Sexual Abuse & Domestic Violence

Alaska has some of the highest rates of domestic violence in the country, with studies finding that almost half of women in the state have been victims in their lifetime.

A recent series by the Alaska Beacon takes a look at various facets of the domestic violence epidemic in Alaska, from root causes and proposed solutions to adverse health effects.

Beacon reporter Claire Stremple says funding for shelters and other programs to help domestic violence victims is hard to come by.

Listen:

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Claire Stremple: Shelter directors will tell you that they’re strapped for cash, even though the state adds money to federal funds that we get to address the issue. The state’s former Council on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault Director Diane Casto told me that those programs are just really expensive and recent inflation is not helping those budgets. But she also pointed to this other thing that’s really important, which is that the state spends most of its money to treat domestic violence on shelters and other services for after harm happens. But she said, if we want to stamp out domestic violence, we really have to focus on prevention, on keeping it from happening, and that’s harder.

But then the root causes of violence, advocates say, and state data bears this out, that violence begets violence. So most domestic violence offenders have experienced violence in their lifetimes as victims. That’s broad, but the Alaska-specific piece of that answer has to do with our state’s colonial history. I spoke with Charlene Apok, she’s the director of Data for Indigenous Justice. And in that work, they keep a record of missing and murdered Indigenous people, which of course, has a lot of crossover with domestic violence. (She) said that institutional violence, especially against Alaska Native people, is violence that also begets domestic violence. So they give the particular example of boarding school violence against children, physical violence, which can have devastating effects on adulthood. But they also talked about how stripping cultural values and practices, that psychological violence can also have impacts.

Wesley Early: So you note that in a lot of these instances of domestic violence, women are unable to get away from their abusers, with many having trouble finding housing. Can you talk about those barriers and what’s being done to take them down?

Claire Stremple: So housing is a struggle in the state whether you’ve experienced domestic violence or not, but it is especially devastating in that context. Survivors of domestic violence often need assistance to find and pay for housing, because data shows that abusers commonly sabotage their victims’ economic stability. So that can result in things like trouble finding rental properties because of poor credit, or a bad rental history, or a spotty employment history. Mandy Cole runs the DV shelter in Juneau, and she said, essentially, there’s no daylight between surviving domestic violence and independent, affordable housing. So it is this crucial piece, but it’s also, because of the violence and the trauma that people have experienced, harder to access.

What’s being done to take those barriers down? At the Juneau shelter, and at some other shelters, they’re building permanent supportive housing for victims of domestic violence. So it’s something that people are working to address. I don’t know if there’s this large policy solution that’s aimed specifically at fixing that problem.

And another thing that I’d like to note, and this, I guess, is not going in the solutions direction, but domestic violence is the leading cause of homelessness for women and their children. So nationally, most women who experience homelessness have been victims of domestic violence.

Wesley Early: Advocates who you spoke to in your reporting also point to a myriad of adverse health trends that are linked to domestic violence. Can you talk a bit about those?

Claire Stremple: The specific outcomes that we talked about in this series, the first is that domestic violence is linked to our high maternal mortality rate in the state. So in the past 10 years, the number of people who die in the year after labor has nearly doubled in Alaska, and more women die from homicide, suicide or overdose than from medical complications. And of those women who die in the year after labor, about 70% of them had experienced domestic violence in their lifetimes. And one thing to point out when we’re talking about the suicide and overdose piece is that those two, and studies and research bears this out, is that they’re common responses or even escape measures to domestic violence.

Another issue is traumatic brain injury. Alaska has the highest rate of deaths from traumatic brain injury in the nation. And it also has among the highest rates of domestic violence, and recently in Alaska, advocates and caregivers are starting to link those two data points. But they do say that as high as the rates are in Alaska for both traumatic brain injury and domestic violence, they’re very likely undercounts. The state is developing a screening tool. It’s in a pilot program right now. But it’s aimed at being used in shelters to help advocates spot those symptoms, spot TBI symptoms, and connect survivors of violence to resources. So that’s really exciting.

