroom apartment, $1100/month. W/D and parking for both. 603-591-6767 EXETER - For years, Lee Newman, 51, kept a sleeping bag and duffel bag in the trunk of his car in case he needed to flee his home and sleep in the car in a nearby apple orchard.

Don’t tell him men can’t be victims of domestic violence.

But that’s the message he believes he’s hearing from other victims’ advocates who have not supported the organization he helped establish a year ago. Violence Intervention Program-New Hampshire (VIP-NH) will provide services to any victim of domestic violence, but Newman said most VIP clients are men, a group he says is underserved by existing crisis centers.

Grace Mattern, executive director of the New Hampshire Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence, counters that established crisis centers are doing a fine job helping male victims, and that’s why VIP-NH was excluded from membership in the coalition. In a letter to the coalition’s 14 member agencies, Mattern emphasized how VIP-NH would overlap the work of A Safe Place, a domestic violence crisis center that operates in Portsmouth, Rochester and Salem, covering all of the Seacoast.

"While the new program claims there are many underserved victims in this area, much of their focus appears to be serving men who assert they have been battered," Mattern wrote. "All member programs of the coalition, including A Safe Place, assist battered men, so VIP’s assertion that this population is unserved is not true."

Because coalition leaders believe VIP-NH will duplicate existing services and could siphon financial resources they depend on, they have denied the agency membership not only in the statewide coalition, which administers much of the federal funding for domestic violence programs in the state, but also the Exeter Hospital Task Force on Domestic Violence. The latter group trains local health-care providers to spot signs of domestic abuse in their patients.

‘Out on a limb’

Newman, who was involved with the Exeter task force while working at A Safe Place, now participates in the Greater Derry Domestic Violence Council at Parkland Medical Center. Exeter Hospital representatives did not return a phone call seeking comment.

Annie Venier, education and outreach coordinator for A Safe Place, sits on the hospital task force, and said her agency serves all types of victims in Rockingham and Strafford counties, making the Rochester-based VIP-NH redundant and potentially confusing for clients trying to figure out who should help them.

Newman worked at A Safe Place for six months in 2000 under the AmeriCorps Victim Assistance Program. After a long career as a businessman, Newman joined AmeriCorps at age 48 to test his dream of being a counselor and benefit from the program’s college tuition vouchers. He worked with the N.H. Reads literacy program for a year before joining the Victim Assistance Program in 2001.

His stint with A Safe Place was supposed to last a full year, but he asked for a transfer after a conflict with the executive director, who is no longer with the agency, over treatment of employees.

VIP/SAFE-NH P.O. Box 523 Rochester, NH 03867 http://www.vip-nh.org 859-0859 (24-hour answering service)

A Safe Place 6 Greenleaf Woods #101 Portsmouth, NH 03801 http://www.portsmouthnh.com/org/asp 436-7924 24-hour hotline (800) 852-3388

"Somebody has to go out on a limb a little bit for change to happen," he said. "During that time, I realized there were some serious gaps in service."

VIP-NH’s other co-founders, Deb Roy and Joanie Comeau, also formerly worked at A Safe Place. Newman said all three of them filed grievances over a closed-minded climate, epitomized in the prevailing assumption that men are always the aggressors and women the victims in domestic abuse situations.

"It’s very horrifying that people will call and be turned away just because they happen to be the wrong gender," he said. "We get calls from mothers about their sons. We get calls from sisters about their brothers. We do get calls from men themselves. The majority of our phone calls are from men or regarding men."

In trying to show established crisis centers are not meeting the needs of male victims, Newman recites results of research conducted by University of New Hampshire sociologist Murray Straus, a world-renowned and controversial expert on family violence. While Straus claims women commit violence against their intimate partners about as much as men do, N.H. coalition public policy director Linda Griebsch said crisis center service records approximately mirror the gender ratio of domestic abuse cases - 95 percent committed by men and 5 percent by women.

In the fiscal year ending June 30, the coalition reports 7,268 females and 396 males sought asylum at one of the 14 crisis centers across the state. A Safe Place served 1,160 females and 80 males. Most of these needed only counseling or legal services, but 113 needed overnight shelter, including 53 adult women, 38 female children and 22 male children.

"We did not provide shelter to any men," Venier said.

Men are abused

Newman figures he spent dozens of nights sleeping in his car or home office during the latter part of a domestic partnership in the early 1990s.

"There are no shelters for males affected by domestic violence," he said. "His shelter becomes his locked car. When you turn on the radio in the morning, you’re listening to see whether your house has been burned to the ground."

Newman said his live-in girlfriend frequently assaulted him while riding in the passenger seat as he drove, and he would order her out of the vehicle and continue down the road only to turn around and go back because he was convinced her word alone would make him the perpetrator in the eyes of the law.

"All she had to do was claim I had abused her," he said.

After the woman threatened to falsely accuse him, Newman finally evicted her from his home by inviting another female friend to stay with them for about six weeks and witness the abuse. The friend walked in on the woman terrorizing Newman with a knife, he said.

