I'll try to do my best with that. First, I want to clarify that when I was 12 years old, I took the opportunity of going to a boarding school. So in effect I was running away from home then. I did run back home from the city after school. I just returned to my community in 1998 only to find that, of course, the violence and abuse were still there. I say that just for clarification.
I think that when I experienced being thrown out of my home with my son.... I work in the community. I know the resources. I worked at social services. I'm in the addictions field. But it was such a crisis that you don't think readily or clearly. Outreach would have been helpful. I think I had one or two people out of the entire community ask me what really happened. Again, it was like a silent crisis for years.
You can have safety plans. I think safety plans keep you physically alive. But you don't feel safe for a long time until you do the work of making sure that all precautions are taken. You then start to build on that experience of feeling safe. Nonetheless, that sense of safety still isn't there; I still feel unsafe at times because I run into certain individuals, and continue to deal with obscene gestures and remarks and those sorts of things.
They were helpful to me at the shelter. God bless them. They're so busy and so alert 24/7 in dealing with crises. I'm so glad that they were there for me when I needed them. But I knew about them. So I'm not so sure if any person going through a crisis would readily think of those things. I think the outreach is absolutely needed and some type of coordination team or something like that when situations happen. People knew that happened to me; they knew that when I was thrown out of the house and the door was locked, nobody came. I tried calling and all sorts of stuff. The police said their hands were tied.
People know what's happening but they don't know how to deal with it. It's as if we live in a community that's paralyzed, because we're in crisis and we deal with a lot of issues all the time. Sometimes things are normalized.