Emotions

Monday July 8th- First day at the Shelter

I want to preface this all by saying that over the next couple of weeks I am going to want to type and say somethings that either may be really emotional or that I am not allowed to give a lot of detail about. Working with a women's shelter involves a lot of privacy in order to protect the women and children in the shelter so there are some details that I will not be able to share. That being said, today was one of the most emotionally draining but also one of the most eye-opening experiences. Today we had our first glimpse of the shelter.

We had to wake up much earlier than we normally will need to because orientation started at 8:30 and we had to leave at 7:30. Our journey to the shelter was not exactly easy. We got on the bus not realizing that it doesn't start the route we will normally be taking until later in the day and ended up going to the wrong side of town. But on the plus side we ended up finding the outlets of Beersheba, so when we need clothes we now know where to go. We waited for another bus and then realized the bus would take way too long because it had over 40 stops and we needed to 20th and were at the 40th. So, we ended up being a little late and taking taxis. Our orientation was with the manager of the shelter, our supervisor as well as a group of gap-year students from Brazil and Uruguay. The gap-year students will be volunteering in the mornings and we will be taking over in the afternoon.

I am going to get to details about what we learned but I am going to skip that quickly to explain what we did after lunch because it is when we discussed our placements within the actual shelter and the work we will be doing while we are there. Our day will typically start at 11. From 11-1 we are broken up into 3 groups of 2. Sarah and Miriam will be running programs for the mothers staying the shelter. This may be cooking, computer skill classes, crafting, etc. It is all up to our discretion as to what we plan. Jordana and Ariel will be working with the manager of the shelter doing research on grants, funding, and shelters all over the world. Hannah and I will get to work one on one with some of the older girls in the shelter acting as mentors and hopefully becoming a friend and someone they can relax around and just be a teen with. From 1-3 we have an hour for lunch and an hour to plan and work on our afternoon programs. Then from 3-5:30 we are divided up into 3 age groups to run afternoon activities. Sarah and Miriam choose to take the youngest kids, ages 3-6. Hannah and Ariel are with the middle group, ages 7-9, and Jordana and I will be working with the 10-14 year olds. We can create any sort of program we want so we are all thinking of doing one day of athletics, a day of music or cooking, some leadership, and crafts. But, we all agreed we want to see what the kids we are working with are interested in before we make concrete decisions. The interesting thing about cooking or baking though, is that if we cook or bake we must make enough for everyone in the shelter (so all the mothers and children). Two days a week the kids have a couple of activities like yoga and gardening so we will actually have quite a lot of free time to come up with great programs. We also decided we want to work with all of them to put on a talent show at the end of the summer for all of the staff and the mothers. I am hoping that by doing this the kids will get to feel more like individuals and like they have the freedom to pursue their interests, especially the older kids.

So back tracking to the first 4 hours of the day... we started the morning learning a lot of information and background as to how the women get to the shelter and their experiences in their home lives. I took a lot of notes and will do my best to condense it all but all of us volunteering there were really impacted by what we learned and I think a lot of this information is really important to share, it certainly made me glad to be raised in a loved environment, even if I didn't see it all the time growing up. To start, we learned about all of the different types of violence that women can be subjected to in harmful relationships. These are