Wesley Early: Continuing on that, you know, what else is being done to combat this epidemic of domestic violence in Alaska? What resources are available either from local nonprofits or the government?

Claire Stremple: There’s actually a lot of work that’s being done to combat domestic violence in Alaska. And while working in such a difficult subject, it’s something that really gave me hope, is how many people have dedicated their lives to helping to heal that issue. So I’d say first, Alaska is a state that contributes to solutions financially. Not all do. About half the budget for shelters and programs statewide comes from state funds. So this is something that our state does recognize and aims to fix. There’s a funding gap this year. One of the sources of federal funds has shrunk substantially, which is leaving a multimillion-dollar hole in the budget. But there is money going that direction. And that’s, I think, important to recognize.

But then there’s also a great example of an upstream solution prevention program that aims to stop violence before it starts. Students across the state are actually legally mandated to take healthy relationships classes. Teens learn what healthy relationships are. They learn how to maintain them, how to avoid dating violence. And all of that is really important because so many survivors of domestic violence say they didn’t initially know what was happening to them, or didn’t have the tools to identify the unhealthy parts of their relationships. So that work is really important.

A traveling social worker based in Bethel told me he sees that curriculum work, and he travels from Bethel to schools and villages around the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta to share those curriculums. And I recently traveled with him to Nunapitchuk, and it was amazing to see the bond of trust that he built, not only with the students, but also with his colleagues there in the school and how those relationships meant that people really absorbed his message

“Domestic Violence in Alaska” was produced with the University of Southern California Annenberg Center for Health Journalism’s 2023 Domestic Violence Impact Fund.

If you’re a victim of domestic violence, you can call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 800-799-7233. A full list of Alaska shelters and victim’s services providers can be found here.

A new study from Alaska researchers shows that all types of intimate partner violence – including psychological aggression and controlling behavior as well as physical violence – are linked to negative physical and mental health outcomes. Intimate partner violence is the specific form of domestic violence that occurs between couples.

More than half of Alaska women have experienced domestic violence or sexual assault in their lifetimes. The new University of Alaska Anchorage study shows that those traumas, if left untreated, can have long-term health effects.

Dr. Ingrid Johnson from the university’s Justice Center said that sheds light on a public health issue. “We can’t just only focus on recent experiences,” she said. “A lot of people in our state have had these experiences that, even if they’re historical, put them at a higher risk or negative health outcomes.”

The study used frequent headaches as a health indicator. Women who had experienced intimate partner violence in their lifetimes reported having frequent headaches 1.5 times more than those who had never experienced IPV. Those who had experienced IPV recently reported frequent headaches 2.4 times as often. In cases of both recent and historic abuse, the results are statistically significant.

Johnson said researchers have more than a decade of data about violence against Alaska women that they have used to make a dataset they can analyze in depth. The goal is to increase understanding of the effects of violence on health, but also to increase understanding that psychological violence can be just as harmful as physical violence.

“When people talk about intimate partner violence, they focus on physical intimate partner violence, so they focus on someone being hit or slapped or shoved. And those are kind of the stereotypes that we have about violence,” she said. But she said there’s a range of harmful behaviors that don’t involve physical contact: things like threats, control of money or friendships or travel, psychological aggression, insults and humiliation.

“Those other forms of violence are quite common, and actually more common than physical violence, but also that they have pretty substantial impact on health or substantial relationships to health,” she said.

The study showed that women who were threatened with harm experienced frequent headaches nearly three times more than people who were not threatened with harm; women who experienced controlling behavior were 2.4 times more likely to report frequent headaches.

“A lot of these things that have really negative impacts on health aren’t even illegal — like controlling behaviors and psychological aggression behaviors — they’re not even something someone can report to the police,” Johnson said.

Since many harmful behaviors are not reportable crimes, it limits access to care for survivors, which Johnson said is a public health concern. “So what does our state have to offer people who might not be reporting to the criminal justice system or using victim services?” she asked.

This story originally appeared in the Alaska Beacon and is republished here with permission.

