How Family Justice Centers Help Survivors

Key Takeaways:

1. Comprehensive Support in One Location: Family Justice Centers (FJCs) provide co-located services such as legal aid, trauma counseling, safety planning, childcare and basic needs, reducing secondary trauma and making it easier for survivors to access support.
2. Survivor-Centered Approach: FJCs allow survivors to choose their own path, including whether or not to involve law enforcement. Survivors guide information sharing and can access critical resources without fear of forced decisions.
3. Life-Saving Impact: FJCs have a proven track record of helping survivors recognize danger, plan for safety and find hope. Their collaborative, trauma-informed model can drastically improve outcomes and even save lives.

In 2003, San Diego, Calif., announced a 95 percent reduction in domestic violence homicides over the previous 15 years and then recorded a drop in homicides to almost ZERO by 2008.  It was a monumental feat, one that has been widely credited to the San Diego Family Justice Center, the first of its kind in the US and the world. Oprah Winfrey endorsed the Family Justice Center on her show in January 2003 and then in October 2003 President George W. Bush announced a $20 million Family Justice Center (FJC) Initiative, which would fund 16 FJCs across the U.S. Today there are more than 300 Family Justice Centers worldwide including 30 in California and another 77 in Mexico called Centros de Justicia para las Mujeres. 

But what are FJCs exactly? Simply put, a Family Justice Center is a singular location where survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, child abuse, human trafficking and elder or dependent adult abuse can find all of the services they may need. These Centers focus on reducing the number of times survivors have to tell their stories and the number of places they must travel for help. During trauma, being shuffled around town to eight or nine different agencies and being asked to repeat a story of abusive trauma many times over can deter survivors from disclosing abuse or asking for help. 

Casey Gwinn, former San Diego City Attorney, was the visionary behind the Family Justice Center movement. He saw that child advocacy centers—a similar concept aimed at helping child abuse victims—were instrumental in helping reduce the impact of direct and secondary trauma after the abuse of children. He reasoned that if these Centers worked for child survivors, they could work just as well for adult survivors of sexual and domestic violence.

He was also frustrated at the degree to which the disconnected services for survivors of domestic violence contributed to poor outcomes, which not only put survivors at a higher risk but made effective prosecution more difficult. He and the first Director of the San Diego Family Justice Center, Gael Strack, now the CEO of Alliance for HOPE International, hosted focus groups with survivors and found survivors unanimously wanted to be able to go one place for their services and support. Strack and Gwinn say they also realized that survivors didn’t just need services, they needed a community to belong to long after the crisis.

Today, as the President of the Alliance for HOPE International, an organization that also operates the Family Justice Center Alliance, Gwinn and Strack have helped 70 FJCs become affiliated as part of the Alliance across the country, adding about five to seven a year from a combination of newly developed FJCs and existing FJCs that decide to affiliate worldwide. The Alliance’s affiliation process seeks to ensure high standards for Centers and focuses on promoting trauma-informed (what Gwinn and Strack call “kindhearted”) and hope-centered care.

Co-Located Services Often Found at Family Justice Centers

“The key to the success of Family Justice Centers is both the co-location of agencies and services and the collaboration between partner agencies,” explains Ken Shetter, JD, National Director of the Family Justice Center Alliance. 

These agencies assign staff on a full-time or part-time basis to each FJC, allowing survivors to receive the following services:

• Legal support, such as orders of protection or filing charges
• Trauma counseling
• Safety planning
• Childcare
• Basic needs like clothing
• Temporary shelter options
• Career support

Survivors can access all of these services without ever leaving the building. And if a needed service or program does not have full-time staff onsite, theFJC creates an “offsite” partner model and asks that agency to come to the Center to help the survivor instead of sending the victim to another location.

“Being all in one place reduces the risk of lethality because it allows a survivor to get help without going from place to place to place, risking their abusive partner discovering that they are seeking help. This co-location also reduces confusion, saves time and is far more trauma-informed. Collaboration is important because we do better work when we are working together,” says Shetter.

“Most specifically,” Shetter adds, “working together as multi-disciplinary teams to focus on high-risk cases improves outcomes for victims of strangulation.” Strangulation is known to be the number one indicator of homicide later on by that partner. In a study of homicide victims killed by an intimate partner, it was found that 43 percent had experienced a non-fatal strangulation by their partner prior to their murder. In attempted homicides by an intimate partner, 45 percent of victims had been strangled before the attempted murder. 

What If a Survivor Doesn’t Want to Go to the Police?

While FJCs often have one or more police officers or detectives on site ready to help survivors, not everyone is comfortable with law enforcement. Some survivors fear additional violence by their abusive partner if they press charges. Others doubt if they’ll be believed or have had negative past experiences with the legal system. To that, Shetter says FJCs’ doors are still open to them.

“It is important to note that survivors get to choose their own path in FJCs. They can choose whether engaging law enforcement, or any other partner, is right for them. In fact, in many—maybe most—FJCs, a majority of survivor clients choose not to engage law enforcement.”

Regardless, being able to get a danger assessment, safety planning, service planning, counseling, services for children, civil legal services, job training and many more services in one location, can benefit survivors and possibly help them escape with their lives, whether law enforcement is part of the service plan or not. 

“It's also important to note that, while information sharing between partners is key to the FJC model, the survivor gets to guide the sharing of information,” says Shetter. “They decide who they want their information to be shared with, for how long their information can be shared and always have the right to revoke that permission. Finally, even survivors who do not engage with law enforcement benefit from their presence on-site at the FJC because it contributes to a safer environment.”

The Impact of FJCs on Survivors’ Futures 

Shetter says he’s seen time and time again how survivors arrive at FJCs fearful and leave with hope.  

“What sticks out as a pattern to me is the number of survivors who are impacted on one visit. I can think of many survivors who have come in not knowing their life is in severe danger, but after one visit with an advocate, decide to take immediate, often difficult steps to achieve safety for themselves and their children,” says Shetter. “Maybe my favorite memory is a client I never met, but whose anonymous client satisfaction survey I saw of hers after just one visit. She said she came into the Center feeling hopeless and suicidal. But the young advocate she met with that day ended up saving her life.”

You can find your closest Family Justice Center here.