ENGLEWOOD -- The man was about to start living on the
streets. His wife had just left him. She had taken the family car
and left a pile of unpaid bills behind.
The place the couple
was renting had been sold, and he had just been laid off from one of
his jobs.
Donna Leclerc, executive director of Domestic Abuse
Shelter Homes, said the man's wife suffered from severe
schizophrenia, refused to take her medication, and had abused her
husband physically and verbally. Leclerc said the man was physically
small and also didn't want to strike back at his wife.
His co-workers had figured out something was wrong and
alerted DASH.
The victim is one of the seven men that DASH is
helping under its new Men's Resource and Referral Center of Sarasota
and Charlotte Counties. The program addresses violence against men
and men's issues.
While DASH has never helped women
exclusively, it hadn't reached out to men until recently, Leclerc
said. In the past three months, Leclerc has put the word out and
DASH has taken on the male clients.
"We really started publicizing this and marketing it
three months ago," she said.
DASH serves all domestic abuse
victims as defined in Florida law, which holds that domestic
violence is any physical or sexual assault (including stalking) that
results in the injury or killing of one family or household member
by another.
Family or household members are further defined
as those who reside in the same dwelling or who used to reside in
the same dwelling. The definition includes those related by blood or
marriage, former spouses, and even people who have a child in common
but have never lived together or been married.
Family violence is not limited to physical abuse,
Leclerc said. It can include abusive language, threats, and
intimidation.
To fund its men's program, DASH will allocate
$20,000 from its Pat Stottsberry endowment fund. Stottsberry was a
DASH board member who had always wanted to have a men's shelter,
Leclerc said. She left DASH $53,000 in her will; her daughter, Polly
Butler, has allowed DASH to use $20,000 for the new men's
program.
Through the program, DASH provides free shelter,
parenting classes, counseling, and help with employment and
continuing education to men.
DASH has partnered with the Nurturing Dads Initiative,
a program that aims to help men become better fathers, and has found
male counselors and attorneys to donate their time to the
program.
"Before, we had women counselors and we tried to
utilize female attorneys," Leclerc said.
DASH will not help
women any less because of the new men's program, Leclerc said.
Rather, DASH is aiming to make its services equal for men and
women.
"We don't want the public to think we're being gender
biased because we're helping men," Leclerc said.
After Leclerc learned about the victim in this case,
DASH put him -- as well as his dog -- up in a shelter in
Englewood.
The victim stayed for eight weeks. DASH gave him a
set of donated garden tools so that he could start a new part-time
lawn care job. DASH also gave him a donated car, a 1989 Chevrolet
sedan.
The victim has been on his own for a month and is
doing fine, Leclerc said. Several local groups donated cash to help
him get back on his feet, she said.
The men in the program have all been victimized by
women, Leclerc said. She said she found that they generally did not
stay with their abusers for economic reasons, the way women often
do. In fact, the men typically have a higher wage and are more
educated than their partners. Leclerc said they often stayed because
they were ashamed.
"You don't want your men friends that you
go fishing with to know that your wife is abusing you," she
said.
Leclerc said the number of male victims isn't
necessarily growing, but men are becoming more aware that help is
available.
"They're showing us that they need it now, that they
want it," she said.
In 2001 about 15 percent of nonfatal
violent acts by intimate partners -- current or former spouses,
boyfriends, or girlfriends -- were against men, according to the
U.S. Department of Justice. The department reported that 1,247 women
and 440 men were killed by an intimate partner in
2000.
Stephanie C. Woods, the executive director of Safe
Place and Rape Crisis Center in Sarasota County, said male victims
are often abused by other men. A homosexual man could abuse his
partner, a father could abuse his teenage son, or a teenage son
could abuse his father, Woods said.
SPARCC only serves intimate partners, meaning men and
women who are in sexual or romantic relationships with their
abusers. Woods said most people who turn to SPARCC for help are
women, and only a few men request help from SPARCC each
year.
"There are some violent women," Woods said. "Those are
few and far between. The vast majority of victims are
female."
Woods cites statistics from Neil Websdale, a
criminal justice professor at Northern Arizona University who
studied domestic homicides in Florida in 1994.
The study shows that men are overwhelmingly the
killers in domestic homicides. When women kill men, it's usually in
self-defense or it's a reaction to prior abuse, the results
show.
If you are being abused, call the Florida domestic
violence toll-free hotline at (800) 500-1119.
Dads Against the Divorce Industry