Downtown Seattle’s Union Gospel Mission (UGM) is arguably the largest and most effective charity serving Seattle’s homeless population. In 2019, for example, they helped 428 unsheltered people get off the streets and into shelter, recovery, or transitional housing.
Donors to UGM receive periodic email updates from the organization. On July 27, 2020, UGM sent out a 3-page document called “Homelessness in Seattle”, which was introduced in the body of the email as “…a piece on Homelessness we have put together to better explain some of the risk factors for homelessness…”.
The publication lists “mother treated violently” as one of ten Adverse Childhood Experiences that can set children on a path to homelessness.
Two days after receiving the email, we brought to the attention of the donor relations officer that it seems strange that a violent father would be a top cause of homelessness but a violent mother would not. After all, women are violent in a substantial proportion of all relationships in which there is intimate partner violence. Is a boy significantly less traumatized seeing his mom beat his dad than seeing his dad beat his mom? Shouldn’t a survey about difficult experiences in one’s childhood provide space for sharing about either of one’s parents being violent? And wouldn’t “parent treated violently” be a superior way for Union Gospel Mission to express the idea in their publication?
The reason this matters is because too many people perceive domestic violence as a matter of men abusing women. This was certainly the bias the authors of this blog used to have. We want the narrative about abuse to become more balanced and to accurately reflect what the data show. If we want equality for boys and men, and if we want male victims to seek help, we need to avoid narratives that exclusively paint women as domestic violence victims.
We will see how Union Gospel Mission responds to our inquiry.