Alaska is notoriously lacking in law enforcement for its remote communities, especially Alaska Native villages off the road system. These limitations put extra pressure on services in those communities to respond to violence after it happens, but a new program aims to help.

In Emmonak, a village of about 800 residents near the terminus of the Yukon River, the women’s shelter has begun to train people known as “victim resource advocates” in the region’s smaller villages to connect people who have experienced violence there with shelter and care.

“The villages don’t have village police officers and we never know who to call, but hiring advocates in their community helps us provide services to those in need that are victims of domestic violence or sexual assault,” said Joann Horn, the executive director of the Emmonak Women’s Shelter.

“In the past it was hard. Sometimes we still have a hard time getting hold of law enforcement,” Horn said. “In the villages it’s hard where they have no law enforcement, it takes days for them to get a response.”

She said in the years before the shelter trained resource advocates, help was difficult to come by for women who experienced domestic violence or sexual assault — they would have to go to the tribal office to call the shelter in Emmonak and then wait in the tribal office until a plane could come get them, Horn said.

Brent Hatch, now a patrol sergeant for the Alaska State Troopers in Fairbanks, spent years responding to domestic violence cases in remote parts of Alaska. He  said the Alaska State Troopers are severely understaffed, but must still respond to crimes over vast distances.

“I think we’re down over 50 troopers; their spots are just empty. And so the troopers that we do have to cover all of the work that our missing troopers are not able to do,” he said. “So just the fact that we’re so incredibly short-staffed, it puts a great burden on a lot of people.”

Hatch described having to “triage” calls when he worked in bush Alaska, and said the troopers that are on duty are responsible for such large geographic areas that travel can slow down the response considerably.

“I’ve had instances where I’ve had to spend over eight hours on a snowmachine to get to a location to investigate domestic violence calls because a flight was not an option due to weather,” he said. “I’ve had instances on numerous occasions where I’ve spent eight to 12 hours in a boat going upriver to deal with situations like this.”

Hatch has been with the troopers since 2008 and said staffing has always been an issue, but that lately it has been even harder.

“The last several years especially, we are losing more people than we’re able to recruit. And the ones we recruit, we’re having a really, really difficult time retaining them,” he said, adding that he attributes some of that to a cultural shift in how law enforcement is perceived by the public.

Village resource advocates

The Emmonak shelter trains the victim resource advocates, who then advertise that they work for the shelter and list their contact information and the services they provide in their communities.

Horn said it has helped get more people from remote villages to safety at the Emmonak Women’s Shelter. “In the past we never used to have a contact person. So having a resource advocate in those villages that we provide services to makes a difference,” she said.

Tammi Long, an employee of the Emmonak Women’s Shelter, said the program is new for them — it started in February of last year.

“That really, really helped us with getting these women and children into safe homes if for some reason they cannot travel to the shelter,” she said. “Before we had these village resource advocates, we’d always have a hard time if it was late at night and the woman or the victim was walking around outside with no place to go.”

The shelter has village resources advocates in Alakanuk, Pitkas Point, Russian Mission, Pilot Station and Marshall. It is working to fill vacancies in Nunam Iqua, Kotlik and Mountain Village. Horn said they also have a trained coordinator who connects with the other advocates weekly.

Horn said the positions are hard to fill. “Once they get a crisis call, they have to take them (the victim) into their homes, and they’re afraid for them to come to their home because the perpetrator might come after that family,” Horn said.

But overall, Horn and Long say the program has helped communities.

“It has been successful so far,” Long said. “We’re getting more and more crisis calls and more and more women and children wanting to come to the shelter. I mean, it’s unfortunate, but we do have more data to report since the village resource advocates started.”

Leaders in solutions to violence

More than 130 miles away in Anvik, Tami Truett Jerue, the executive director of Alaska Native Women’s Resource Center, said there’s the same lack of access to law enforcement, but there are no safe homes for survivors of dometic or sexual violence either.

“In my community, you don’t even have access to 911. There’s no health care, there’s no law enforcement, and you have to get on a plane to get in and out of there.”