• physical violence 
• being beaten, attacked, etc.
• emotional 
• the most sophisticated of all types of abuse and violence because it tears at parts of us that can't be proved or seen
•  This primarily involves humiliation and guilt 
•  includes psychological abuse and the Stockholm syndrome- when you love the person abusing you because you are dependent on them and start to believe you deserve the treatment you receive. However, people subjected to this syndrome rarely seek out help and it especially found in cults
•  The manager even told us that for most women, they can take the physical pain, what really hurts and ruins them is the emotional toll of the abuse.
• This also includes things like religion being used against ultra orthodox women, so prohibiting them from using mikvahs or embarrassing them by taking of their wigs or hair coverings in public.
•  sexual violence 
• which involves using sexuality to force a woman into doing something she doesn't want to or sexually humiliating them. 
• The statistics we were given for this were so difficult to believe. 1/4 Israeli women are raped. 1/3 American women are raped, and 1/2 Israeli women are sexually abused in some way shape or form during their lifetime. 90% of sexual attacks are also by people you know and happen in either your or their home. (aka we shouldn't be quite as scared that we are going to raped in the middle of neighborhood or in a dark alley, it is still possible and we should be on the watch but it is not as common). 
• Rapes and sexual abuse and really all of the violence that happens to women are the effects of men wanting to seem powerful, dominant and forceful
• Up until the 70s, rape in a marriage was seen as legal because women were considered their husbands property so he could do whatever he wanted. If a young girl or unmarried woman was raped, the punishment was that the raper had to pay their father for damaging his daughter and devaluing her when she went to get married. Obviously, this is not the case today. Although, the manager did tell us that some women will call their mothers when they get to the shelter in some very religious women will be told that they have a duty to obey their husbands and do what they want and to just deal with it. 
• Personally, I could never imagine "just dealing with it" because I grew up in a community where women had more or less equal rights. But being here in Israel and reading UnOrthodox last week one can really come to understand how especially among the ultra orthodox community equality is a foreign concept. The orthodox women who escape abuse do so under extremely challenging circumstances and all I can say to them is kol hakavod (translated to "all the respect", like an Israeli way of saying wow).
• Financial
• more common among middle/upper class 
• occurs when the husband has complete control over the finances in the family, even when the women works her money is taken from her and he controls spending
• in a lot of cases like this, the husband will say that they don't have enough money to afford food or trips or clothes and will keep the money for himself while racking up debt in the woman's name. 
• This makes it really challenging for women to leave because they don't know anything about how much they have.
• 1/10 women are in this sitation
• It is hard to recognize but the most obvious way to recognize this is if the women is afraid of buying something or telling her husband about it for fear of getting in trouble
• Immigration
• I had no idea this type of abuse even existed because it is less common in the states
• Occurs when an Israeli man goes off to another country, finds a non-Jewish bride and brings her to Israel where she has no rights and will have an extremely challenging time becoming a citizen because she is not Jewish. This gives the husband total power over her. If she wants a divorce the Israeli government will simply say okay go ahead leave, get out of the country. But if she reports abuse she has no rights and and she has no rights in terms of protection. 
• It can take up to 5 years to get citizenship if you are non-Jewish
• If the man is "smart" aka he premediates all of this, he will have gone to the police and told them they she is bad news and she will be denied a visa, extensions, etc. This makes it so she can't leave, can't get a job, and can't afford to live. 
• It gets even more complicated if children are involved because the children will be citizens and she won't be able to take them with her if she leaves.

Next we learned about the shelter itself and the system in Israel. Israel has 14 women's shelters in the country. 2 are for Ultra Orthodox women, 2 are for Arabic women, and 10 are secular and take every ethnicity, religion, etc. The shelter in be'er sheba is a secular shelter. Our shelter takes only the hardest cases that are sent to them by social workers. The manager will get calls at all times of the day asking if families can come but because of limited space and protection of the families already at the shelter she sometimes has to make very tough decisions as to who to let in and to turn down. Just yesterday she got 4 calls and only accepted one family. Women are allowed to spend 6-8 months in the shelter but they can leave at any time. So if a woman comes to the shelter and after a couple of days decides she wants to return to her husband she can go on her own accord. No one accept the staff of the shelter knows its exact location. Social workers are simply given a contact number and who ever drives the family to the shelter must discard of the address immediately and only they are allowed to see the address. What I found really interesting is that shelters for the most part will only take children up to the age 10. This shelter will take kids until the age of 14 but it is on a case by case basis because a lot of teenagers may side with their father, won't want to leave their homes and friends, or especially in the cases it is unsafe to have an older boy around so many young girls who have been subjected to such violence. Its also interesting because a lot of times the husband will threaten to kill the women and children but if it is just a threat there isn't much the police can do. And if the woman tells he can spend up to 72 hours in jail but upon returning home he will just be angrier than he was before.  

Part of what the shelter does, is to normalize the family. This means they try to teach the mothers to stand up for themselves, learn independence, and learn to not be afraid of all men in the world. Because the father technically still has rights to see his children they also try to arrange supervised meetings of the father with the children (obviously not near the shelter) and they will also encourage the mother to meet with the father in a controlled setting so that she can learn to stand up to her demons. This way when the women leave the shelter they are set up for a better life, which doesn't always work but the hope is that it will. On average, a woman needs 5 attempts of leaving (so that could be going to a shelter and leaving to go back to him) before they actually leave for good. We also learned about a the circle of violence. This is basically a reactionary chain in which there is tension among the couple that will blow up because of the smallest action and then after the blow up the husband will regret his decision and then apologize and beg for forgiveness. The forgiveness is almost always given and then for a little while everything seems to be good in the house until the tension comes back and things start again.

