PART FOUR IN A CONTINUING SERIES ON THE IMPACT OF GUNS AND RELATED ISSUES
Illustration by Justin Vaughan
Richmond Police Sgt. Carol Adams knows what domestic violence looks and feels like.
She and her younger sister spent their childhoods experiencing the fear and intimidation of their father and did their best to protect one another and their mother. On Dec. 30, 1980, when she was 17 years old and living in Richmond’s East End, Adams heard five shots ring out in the bedroom next to hers.
Her father had killed her mother.
In 1997, 17 years after that life-changing night, Adams joined the RPD as an officer. Rather than allow herself to be consumed with anger or vengeance, she dedicated her life to helping people deal with domestic violence. She credits her grandmother with instilling in her and her sister a sense of faith and forgiveness and, with that, the power to transform her family tragedy into a positive.
In 2014, she formed the Carol Adams Foundation, whose mission is to provide emergency assistance to women, men and children who are victims of domestic violence. She has received numerous accolades from the RPD and community organizations for her work.
Carol Adams (Photo by Jay Paul)
Today, Adams says she worries not only about what she reads in newspapers and watches on television about the COVID-19 quarantine, but about how it is affecting people in precarious domestic situations as they spend more time isolated at home.
Noting a “horrifying surge in domestic violence,” United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres recently called on all nations to help protect victims: “Violence is not confined to the battlefield. For many women and girls, the threat looms largest where they should be safest — in their own homes.”
“In many cases this quarantine has made prisoners of women and children,” Adams says. She ticks off four recent domestic violence incidents in the region involving guns, two in which someone died, one in which a person was wounded and one in which the shooter took their own life.
Gun sales, alcohol sales and unemployment spike
In April, Virginia State Police recorded a 95% increase in the number of firearm transaction requests — 62,620— compared to 32,063 in April 2019, according to Corinne N. Geller, public relations manager for the VSP. In March 2020, there were 80,228 transaction requests compared to 45,826 in March 2019, a 73% increase. The FBI statistics for background checks by gun dealers reveal an increase of 41% in March 2020 over March 2019, representing more than a million new guns sold across the United States.
Why are people buying more guns? “Simply put, people are buying more guns because they are afraid,” says Peyton Galanti, director of marketing at Colonial Shooting Academy on West Broad Street in Richmond. “These are uncertain times, and the world is so polarized. The majority of the guns sold since the pandemic started have been to first-time buyers. People are worried.”
Kate McCord, associate director of the Virginia Sexual & Domestic Violence Action Alliance, based in Richmond, says that more guns mean more risk for those in unstable home situations. “Although we don’t have data to know whether gun owners [generally] are more likely to engage in domestic violence, we do know gun owners who engage in domestic violence are more likely to kill their partners,” she says.
Nearly 1 million women alive today have been shot or shot at by an intimate partner, and about 4.5 million women — 1 in 27 — have had an intimate partner threaten them with a gun. When an abusive partner has access to a firearm, the risk the other partner will die increases more than five-fold, according to the Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence.
The organization’s data from 2015 — the latest available — show that while women make up half of Virginia’s population, they comprise three-quarters of intimate partner homicides (IPH). Individuals in communities of color in Virginia make up less than one-third of Virginia’s population but constitute half of the commonwealth’s IPH homicide victims.
Sales of alcohol in Virginia also rose in the wake of the pandemic, totaling more than $107 million for the month of March, according to the Virginia Alcohol Beverage Control Authority, a 22% increase over March 2019. It was the first time March sales revenue exceeded $100 million, says ABC spokesperson Dawn Eischen. In April, sales were up about 15% year over year.
According to the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence, alcohol and alcoholism are "never the sole trigger or cause of domestic abuse,” but they are considered contributing factors that could lead to abuse in a violent individual.
Despite a decrease in crime overall since Gov. Ralph Northam issued stay-at-home orders, Richmond Police Chief William Smith says the department has seen some increases in domestic disturbances and domestic assaults. “We've [also] seen an increase in calls concerning neighbor disputes: People who are not normally home are exposed to more stresses,” he says. “That is a challenge.”
The pandemic has also ratcheted up unemployment, which adds tension and uncertainty for basic survival, food and shelter. In early May, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the U.S. economy lost 20.5 million jobs in April, the largest and most sudden decline since 1939, when the government began tracking the data, spiking the national unemployment rate to 14.7%. In addition, the economy lost 870,000 jobs in March.
“The situation is a perfect storm for some truly tragic things to happen,” McCord says. “The fear and tension combining with the forces of isolation, job and food insecurity, children home from school create tangible anger, frustration and a sense of helplessness for both abuser and the abused.”
Cries for Help
McCord, whose alliance represents 65 groups across the state, says that overall calls to domestic violence hot-lines in Virginia are up 73% from March 1 to April 30, 2020, compared to the same period in 2019. But she notes, “Many of the calls have to do with fundamental survival questions such as the need for shelter, food and coping with the fear of being abused.”