Jerue has worked to end domestic violence and increase safety for Alaska Native people for decades. Last year U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland appointed Jerue to the Not Invisible Act Commission, which is an advisory committee that includes law enforcement, Tribal leaders, federal partners, service providers, family members of missing and murdered individuals, and survivors.

Jerue said what the shelter in Emmonak is doing is a good example of how tribes can be leaders in addressing domestic violence statewide.

She said Alaska Native people tend to be on the periphery of victim services and safety even when they are the majority of people who need services — and she wants to see that change.

“We want to change the current rates of violence that we see against our Tribal communities and Tribal people in our community, but outside our communities as well,” she said.

Currently, she said, police reports are necessary to access a main federal funding source for victims of crime, set aside in the U.S. Victims of Crime Act.

That can disenfranchise small, predominantly Alaska Native communities like hers, that do not have law enforcement. But in recent years, the federal government has added a funding stream to address that inequity.

Tribal Victim Services Set-Aside

The federal Tribal Victim Services Set-Aside program brought a historic amount of money to Alaska Native tribes and tribes across the nation to spend on victim services, Jerue said. Her organization is working with Alaska tribes who have not previously had the budgets for such services.

Crime Victim Specialist Kristi Travers has traveled to communities across the state to help tribes build sustainable programs through direct training and technical assistance.

“If we’re here to protect victims and help victims, then their voices need to be front and center every time,” said Travers, who has worked with domestic violence and sexual assault programs that serve Indigenous communities for the past 16 years.

When the Tribal Services Set-Aside program began in 2018 and 2019 there was a huge push for tribes to apply for the funds, she said. But not all tribes had the resources to write grants for competitive funding, even if their communities could benefit from services.

In 2020, at the request from tribes across the country, the federal government changed the program to a formula grant program, instead of making tribes compete for the money.

“We’ve had a massive expansion in the number of villages that are starting or enhancing their victim services programs because of this funding,” Travers said.

This summer, the U.S. Justice Department announced that $22 million will go to 67 Alaska tribes. Jerue said this should add to the number of Alaska Native communities that can build solutions that fit their needs.

This article was produced as a project for the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism’s 2023 Domestic Violence Impact Fund. It originally appeared in the Alaska Beacon and is republished here with permission.

A full list of Alaska shelters and victim’s services providers can be found here.

Charlene Apok sat in front of multiple computer monitors in an Anchorage office and scrolled through a spreadsheet of missing and murdered Indigenous Alaskans.

The neat boxes on the screen were labeled with things like name, date missing, location or cause of death, but Apok saw more — narrative lines of deep family love and loss, and a history of violence that dates back to colonization and boarding schools in Alaska.

“I can see patterns across these stories and experiences because I’ve lived them,” they said.

Apok runs Data for Indigenous Justice, a database of Missing and Murdered Indigenous People. The center has maintained this database since 2018; Apok says it’s for community and family.

“My mother passed away, and basically our family thinks she was murdered. And it was ruled suicide. It’s one of many of the statistics that we talk about. So I can read data and I can see the lived story and the experiences very easily,” they said.

Apok does not simply keep the data, but aims to humanize it. And the mothers on the list are why Apok is working with a state program, the Maternal Child Death Review, to help understand and prevent the deaths that happen in the time between delivery and the first year of motherhood.

A basic fact driving these numbers is startling: More Alaskans who die in the first year after delivering a baby do so as a result of violence or overdose, rather than from medical causes. Alaska Native people are disproportionately represented. The most recent data shows that nearly twice as many pregnancy-associated deaths in the state are from homicide, suicide and drug or alcohol overdose than are from pregnancy-related medical causes. More than 70% of the mothers who died had a history of intimate partner violence.

State researchers say the data shows that trauma and intimate partner violence are killing Alaska mothers. So as state health employees and birth workers fight to keep mothers from dying, they aren’t just fighting for increased access to medical care. They’re fighting to increase access to safety.

