The Counselor
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PATRICIA PRICKETT, who is 58, divorced, and the mother of two grown sons, never imagined she'd wind up as an advocate for battered women. She came of age in the 1960s and 1970s, dividing her energies among the antiwar movement, the environment, and lefty political campaigns. Her manner is both direct and disarming, and she frequently employs a mischievous humor that challenges social taboos—at one point she and some friends started a group called Tough Women Against Toxics, wearing T-shirts with the acronym on prominent display. "We'd go to nice parties and watch people's responses," she says with a raspy smoker's laugh. "They'd start off like, ‘Oh that's great,' and then they'd be like, ‘Oh.… Oh…. Oh.' And then they'd run away."
Meanwhile, domestic violence was gaining ground with women's rights activists and in the courts, especially after a 1978 New York court case, Bruno v. Codd, in which 12 battered women seeking damages for inadequate police response provided affidavits detailing gruesome accounts of abuse. The court sympathized with the women and expressed dissatisfaction with the police. "It was the first judicial airing of what was wrong with the way society responds to battered women, and how out of date it is," says Meier, who is director of the Domestic Violence Legal Empowerment and Appeals Project. "It was very powerful in bringing the truth to light."
For the next decade, the movement continued to grow, manifested mostly by the emergency shelters and hot lines that were established. In 1983, the problem entered the mainstream when Time featured a graphic cover photo of a battered woman. "That was a measure of where we were then," Meier says. "It wasn't talked about, and it wasn't understood. All of us who were interested in the field went and snatched up all the copies."
It was around that time that Prickett, weary of the constant hustle of activism, changed course. Her father had been a Marine and had spent three and a half years in a Japanese prison camp during World War II. He didn't talk much about his ordeal, but what he did describe—being kept immobile in a hole for a month, eating raw flour until he threw up—moved and disturbed her. "I was always interested in the concept of abuse of power," she says. "I felt like it was time to take that on."
She went back to school for a master's in clinical psychology, intending to become a marriage and family therapist. Mindful of her father's experience, she sought out course work on abuse, which in a family setting included domestic violence. What she found dismayed her. The only related writing focused on sexual abuse, and it placed the blame squarely on the victim.
Beyond the confines of the classroom, the social landscape was changing. In 1984, more than 200 battered women created the Power and Control Wheel, a diagnostic tool describing abusive behavior patterns. The wheel has since become the talisman of the therapeutic model for addressing domestic violence and is still widely applied. Domestic violence had also gained enough recognition that courts began ordering counseling for abusers, and Prickett found an internship at a community clinic in Los Angeles that ran such a group. "The batterer thing appealed to me partly because at the time nobody else wanted to do it," she says. "And I was attracted to the idea that if you could do good work with them you would have an impact on a lot of people, as opposed to working with survivors, where it's one at a time."
Batterers' groups were seen as the humane antidote to abusive behavior. But a series of studies called into question whether they actually altered the way men viewed their actions enough to prevent them from repeating the abuse. In 1984, a study conducted by the Minneapolis Domestic Violence Experiment found that batterers are half as likely to commit repeat violence within six months if they serve jail time. In 1987, in a landmark case called Thurman v. City of Torrington, a federal district court awarded a battered wife $2.3 million after police refused to arrest her husband. This case, along with the Minneapolis study, spurred a wave of tough arrest laws around the country, begetting an uneasy alliance between the battered women's movement and the traditional advocates of law and order.
At first, Prickett believed that counseling alone might work. Eventually she, too, concluded that it could be effective only if men attended for several years—in conjunction with jail time. "There has to be desire for change on the part of the batterer," she says. "That's why jail works. Sometimes the only desire is to stay out of jail."
While Prickett immersed herself in batterers' counseling, O.J. Simpson, an alumnus of court-mandated counseling programs, went on trial for the murder of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson. The trial achieved what 20 years of activism had not, legitimizing battering as a crime category and persuading millions of Americans that domestic violence was not solely an issue for the poor and drug-addled. Lynn Rosenthal, director of the National Network to End Domestic Violence, was running a shelter at the time. By 1995, the year of the trial, calls for help had soared by 40 percent. "The O.J. case changed our work forever," Rosenthal says. "We had to rush to keep up, and we're still catching up."