I really wish I could share the stories we heard today. So many of them were so incredible. Not because the women got out of the situation but because they are so unfathomable to think that such a thing could happen. These women are so unprotected and have to go through so much hurt and so do their children. I can give general ideas though because some of these things are just so serious that I will never understand how the police and justice systems in our counties fail to arrest the husbands or to do anything other than send the women to social workers or outside organizations. For instance there was a woman whom I guess went to the shelter with her children and when she left went back to the husband who had previously threatened to kill her and the children. But since it was a threat nothing could be done. Next thing you know the little girls are dead. We were all so shocked when we heard this story. On the plus side though we also heard stories of police going into cults to rescue the women and children and take them to shelters all around the country. There have been to cases of this. In the first the dissolution of cult was successful but in the second because the women were so in love with their abusers the community re-formed.
Here is a little more information about an example of breaking up a cult http://www.jpost.com/National-News/Authorities-handling-fallout-of-breaking-up-polygamist-cult

Before today I honestly didn't know too much about shelters. I knew what the typical person knows in that people go for protection and that they teach skills to help the women adjust to life after they leave but I didn't know that everything is done through a social worker and all of the facts and figures and complications that go into getting women and their children to the shelter. As part of this learning we also learned a little bit about the history of women's shelters. I am so happy that I got to learn this information because it really shows how people in the community can make a difference in their environment and act to fix a problem. Shelters for abused women started as public/NGO institutions. Feminists in the community saw a need for the shelters and said that the government needed to take charge and do something about it but at the time marriage was seen as a completely private matter. Thus, the government wouldn't get involved. And so a private organization created the first shelter in Haifa and the government finally got on board and saw it was an issue and started helping and financing shelters to protect the women of Israel and their children.

There are obviously a lot of security guidelines we have to follow in order to volunteer with the shelter. The most interesting rule to me is that there are no secrets whatsover. If a child we are working with tells us a "secret" we have to report it. This puts workers in a tough place because you want the children to confide in you and trust you but obviously you would only be telling the staff members to better the children. I actually think this is a very good rule because I would hate if a child told me something about what happened in their house that they hadn't told anyone and I didn't do anything about it but just let them continue believing that no one in their life was going to care and take care of their needs. An abusive environment is obviously not a situation for anyone to be in but children especially should not have to be subjected to such abuse.

Our orientation luckily did not take as long as they said it would so we got back with 2 hours instead of 5 minutes before our group session. I was able to take a much needed nap because what we learned at the shelter just took it all out of us. Our group session was with a representative of the Jewish Agency for Israel, which is one of the sponsors of our trip (and the organization paying for it). We have a seminar outside Jerusalem this weekend through them with 4 other Onward Israel trips (one from Poland, New Jersey, France, and Hungry maybe, I don't fully remember). Before talking to him we were all unsure of the trip this weekend but now we are all looking forward to it. We also finally got to meet Rachel who was our point contact person in the U.S. for all of our forms. She is so sweet and it was so nice to finally meet the person behind all the e-mails. After dinner a few of us walked a couple of streets over to the street where all the small restaurants are and went to a create your own pasta place. It reminded me of Vapianos at home because you picked a type of pasta, sauce, and then added veggies. They had some really creative sauces like a curry one and red pesto and vegetables that I normally wouldn't put in pasta but we all really enjoyed ours. It was also a fairly large portion so i was able to save some so that all I had to do was come home saute some broccoli and now I have lunch for tomorrow.

Overall for today I can say it was definitely the start of my life changing experience here in Israel. This isn't to say that the last week hasn't been amazing because it has been but until you really see what you have to work with, your ability to make a change doesn't hit you. When we toured the shelter it was amazing, the children all seemed so happy and I hope that I can continue to keep those smiles on their face and maybe even enhance the smiles of the older kids who didn't look as happy as the little kids.Obviously the girls working at the shelter and everyone at the other organizations still have a lot to learn but I think we are all finally starting to feel like we came here to make a difference and will have the opportunity to do so.