Crisis of underlying trauma

Ness Verigin, who manages the Maternal Child Death Review, said the state has begun to address maternal mortality from violence, but there’s a lot of room for more prevention efforts.

“If you’ve been healthy enough to be pregnant, you shouldn’t be dying,” they said. “It’s a time when protection and safety and health should be wrapped around a person. And the fact that violence is more common during that time is a serious problem.”

Apok added that when people go through a long history of domestic violence or sexual assault and then overdose or attempt suicide, those deaths need to be understood as part of that violence.

“How we translate those stories and those impacts and those connections in a way where we can improve prevention and services is a huge challenge,” Apok said. “So many of those things are stigmatized, especially for certain races or ethnicities.”

Studies show that pregnant people who are abused can turn to suicide to end the abuse. Like Apok, Verigin also said deaths from overdose of drugs or alcohol are also usually responses to violence.

“Women, especially pregnant women, just don’t use substances because they’re partying or they’re having fun or they’re just irresponsible people,” Verigin said, adding that direct treatment providers with substance use programs say that most of their clients have experienced intimate partner or sexual violence in their lifetimes. “There’s usually something really serious wrong. And often it’s being victimized and having their power taken away. And it’s a way of numbing the pain and surviving.”

Health care professionals screen for domestic violence, and Verigin said medical settings can be a place where pregnant people are away from their perpetrator and can talk about their experiences.

The state’s new postpartum Medicaid expansion law allows new parents to get health care benefits up to 12 months after giving birth.

“The extension of Medicaid postpartum is so, so important, because it gives more opportunities to engage in care where these kinds of things can be identified,” Verigin said. “That postpartum period is such a stressful time that if there’s going to be violence in that relationship, it’s more likely to come out during that time.”

Jennifer Harlos, a nurse and a member of the committee overseeing the Maternal Child Death Review, said seeing the nonmedical issues that affect medical care propelled her to pursue graduate study in public health. She has worked at the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium for 12 years, mostly in labor and delivery.

“You’re at the bedside in this vulnerable moment in someone’s life. And you see all of these issues, but there’s only so much you can do from that lens in that moment,” she said, referring to things like intimate partner violence. “If you talk to me or any of my colleagues, we all know what the problems are. We see the problems and we can’t necessarily fix them from our seat in the hospital.”

Domestic violence affects maternal mortality in homicides and suicides, but it can even contribute to the deaths from medical causes.

“If you aren’t allowed to leave the house, then you’re not going to go to your appointment. And if you know that your partner is going to drink and hurt your children, then you’re not going to get admitted to the hospital,” Harlos said.

“People don’t think about that. But a lot of these women are not getting the medical care they need because they or their children are unsafe or they are just unable to go to the hospital. And you see that more than you would think you would.”

Those stakes are especially high for the women who must travel for medical care.

Harlos said a pregnant person who experiences domestic violence is more likely to experience several conditions that can increase risk. They are more likely to go into preterm labor, to have an abruption — when the placenta detaches from the womb as a result of abdominal trauma, high blood pressure or substance use — and to have intrauterine growth restriction because of physical and emotional stress.

“The majority of our deaths are Alaska Native women. And many of them are happening in rural Alaska where they have some of the worst access to these services,” she said.

Family by family

Harlos said the barriers to access are are part of why the most common recommendation from the Maternal Child Death Review Board is that the state expand home visiting nurse programs across Alaska.

“These women, whether it’s for intimate partner violence or for a plethora of reasons, are not seeking care, right? And so we need to go to them and bring that care. And that’s what these programs do,” she said.

Home nurse visiting programs already exist in Alaska, but not every pregnant Alaskan has access to them. The Maternal Child Death Review began a partnership with an Alaska Native birth worker program for culturally responsive support with a $250,000 a year grant from the Office on Women’s Health. The state has three more years of grant funding and is transitioning that program to a partnership with the university system, Verigin said.

Harlos said the birth worker or doula is a connection between the home and family life and the medical world — they understand the needs and limitations of people who work in health care and they have an understanding of the home life and personal concerns of the patient. They can use that knowledge to advocate for their patient.