The year before, Congress passed the Violence Against Women Act. Many states enacted civil protection orders and mandatory arrest laws, requiring cops to arrest batterers even against the wishes of the victim. To further protect against victim intimidation, cities adopted no-drop policies; prosecution would continue even if a woman backed out.
Those changes led to a dramatic uptick in attention to domestic violence within the criminal justice system, and in 1996, at a training session at the Los Angeles Police Academy, Prickett heard a former sheriff's deputy speak about being beaten by a boy- friend, an L.A.P.D. officer. Thanks to new federal and state funding, the woman told the crowd, anti-battering programs could educate the police by partnering with them. For the first time in a long while, Prickett felt inspired. "I thought, ‘I want to work with her; I want to do what she's doing.'" The following year she reported for work at the police station in West Los Angeles to begin her second chapter as an advocate in the battered women's movement, this time with a focus on enforcement instead of counseling. That chapter would end in disillusionment, when the 2001 murder indicated to her that her efforts were futile. "Four years sitting in a cell," she says. "From the day I walked in the door I fought the same battles, over and over and over again. Nothing changed." In mid-2002, when the funding for Prickett's program ran out, the station declined to seek a renewal.
THREE YEARS LATER, Prickett paid a visit to the precinct house and saw little evidence of her tenure. Her "cell" had been converted into normal office space—a microwave sat in the spot that had been the intake desk for sex offenders. There were no domestic violence posters in the lobby, just a few pamphlets stacked alongside brochures on Halloween safety and real estate fraud. And more importantly, there was no longer specialized training for officers, and no volunteers to accompany them on domestic violence calls.
"While Patty was here it got people talking about domestic violence," says Officer Rashad Sharif. "Maybe they cared, maybe they didn't. But at least they were aware of the issue and they had been trained on how to handle it. Now it's back to just the basics, whatever they get at the academy, which is more than what they offered when I was there, but it's still not at the level of robbery, rape, and drugs. It's still on the fringe."
After the West Los Angeles experiment, Prickett lost some of her enthusiasm for laboring in a confrontational environment. "It's hard to work in a place where people are happy when there's an execution," she says. "It's exhausting." As a member of the city's Domestic Violence Task Force, she tried to secure funding for a range of programs. She revived her private practice, taking on victims of domestic violence, and also became a counselor in the health clinic at Manual Arts High School, one of the most dangerous and academically underperforming high schools in the city, thinking the position would provide a break from battered women's advocacy. Instead, she's been confronted with the issue yet again. "These kids see violence every day," she says. "They see shootings and all kinds of brutality, in the streets and in the home."
Once again, Prickett's transition reflects the evolution in the battered women's movement, which is broadening beyond the current focus on cops and courts to include social services like the kind Prickett is providing at Manual Arts. Outside her office at the high school on a morning in mid-April, a dark-haired teen in baggy pants and a hooded sweatshirt stands waiting as Prickett approaches. They embrace in greeting, and she ushers him inside. More than half of the students she counsels at the school have witnessed domestic violence—a bad harbinger, considering that children who witness abuse are more likely to become perpetrators. Recent reports indicate that domestic violence in teen relationships is on the rise. Prickett's work with students is one small bulwark against that trend. "You just can't get away from it," she says. "The longer I do this, the more I'm reminded that domestic violence is everybody's problem."
Contrary to what she believed starting out, she has learned that helping one victim helps many—the woman, her children, and the relatives and the extended community affected by abuse. As Prickett aids the students, the students aid her. Through them, she has gained direct access to some of their victimized parents, whom she talks with on the phone, directs to services, and sometimes persuades to come in. In each case she hopes she might do something, any small thing, to avoid a repetition of that day in 2001 when she sat in her police station office before two young, motherless children, and didn't know what to say.
Sara Catania is based in Los Angeles and specializes in stories on criminal and social justice. She was a 2004 John S. Knight Journalism Fellow.
Photo: Gregg Segal
