Deaf abuse victims accorded a refuge

From: The Register-Guard - Eugene,Oregon,USA - Apr 5, 2005

By Claudia Rowe
Seattle Post-Intelligencer

SEATTLE - When Carol Keeley was raped at 19, no one would speak to her. After the police arrived, she said, no one even asked if she was hurt.

They couldn't. Keeley is deaf, and in that instance, her attackers were the only ones who could communicate.

Similar silences met Cheri Molnar's incoherent screams for help during the three years she reported being battered by her then-husband.

And when Lisa Vosburg-Buhl watched state social workers in Minnesota put her children into foster care, she had virtually no way to make herself understood during a three-year fight to win them back.

All three women are deaf. All described a litany of abuse. And all were relieved to know that Seattle has become the first city in the country to begin building apartments specifically designed for deaf and deaf-blind women overcoming domestic violence.

The effort began 19 years ago in Marilyn Smith's basement.

A therapist, Smith founded Abused Deaf Women's Advocacy Services after a man killed his deaf wife during a domestic dispute in Seattle. The victim, said Smith, who is deaf herself, had tried to escape and seek help but was turned away because service providers were unable to understand her needs - much less answer them.

''The experience of domestic violence is the same for deaf and hearing women,'' said Molnar, a client of the advocacy group, who spoke through an interpreter. ''The difference is, when we're calling for help - literally screaming - we don't know if anyone can hear us.''

In her case, police responded to Molnar's cries but routinely turned to her ex-husband for an explanation, she said. He shrugged off her frenzied signing by suggesting that she had misunderstood him, Molnar said. Increasingly isolated, by the time she left the marriage three years later, Molnar said, she barely knew who she was.

Her friends in the deaf women's group watched as she signed the story, nodding in vigorous agreement.

''The police will always talk to the hearing person first,'' Vosburg-Buhl said. ''They think we aren't educated, or smart enough, or that we can't communicate, can't understand the legal system.''

Worse, she added, is the tendency for emergency responders to quell frantic gesturing by grabbing a deaf woman's hands.

''Then we can't speak,'' Vosburg-Buhl said. ''How can we communicate if our hands are being held?''

These are exactly the issues that the new housing will help address. Molnar, Vosburg-Buhl and Keeley won't be there - through the advocacy group all three have moved on to stable lives. But other deaf women and their children, up to 72 people in all, will live in the Northeast Seattle complex, A Place of Our Own, receiving therapy, vocational training, day care and education services.

The $7.7 million project, 64 percent funded by public money, will provide 19 apartments; no resident will pay more than 30 percent of her income toward rent. Move-in day is scheduled for next spring.

''We still have a long ways to go,'' Smith said in an e-mail interview. ''Deaf victims and deaf people in general still face barriers to other services, and we still need to send advocates with our clients when they need legal assistance.''

Domestic violence rates among the deaf mirror those for the hearing population - affecting about 25 percent to 30 percent of women in their lifetimes, according to U.S. Census data and crime statistics reported by the National Domestic Violence Hotline.

Advocacy workers estimate that more than 4,000 deaf and hard-of-hearing women in King County will experience domestic violence or sexual assault during their lifetimes.

But there are circumstances particular to victims who can neither hear their attackers coming from behind, nor ask for help if an abuser breaks her TTY communication device.

To Smith's mind, especially troubling is the frequency with which counselors attempting to offer help will use the hearing children of deaf women as interpreters - in effect, forcing kids to narrate the painful secrets of one parent while taking sides against the other.

The deaf women discussing A Place of Our Own said they understood the impulse, but it made them no less frustrated.

''There's just this huge wall between us,'' Molnar said. ''And in a high-stress situation, you're really stuck in a lurch. You want to communicate one thing clearly, just one thing.''

Smith, who was honored by President Clinton in 1996 for ''outstanding services on behalf of victims of crime,'' has since worked with the Department of Justice to replicate her program in 15 other cities.

The first years were lonely, she admitted. Gaining acceptance from the deaf community itself was a hurdle.

''But I knew in my heart that the work we were doing was important and necessary. Today, I can say we definitely have made a huge difference, and this perseverance has paid off.''

Copyright 2005 The Register-Guard