“They’re very familiar with what things are like at the hospital, but then they also know situations that are going on for our patients that we don’t know about,” she said.

“And so there’s that culturally managed care that they don’t always get from everybody in their health care team,” Harlos said. “That goes a long way in building trust when you think about historical trauma and things that have happened.”

Abra Patkotak is a birth worker who visits pregnant people in their homes before, during and after pregnancy. She, along with Charlene Apok from Data for Indigenous Justice, is a member of the Alaska Native Birth Workers Collective, which provides care without charge to Alaska Native families. Currently, the collective is crowd-funded, Patkotak said.

The collective started as an idea in a group text thread, but has grown. By Apok’s count, the group has certified more than 40 doulas and lactation consultants. The group also teaches childbirth education classes and facilitates mens’ groups.

“The lack of support is huge,” Patkotak said.

She links the violence to a system that is failing to support Alaska Native families, especially families that live far enough from major hospitals that pregnant people must leave their home communities a month before delivery to be near a hospital, which is common practice for most remote Alaska communities.

“For Alaska Native people, if you’re from rural Alaska, the additional stress of having to leave your community, often at 35 weeks or earlier, leave your support system and often having to leave your other children behind — the stress that that creates for our families is huge. And it’s not been studied, but there’s nowhere else in the United States that this forced evacuation is happening,” Patkotak said.

She said most medical providers are not Alaska Native, have never been to rural Alaska and can’t quite grasp what these families are going through just to get to the hospital.

“​​Navigating the health care system when you’re alone can feel very overwhelming,” she said. “Who you encounter with the health care system may not necessarily understand your culture, your beliefs, even your body language … Culturally understanding how to communicate with people — even without words — that’s a huge thing, to create safety, especially during birth.”

Patkotak said she and other birth workers can help pregnant people get the care they need in medical spaces, but also help them stay safe because their work can diffuse tension and anxiety in the home.

“If someone’s not in a good situation, and we’ve already built that trust and we’ve created safety, so they know they can trust us, then people can reach out and we are able to connect people to resources that they might not otherwise know about if they need help,” she said.

Apok and Patkotak said the disproportionate number of Alaska Native families that are affected by domestic violence is a trend that can be stigmatizing if people do not understand the historical context.

“This is directly from colonization,” Apok said. “Living elders today are sharing about what happened in boarding schools. It’s horrific . . . Men didn’t just become violent. It happened because that was what was taught and their experience. We have children as young as 5 and 4 who were taken and then abused, and then had to raise families. What did we expect was going to happen?”

“It was something that was pushed on us that we are now actively fighting to recover from,” Patkotak said. “We’re not violent people, but we have been deeply hurt by systems that are unsafe.”

Ultimately, they say that childbirth education and direct work to build healthier families is helping to rebuild and heal that history. Apok said that, despite the grim data they work with, and the violence that continues statewide, there’s hope.

“I truly believe that’s making a huge difference,” they said.

“Family by family, you know?”

This article was produced as a project for the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism’s 2023 Domestic Violence Impact Fund. It originally appeared in the Alaska Beacon and is republished here with permission.

A full list of Alaska shelters and victim’s services providers can be found here.

Domestic violence is a leading cause of homelessness for women and their children. Alaska’s major cities are struggling to manage homelessness, especially in the winter, when the stakes for survival are even higher. And experts have identified domestic violence as one of the faucets that floods cities with homelessness.

“Probably every woman in here has experienced domestic violence,” said Mariya Lovishuk, the director of Juneau’s emergency shelter, the Glory Hall. “Most women who come to us have experienced domestic violence at some point in their lives. Maybe not yesterday, but definitely it was very serious, and it has impacted them.”

Lovishuk said that not only does the statewide dearth of affordable housing keep people unhoused longer, but it can keep them in abusive relationships longer, too. “Even if they want to leave… going to shelter is not a very appealing option. So they just stay,” she said.

Lovishuk said that because shelters can be chaotic places, she sees some people stay in abusive situations rather than navigate them alone.

