California domestic violence advocates ask Gov. Newsom to spend more on prevention programs
A coalition of 100-plus crisis intervention agencies is once again appealing to the California Legislature and Gov. Gavin Newsom to set aside funding in next year’s budget to pay for programming found to prevent sexual and domestic violence.
Although California has a budget surplus, Newsom did not set aside money for this work in his January budget proposal, something that did not sit well with coalition leaders.
“Despite significant investments in policing and criminalization as a response to rising concerns about public safety, the governor’s budget ignores promising strategies that address the root causes of violence, and fails to place any focus on preventing domestic and sexual violence before they occur entirely,” they wrote in a statement criticizing the omission.
The governor’s office did not respond Friday to a request for comment.
Legislators put $15 million in this year’s budget to support the prevention programs, and Newsom signed approved it. The coalition of victim services providers requested that same amount this year but had asked that it be ongoing annual funding, saying a stable source of funding would allow community-based organizations to sustain and build their initiatives.
Prevention programs help youth understand how they can work to end sexual and intimate partner violence. In past initiatives, community groups have trained school-age youth in how to cultivate safe, healthy relationships; developed teen-led groups who set the tone for acceptable behavior and bring awareness to intimate partner violence; and engaged boys and young men as allies in prevention.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention has provided states with detailed models of programming that work in a resource paper titled “Preventing Intimate Partner Violence Across the Lifespan: A Technical Package of Programs, Policies and Practices,” and it includes evidence showing successful outcomes.
“Nothing undoes that pain and that trauma that you’ve experienced, even if you can heal from and move beyond it,” Colon said, “and so...we feel it’s incredibly important to begin to be able to focus on preventing any future generations from experiencing this type of abuse.”
Though the coalition of groups has requested it, Newsom has not included ongoing funding for prevention when he’s laid out his priorities for the budget, Colon said.
The California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services is now weighing which prevention programs it will fund all around the state this year. The Legislature also set aside $10 million in prevention funding in 2018-19 and $5 million in 2019-20, and Newsom approved both appropriations.
California’s lack of prevention funding is a significant gap when it comes to addressing homelessness and violent crime, according to a report from the Little Hoover Commission issued in January 2021. It noted that domestic violence poses a “heavy burden on taxpayers through medical, criminal justice, property damage, and other costs.”
The watchdog agency urged California’s leaders to place a strategic emphasis on prevention, pointing to a comprehensive study done by the California Coalition Against Sexual Assault that assessed both the tangible and intangible costs of sexual violence to California.
“The study found that the annual tangible cost for sexual assaults in California is $9 billion,” the commission reported. “Tangible costs include health care, property damage, investigation and adjudication of the incident, and other costs resulting from the crime. $2.9 billion of that is funded by taxpayers to pay for police, courts, jails and prisons, sex offender management, and other public services – and this figure doesn’t include other costs paid by society, such as increases in insurance premiums.”
The intangible costs are even greater, the Little Hoover report stated, citing findings from the California Coalition Against Sexual Assault. The coalition noted that intangible losses include the tax revenue lost during a victim’s recovery and a batterer’s imprisonment and the expenses an employer incurs to hire and train a temporary worker. The coalition’s conservative estimate of these costs pegged them at $140 billion annually.
This violence, though typically occurring within a home, regularly spills into the broader community with disastrous results, according to the Little Hoover Commission’s report. Some examples:
- 40% of law enforcement officer homicides nationwide are associated with domestic violence calls.
- 20% of deaths in intimate partner homicides are collateral victims, people who were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, according to a 2014 study.
- More than 1 million women in the U.S. today have survived a shooting attempt by their partner.
- Roughly 4.5 million women in the U.S. report having been threatened by a partner wielding a firearm.
The Little Hoover Commission urged state leaders to “develop a comprehensive long-term intimate partner violence prevention and early intervention action plan,” adding that “California must integrate its anti-violence initiative into every segment of society. The state must provide adequate funding to implement this plan.”
This story was originally published February 14, 2022 at 3:00 AM with the headline "California domestic violence advocates ask Gov. Newsom to spend more on prevention programs."
