FOCUS ON PREVENTING SEXUAL AND DOMESTIC VIOLENCE
Last month, the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services awarded $13 million in grants for prevention of sexual and domestic violence to communitybased organizations across the state, including San Diego. We cannot overstate the importance of this funding given 2021 data from California showing an increase in violence against women and an increase in violent crimes, which many believe are attributable to the social, economic and mental health stresses of the pandemic.
Unfortunately, the Office of Emergency Services grants were a one-time effort, and we are far from over the pandemic impacts. Further, an economic crisis is looming, and we know from prior experience following the great recession that economic crises result in an increase in prevalence and severity of domestic violence incidents, as indicated by California domestic hotline data. We also know that these incidents do not evenly distribute across our society, with adolescents and young adults, low income and racial/ ethnic minority communities, individuals identifying as LGBTQ or outside the gender binary, and those contending with physical, intellectual or emotional disabilities most likely to face these harms. Many of these same groups are those who have disproportionately faced COVID-19 infection and losses of family and friends.
Prevention of sexual and domestic violence is fundamentally important to strengthening our communities and state as part of how we contend with the COVID-19 pandemic and its harmful lingering effects. Why? Because prevention efforts have multifold benefits beyond just reducing incidents of violence now. They also help stop the cycle of intergenerational violence. Further, the focus violence prevention maintains on mental health and self-care can help prevent other forms of violence as well, and can support a healing process for all Californians, as we have all suffered in varying ways and to various degrees under the pandemic and now with the worst inflation in 40 years. Mental health concerns for Californians as a whole have increased and been maintained over the past two years.
So what will this violence prevention funding do, and what can it do for us here in San Diego?
Center for Community Solutions is one local organization putting the funds to work as the leading San Diego-based nonprofit dedicated to ending relationship and sexual violence. For more than 50 years, Center for Community Solutions has been providing trauma-informed, wraparound services to empower survivors as they heal and recover from trauma. The organization’s services include a 24/7 confidential crisis hotline, four domestic violence shelters, counseling, legal services, safety planning, prevention education and more.
Center for Community Solutions relies on grants to serve the tens of thousands of survivors in San Diego who need these critical services, including the most vulnerable aged 12-24. The funds help build capacity in communities and schools and have been used to provide outreach programming to at-risk teens, community groups, parents and families.
Prevention needs dramatically exceed available funding, and San Diego youth and young adults are impacted daily. Teaching about ways to prevent interpersonal and sexual violence has proven to lessen physical, emotional and psychological trauma. A more reliable and permanent source of funding is essential to shift our communities to preventing violence and assault in addition to intervening once the damage is done.
In sum, we are pleased by, and San Diego is benefiting from, the Office of Emergency Services funding provided to sexual and domestic violence prevention in California, but unless we see this funding sustained, the benefits it will provide will not be sustained and the post COVID-19 restrengthening of our state will be stifled.
Teaching about ways to prevent interpersonal and sexual violence has proven to lessen physical, emotional and psychological trauma.
Raj
Griffin-Tabor