People assume that because men are generally stronger than women they can’t be victims, but Newman said men can’t defend themselves without risk of social, financial and legal repercussions because judges, police and victims advocates are predisposed to see men as batterers.

Laurie Couture, an Exeter resident and mental health counselor, agreed, and said prejudice is especially strong within the domestic abuse advocacy culture.

"I don’t think they view women as perpetrators," she said. "There’s such an insurmountable number who are not humanitarians, they’re feminists. ... If a woman does perpetrate, (they think) it’s only because she’s the victim."

Couture interviewed for a job with A Safe Place, and said one of the first questions asked in her group interview was whether she is a feminist. Venier said the agency no longer asks that question.

"Their rose-colored glasses won’t allow them to see the male victims right next to them," Couture said. "They’ll be turned away. They’ll be told there are no services available for them."

Newman said it depends on who answers the phone and whether or not "they’re gender-biased in their own personal views."

The coalition’s Griebsch disagreed.

"I don’t see that as a real problem," she said. "I’m still dealing with some of the issues biased the other way.

"The crisis centers in this state do serve males, but they have to be the victim, not the perpetrator. It would be a conflict of interest for us to try to serve both parties."

‘She threatened to kill me...’

Griebsch said whether or not Professor Straus is right about incidences of domestic violence being committed equally by men and women, male violence usually causes greater injury. Seventy percent of intimate partner homicide victims are women.

"It’s not an anti-male stance; it’s a stance that’s based on the statistics," Griebsch said. "The one statistic they can’t argue with is the homicide statistic.

"Almost all of the wives who killed their husbands had previously been beaten by their husbands. The violence of women against men very rarely results in serious injuries."

But Newman said unfettered rage can turn even the tiniest woman into a dangerous weapon. He installed a heavier door on his home office because his former partner had punched through doors and rammed her head through a panel of drywall.

"She threatened to kill me many times," he said. "Let’s take the gender out of this and put the humanity in. It doesn’t matter if you’re a man or a woman; it still hurts."

Newman said VIP managed 381 cases of domestic violence in its first year, most of them involving male victims of female partners.

"Where would those 381 people go?" he said. "How many of those people would turn out to be suicides? How many of them would turn out to be the murder-suicides that we hear about?"

Bias against men

Domestic abuse against men and the 5-to-1 ratio of male suicides to females are just some of the topics on the agenda of the world’s first Commission on the Status of Men which convened in New Hampshire this fall.

Michael Geanoulis, a commissioner from New Castle, said the topic of domestic abuse has not been broached at either of the panel’s first two meetings, but he plans to push for it because he believes the state’s family court system issues too many restraining orders based on one-sided testimony from women.

Geanoulis said a survey of judicial patterns in New Hampshire’s family courts found at least 80 percent of restraining orders were issued after a judge heard from only one party. At some courts, the number was 100 percent.

"I think it would be OK to order a father out of his house after getting both sides of the story," said Geanoulis, president of the N.H. chapter of the National Congress for Fathers and Children. "The guy shouldn’t be expected to leave the home when the fight breaks out. Men have every bit as valid a reason to stick around the family and house as women do."

Geanoulis said a feminist-influenced education system predisposes society to taking the woman’s side, and Couture said anti-violence training materials depict men, not women, as potential abusers.

"You almost have to shovel through mounds of bias and outright denial," Couture said.

The result is a gender bias at crisis centers, she said, and that’s why Newman believes VIP-NH is a necessary alternative for male victims.

Newman said VIP has worked with victims from the Seacoast to the Lakes and Monadnock regions. As the state chapter of Stopping Abuse for Everyone, VIP is open to anyone in the state, but receives few calls from the North Country.

Gary Palmer, who manages federal grants for domestic violence prevention through the N.H. Department of Justice, said VIP would have trouble securing federal funding if it duplicates existing services. Even though he said coalition agencies don’t serve men as well as they serve women, the numbers of male victims are not large enough to warrant a separate organization.

Palmer said not even large cities have agencies dedicated to male victims of domestic violence.

"I know for a fact that the coalition agencies do provide services to men," Palmer said. "I’m sure Lee means well, but for his two years’ experience in the field, I’m not sure he really has a complete picture."

Newman said with the coalition having the corner on federal funding, VIP-NH has been operating on a few small donations, but mostly on out-of-pocket expenditures by him, Roy and Comeau. Newman believes money is what is motivating the coalition to exclude his group.

"If men are 5 percent of the victims, where’s the 5 percent of funding for men?" he said.

Griebsch confirmed the conflict is an economic one, but said the coalition does provide funding to qualified nonmember agencies, and some members, such as Sexual Assault Support Services in Portsmouth, secure federal funding independent of the coalition.

"We believe the need’s being met and, with limited resources, we can’t afford to have two different crisis centers serving the same area," she said. "If we had unlimited resources, we’d be happy to have an agency on every block."