‘Writing on the wall’: KC victim services fear funding cuts, plead for federal fix
Domestic violence shelters, along with rape, crisis and child advocacy centers worry they may soon have to make difficult decisions about funding that could significantly limit the services and resources they offer victims.
Late last year, Congress announced a roughly $600 million cut to federal funding awarded to states through the Victims of Crime Act, reducing the nationwide budget to about $2 billion, officials said. Since then, Jennifer Carter Dochler, public policy director at the Missouri Coalition against Domestic and Sexual Violence, has been inundated with emails weighing the devastation of possible budget cuts from some of the 124 agencies providing service to survivors statewide, including in Kansas City.
The cuts are the result of a significant decrease in federal criminal prosecutions, leaving less money from criminal penalties and fees to fuel the Crime Victims Fund, which supports the crime act known as VOCA. It is drying up.
Area shelters say it could come down to cutting staff positions or financial assistance to survivors, like rent deposits, and cab and bus fares. They may be forced to eliminate education specialists who lead support groups or transition specialists who help survivors connect with housing and employment opportunities. They could lose therapists. Smaller, rural agencies are facing the prospect of outright closure.
As they face added financial burdens brought on by the pandemic, agencies providing support to survivors of child abuse and sexual and domestic violence across Kansas and Missouri are counting on, and pleading for, what they’re calling the “VOCA Legislative Fix.” It is an effort to replenish lost federal funds in hopes of keeping their doors open for survivors.
They are among a chorus of hundreds of organizations around the country advocating for Congress to amend the VOCA statute.
Over the past several years, the Department of Justice has more frequently relied on deferred and non-prosecution agreements, placing any fines and penalties from these cases into the general treasury fund. The VOCA fix asks that these sizable amounts of money be redirected back to the Crime Victims Fund.
Juliane Walker, executive director of the Children’s Advocacy Centers of Kansas, compared the cuts to VOCA to a building that’s smoldering. While the most grueling affects of the federal cut likely won’t be seen immediately, it could have serious consequences within the next year or two.
“You have to take care of it now before it gets too big and there’s a complete burn-down of the building,” she said, likening a fully-engulfed building in this scenario to the closure and slashing of countless victim services.
Such a dire need will create a ripple effect through the entire criminal justice system, said Denise Edwards, director of government affairs for the National Children’s Alliance in Washington D.C.
When she talks to lawmakers, Edwards tries to transport them to a children’s advocacy center, putting them in the shoes of those who might be suffering.
She explains the place designed to help children and their families heal, where children only have to recount their trauma once and have access to therapy. She reminds them that if a funding solution doesn’t come soon, many centers’ doors could close, leaving victims with fewer options, if any.
If VOCA doesn’t fill in the gap, she asks them, who will?
The help VOCA provides
The Victims of Crime Act was signed into law in 1984 to support crime victims financially by providing access to medical care, mental health counseling, courtroom advocacy and temporary housing.
In 2015, Congress more than tripled the amount of funding released to VOCA programs through the Crime Victims Fund. With the additional money, nearly 2,500 new victim organizations popped up across the country. As a result, more than 2.5 million more survivors got help between 2015 and 2019, according to a letter signed by all of the country’s attorneys general urging Congress to address the trickling flow of new money going into the Crime Victims Fund, which they said will reach a 10-year low by the end of 2021 if nothing changes.
Six years ago, when VOCA funding increased, Kansas’s award increased from $4 million to about $19 million annually, said Joyce Grover, executive director at the Kansas Coalition Against Sexual and Domestic Violence. This allowed Kansas agencies the opportunity to expand programs and services that had historically been underserved.
Children’s programming was added at domestic violence shelters where youth often outnumber adults, Grover said. More outreach was done in both rural communities and urban areas where English is not the primary language.
“We just don’t want to go backward,” she said. “Our congressional delegation needs to know how critical these funds are.”
The children who come through the doors of Sunflower House in Shawnee, Kansas, are often victims of horrific crimes, including sexual abuse by relatives.
“They’re people who they knew and they trusted and so you have all sorts of issues for parents and for children,” said Cindy Riddell, child assessment program director at the Sunflower House, which helps children who have experienced sexual abuse, severe physical abuse or witnessed violent crimes. “And we have services for those kids so they can begin their healing.”
With the help of Sunflower House’s therapists, many children go from being suicidal and under-performing in school to standing up for themselves and finding inner strength, she said.
So the idea of the kids losing access to trauma treatment, including forensic interviews and free therapy, makes her anxious.
Sunflower House, which serves about 550 children from Johnson and Wyandotte counties each year for forensic interviews alone, doesn’t yet know what cuts they’ll be facing, but they’re keenly aware that 15 of their 22 staff are fully or partially funded by VOCA — that includes all of their therapists.
“We have to prepare ourselves for what’s coming in the next few years,” said Sara Lissauer, director of resource development at Sunflower House. “We see the writing on the wall.”
Preparing for impact
When Kansas receives its VOCA award for the 2021 fiscal year in September, Juliene Maska, administrator for the Kansas governor’s grants program, anticipates the 28.7% cut by Congress will be reflected.
Since states have three years to expend each annual federal VOCA allotment, there is some leftover money from previous years Kansas can use to fill in this year’s gap, as well as next year’s, Maska said.
But, she said, if there isn’t a fix within Congress soon, come fiscal year 2023, Kansas agencies would be facing “drastic decreases.”