She said the extensive paperwork for affordable housing programs can take months, and for people who want to flee domestic violence, that wait can outlast their resolve to leave: “What we see is people who are in domestic violence relationships give up,” she said.

Abuse commonly compromises victims’ economic stability. For example, it can result in eviction due to disturbances at home, job loss from missing work or poor credit from a partner’s financial actions. That, paired with a lack of affordable housing in the state, often results in homelessness — nationally, most women who experience homelessness have been victims of domestic violence.

In Alaska, where nearly 20% of adults who experience homelessness said they had a history of domestic violence, some emergency shelters are building long-term and permanent housing to keep families safe.

A growing need

In Anchorage, where the vacancy rate for rentals is under 5%, homelessness complicates the response to domestic violence. At Abused Women’s Aid in Crisis, the largest women’s emergency shelter in Alaska, director Suzi Pierson said that homelessness has devastated the community.

“You’ve got more people in camps, more people at risk,” she said. “You know, in close living conditions, when you’re talking about some of the camps, it’s very dangerous, and the level of violence and drugs and all those things are in the camps. So it’s really not safe for victims of domestic violence. They’re even at higher risk for any other kind of crime.”

As a result of the state’s housing crunch and resultant uptick in homelessness she has seen the average shelter stay lengthen — and more clients from rural areas.

“We end up having people stay here for months, because of the lack of housing,” she said.

The challenge with longer stays is that there are fewer beds available for people in crisis, Pierson said. Shelters measure risk by what’s known as “lethality,” a chilling metric that refers to the likelihood someone will be injured or killed. Shelter managers like to have beds open in case a person with high lethality is in need of shelter. In 2021, her shelter expanded from 52 to 67 beds.

“You want more housing, so you can support people getting into housing that are not staying in your shelter for long periods of time, so that you have beds that are available for those in emergent situations,” she said.

“Our vacancy rate for shelters in the community is at zero,” Pierson said. “So, we’re all full here.”

The shelter still makes room for people in emergencies and screens calls to prioritize those who need shelter most, Pierson said. But the shelter doesn’t have the capacity to build or manage housing for survivors of domestic violence.

Building a solution

The Fairbanks shelter manages nearly two dozen units of housing for survivors of domestic violence, the Bethel shelter is working towards more permanent supportive housing, and this year, Juneau’s domestic violence shelter built seven units of permanent housing. Mandy Cole, the director of local nonprofit Aiding Women in Assault and Rape Emergencies, said it is the thing survivors want most.

“If you can control the door to your home, you control who has access to your family, to your body,” she said. “There’s no daylight between healing and surviving domestic and sexual violence and independent, safe, affordable housing.”

She said the shelter she runs was aware of the housing crisis long before it became a statewide issue. The shelter’s residents had trouble leaving due to a lack of safe, affordable housing options.

By 2012, the shelter had added housing strategies to its long-term plans because she said emergency shelter is not a housing solution.

“Emergency shelter saves lives. Absolutely. But it’s also a trap, in some ways, for repeated bouts of poverty and homelessness,” she said. “This is not a controversial idea. It is not one that everybody knows or understands or wants to talk about, but the data bears this out pretty clearly: that if generations of families live in emergency shelter, they have a very difficult time kind of getting out of poverty and violence and victimization and the repeated cycles of these things over their lifetimes and over family generations.”

The shelter started with transitional housing programs, then expanded to provide financial support through what is known as rapid rehousing. Cole said that this support is crucial to protecting people who leave situations of domestic violence because they are extremely vulnerable to homelessness.

“With people who are just kind of getting back into the workforce, if one tiny thing that happens — you know, a couple of days without child care or transportation issues or a medical issue — they lose their housing for it,” she said. “Whereas people who have more means can absorb some of those things, people who live on the margin just cannot.”

This article was produced as a project for the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism’s 2023 Domestic Violence Impact Fund.

A full list of Alaska shelters and victim’s services providers can be found here.

