C4DP in the news: The COVID-19 pandemic has heightened awareness about domestic violence. As such, C4DP has been called upon to participate in several media interviews.
Below are three links. One is to a TV Clip where Donna Garske, Executive Director, shared the stage with other domestic leaders in the Bay Area in a discussion about the impact of domestic violence at a regional level. The second link is to an interview where C4DP has been included as part of the national dialogue about the surge in domestic violence rates due to the pandemic. Lastly, Donna was interviewed by the Marin IJ:
“Being able to get outside the home is often part of a survival strategy,” said Donna Garske, Executive Director of the Center for Domestic Peace in Marin County.
“The expectation now is that the victim has to actually live at the scene of the crime.”
Donna Garske, executive director of the Center for Domestic Peace, a nonprofit shelter in San Rafael, California, said they have 21 women and about 50 children in transitional housing, apartments that the shelter helped the women find. But nearly all of those women have lost their jobs or had their work reduced because of stay-at-home orders, she said, making it more difficult for them to pay rent.
The Center for Domestic Peace is trying to secure emergency funding to help those women, Garske said, even though the shelter just had to cancel its biggest annual fundraiser.
“If we’re not out of this by the end of June, that would be a major concern,” Garske said.
Marin’s Independent Journal about domestic violence in Marin.
The San Rafael-based Center for Domestic Peace has already had a busy week, said executive director Donna Garske on Friday.
“I think it’s a fair assumption that they will go up,” Garske said of how the shelter-in-place order would affect domestic abuse cases. “I don’t see how they won’t. I will say, often the option to get out of the house to go to work and have some distance from the abuser is part of a survival strategy for the victim in this situation. And now that option has been removed.”