That’s why her office is asking agencies and centers to start planning ahead now. They will have to start looking at what they could cut first, so if and when the time comes, they aren’t blind-sided by the need to lay off staff or reduce the number of people served at a shelter.
“The services are so critical at the state and local level that to decide where those cuts are going to be made is very challenging, and weighs on every funder as we try to make those decisions,” Maska said. “So it is very difficult.”
The situation is similar in Missouri, where some excess funds mean shelters and centers likely wouldn’t need to make cuts immediately, said Carter Dochler of the Missouri Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence. Yet they only have so much funding cushion before the outlook begins to look distressing.
For the 2018 fiscal year, Missouri was awarded nearly $62 million in VOCA funding. By fiscal year 2020, that amount was reduced to a little less than $30 million, Rebecca Woelfel, communications director for the Missouri Department of Social Services, said in an email.
And because Missouri received less funding in 2020, less funding will be available during the next contract cycle beginning Oct. 1.
“We continue to strive for saying that every individual who is in crisis who reaches out to a provider will be able to receive services,” Carter Dochler said. “Yet the reality is that we still do have individuals who we’re not able to provide services to because of capacity.”
She said the strides they’ve made over the last several years to decrease turnaway numbers could be reversed, meaning fewer survivors would get help.
The impact
Each year, the Metropolitan Organization to Counter Sexual Assault based in Kansas City, Missouri, serves about 60,000 survivors across both sides of the state line.
As the only rape crisis center in the bi-state area, MOCSA receives about $2 million in federal VOCA awards annually, equivalent to 34 full time employees, most of whom are therapists, advocates and educators, said Julie Donelon, MOCSA’s president and CEO.
“First and most importantly is the impact this will have on survivors of sexual violence, and it will mean a huge loss of jobs in our city and our state and across the nation,” Donelon said.
MOCSA serves more than 1,500 survivors with free counseling services, and that doesn’t include those on the waiting list. In 2019, more than 1,300 individuals received advocacy services.
But cuts to VOCA could force MOCSA to cut counseling services to between 375 and 840 people, she said. Those same cuts could mean between 342 and 766 survivors would lose access to hospital, law enforcement and criminal justice advocacy.
“Right now what we’re seeing is that survivors’ needs are much more complex as a result of the pandemic,” Donelon added. “So not only are they dealing with a sexual assault. But then, they’re having to take time off to physically or emotionally recover.”
When there have been less significant cuts in the past, Donelon said MOCSA has been able to rely on additional funding sources and support from the community. But that’s especially hard to come by now, as the coronavirus has left many people strapped for cash, and makes fundraising more difficult.
Courtney Thomas, president and CEO of Newhouse, the oldest domestic violence shelter in Kansas City, said most of the $500,000 they receive annually in VOCA funding goes toward covering their 14 staff positions.
She said the proposed cut would be “monumental,” and “in such negative contrast to the need given the spike in domestic violence during COVID.”
For Thomas, the fact that the VOCA fix is not yet realized, sends a message that there continues to be a deep misunderstanding and unawareness around domestic violence.
If the VOCA fix doesn’t come quickly, Newhouse would have to consider cutting down on shelter capacity as well as staff.
But for now, it remains a waiting game.
Edwards, out of D.C., is hopeful that the VOCA fix, which has received bi-partisan support, will go through. To her, it’s more a matter of when than if. The longer Congress waits to act, the more detrimental the consequences.
When asked by the Star how the community can respond to the increasing anxiety around VOCA funding, all those interviewed encouraged people to call their legislators and urge them to act on the VOCA fix soon.
“What is our country’s plan? What is our state plan and what is the local plan to address this?” Thomas said. “There are no other options for these individuals. What we are doing is forcing them to stay in dangerous and potentially lethal situations, so you’d have to ask yourself the question to lawmakers, what’s the cost of a life?”
Resources
An estimated one in every nine girls and one in every 53 boys younger than 18 are sexually abused or sexually assaulted by an adult, according to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network known as RAINN. One out of every six women and one out of every 33 men in the U.S. have been victims of rape or attempted rape.
If you or a loved one are in need of help these resources are available. You do not need to have an emergency to call the crisis hotlines.
Kansas’s crisis hotline: 888-363-2287
Missouri’s child abuse hotline: 1-800-392-3738
Friends of Yates: Crisis hotline: 913-321-0951; toll-free crisis hotline: 855-232-0252
- Metropolitan Organization to Counter Sexual Assault: Crisis hotline, 816-531-0233 for Missouri or 913-642-0233 for Kansas
- Safehome: 24 hour hotline, 913-262-2868
- Kansas City Anti Violence Project: Crisis hotline, available by text, call or email, 816-348-3665 or 913-802-4014 or info@kcavp.org
- Rose Brooks Center: Crisis hotline, 816-861-6100
- Hope House: Crisis hotline, 816-461-4673
- Newhouse: Crisis hotline, 816-471-5800
- Synergy Services: Crisis hotline, 816-321-7050 or 800-491-1114
- Any of the six Kansas City area metro domestic violence shelters can be reached at 816-468-5463.
If you are outside the Kansas City area the National Domestic Violence Hotline is 800-799-7233; the National Child Abuse Hotline is 800-422-4453; the National Sexual Assault Hotline is 1-800-565-4673.
This story was originally published February 1, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