In contrast to the statewide increase in the number of calls, Richmond-area domestic violence hotlines calls actually dropped by nearly 50%, says Rupa S. Murthy, chief development officer for the Richmond YWCA. She notes that the YWCA hotline received 640 calls between March 1 and April 30, 2019, but in the same period this year, during the COVID-19 shutdown, there were just 317 calls.
But that isn’t necessarily an indication that domestic violence is on the wane. Murthy says this anomaly has likely resulted from a decreased ability of individuals who are in a domestic violence situation to have independent access to a telephone and the privacy to make a call.
“Think about it,” Murthy says. “When you are sheltering in place, your domestic partner is there with you 24/7, the kids aren’t in school so they are there, you don’t have access to your normal avenues outside your home, the situation is extraordinarily difficult.”
Adams knows from her own experience and that of 23 years as a police officer that victims of domestic violence frequently don’t want the world to know the extent of the danger happening within their homes. “It is critical for those suffering domestic violence and intimidation — and for their children — to have open and truly transparent conversations about what is happening,” she says.
She stresses that headlines and calls to domestic violence hotlines don’t reveal the true number of simple or aggravated assault, malicious wounding and strangulation attempts, or the numerous bullying incidents that happen behind closed doors.
“Someone doesn’t need to fire a gun to use it to intimidate and terrorize their family,” she says. “All they have to do is sit at the kitchen table and continuously clean, load, unload, reload. Point it at different objects and people in the room.
“Mental health professionals and volunteers answering calls on the hotlines have no way to know if a former victim of domestic abuse isn’t calling because there is ‘no problem’ or because they can’t access a phone,” she says, adding that police reports don’t always show if a victim refuses to file charges “because everything is OK [or because] they are too terrified to do so.” And police and family members cannot respond if victims of abuse "choose to try to hide their fear or the bruises on their bodies and those of their children.”
Adams is especially passionate about helping children trapped in domestic violence situations. She says she hopes that people in the area’s churches will step up in even greater ways and that family members will answer the call with compassion. “This pandemic is presenting us with the opportunity to remember what truly matters and that our homes and our communities need to show more love to one another. If we don’t truly dedicate ourselves to this fight for the lives of our children, if we don’t address this now, when will we?”
The Action Alliance has collaborated with groups across the state to gather information and help those in dangerous situations and to prepare for the “aftershocks” that McCord and others predict will come as they do after an earthquake.
She explains that even after shelter-in-place orders are lifted, not only will the fear of the pandemic continue, but people will still be dealing with financial loss, children who need more freedom — and, paradoxically, more attention — and coping with a lingering anger for unreported incidents suffered behind closed doors.
The Action Alliance recently initiated a plan that aims to communicate that hotlines are open, and that law enforcement and the courts are available to help anyone in a dangerous situation find a safe place.
Like McCord, the YWCA’s Murthy worries that many people are simply not aware that the hotlines are available for any real help beyond “talk” due to the quarantine.
Murthy is proud of her organization’s work with the Richmond Police Department and with the Action Alliance. “We’ve worked together to establish protocols to keep people safe from possible COVID-19 exposure, to provide food as well as to provide safe transportation and rapid re-housing that doesn’t risk the safety of our staff and volunteers or that of the people needing our help,” she says. “We do everything possible to get people into safe places.”
Additionally, she notes that some hotels and cab companies have stepped up to help by donating free rooms and rides when necessary. She can’t say which ones because of “confidentiality and the need to keep people safe from their abusers,” she says.
Murthy, like other front-line responders across the state, is hopeful that despite the pandemic creating a toxic environment for domestic violence, the situation also presents the opportunity “for us to improve upon how we do outreach and delivery of services.”
Kathryn Laughon, a forensic nurse and an associate professor of nursing at the University of Virginia, is national expert on intimate partner violence and homicide. Laughon emphasizes the importance of creating teams — medical, psychological, law enforcement and legal as well as sociological — to address the various complications of the pandemic.
She stresses that it is important for people to understand abusers thrive on isolating their victims, so it is important friends and family reach out to each other. She says one doesn’t need to say anything “heavy or profound” to the victim, "just let he or she know you’re there.”
Laughon says while courts are all still hearing protective orders. Leaving one’s home to seek a protective order is absolutely allowed under Gov. Ralph Northam's “stay-at-home” order, which explicitly stated that, “Leaving one’s residence due to a reasonable fear for health or safety” was acceptable.
Additionally, Laughon urges everyone to download the free “myPlan” app. “It allows a woman — or woman’s friend or family member — to get information, to make a safety plan, and to think about strategies that will help her stay safer no matter what she wants to do — staying, leaving, whatever makes sense for her,” she says. We know this app increases safety and decreases symptoms of depression and PTSD. In these unprecedented times, we need unprecedented vigilance and community engagement.”
Resources for Victims of Domestic Violence
Greater Richmond Regional Hotline
804-612-6126
Virginia Statewide Hotline
Call 800-838-8238
Text 804-793-9999
Chat www.vadata.org/chat
National Domestic Violence Hotline
Call 800-799-7233
Text LOVEIS to 22522