After she left her abusive boyfriend, Brynn Butler also lost her apartment. Drug use is a common coping response to the trauma of unhealthy relationships, and she said her addiction to methamphetamines “spiraled.”

“It just snowballed into, pretty much I lost everything, right? I was staying at a trap house with my children, who were 12 and 13 at the time,” she said.

Another man promised her housing and stability in another state so she could “get her life straight,” but she said that ended up being another abusive situation. When he broke her eye socket, Butler said she decided to change her life.

“I was really hesitant to go to the emergency room, because I had track marks all over my arms, and I was just a very sore sight,” she said. “I looked in the mirror and I’m like, ‘Who is this person?’ and then I decided I couldn’t do meth anymore.”

Butler went to the Interior Alaska Center for Non-Violent Living in Fairbanks and was placed in transitional housing, where she could stay at the women’s shelter for six months and stabilize. The staff saw such a dramatic change in Butler that they offered her a job, which helped her work towards independent living.

Survivors of domestic violence often need assistance to secure and pay for housing because abusers commonly sabotage their victim’s economic stability. That can result in trouble finding rental properties because of poor credit, rental and employment histories. The support Butler got for housing gave her room to quit drugs and hold down a job. Now she is the housing coordinator for the city of Fairbanks, and she’s working to build out transitional services for the community.

A number of domestic violence survivors in Fairbanks say housing saved their lives. Affordable housing is a crucial step for stability after domestic violence, but it is hard to come by in Fairbanks and across Alaska. Advocates say that causes a backup in shelters, which can mean more people return to their abusers or other risky situations.

“We don’t have housing to put them in”

Interior Center for Non-Violent Living is the only low-barrier shelter in Fairbanks, where winter temperatures can regularly dip to 40 below. A low barrier shelter has no conditions, like sobriety, to enter. Emergency shelters are not a long-term solution, but they are a starting point for unhoused people.

Kara Carlson, IAC’s interim director, said she has housing vouchers available and a surplus of rental assistance dollars to move people from shelter to independent living, but she still cannot get survivors of domestic violence into homes.

“We have a lot of funding available to help people get into housing. What we don’t have is housing to put them in,” she said.

There are several ways to house people who are leaving domestic violence. Shelters are crisis housing and the stays are not intended to exceed 60 days. Transitional housing is usually low-income housing managed by shelters or nonprofits, and its cost is usually shared between the survivor and the program. The next step is either independent living, usually with the help of a housing voucher, or what is called permanent supportive housing, for survivors for whom independent living may be difficult because of a continued threat to their safety. It can come with security and a caseworker.

In Fairbanks, Carlson said, low-income housing has become even scarcer as landlords turn their properties into lucrative short-term rentals. There are two military bases in Fairbanks, and she said landlords often prefer military families to tenants that have housing vouchers.

“Landlords are kind of scared of renting to people that have evictions on their record, and may have a criminal record, or all of the above, when they can get a military person or a person with good credit to pay more and not give them any problems,” she said.

One of the manifestations of domestic violence is financial abuse. Often women leaving abusive relationships have no credit or bad credit, or no work or rental history if they were supported and housed by their abusers. They are often also the primary caretakers for their children. Things like evictions and criminal records, which can be the result of domestic violence situations, are often unacceptable to landlords.

In response to how tough it can be to house survivors of domestic violence, IAC manages 20 units of supportive housing. For people like S., a survivor of violence who lived in various emergency shelters for months until she could find permanent housing, the option is especially important.

“Saved my life,” she said, looking around the small apartment.

S. was in a lot of danger when she arrived at a shelter. The Alaska Beacon is not using her name for safety reasons. The door of the building locks, there is security and she has a key to her own door.

The walls of S.’s apartment are covered in framed artwork. A small bag of biscuits, baked by a neighbor, sat on her kitchen counter, and plants grew under a special light. A crocheted blanket and stuffed animals top her bed; on her bookcase were framed pictures of case workers.

Shelters are not easy places to live, especially for people like S. who live with medical conditions. She said she often considered leaving. “I had my backpack strapped to me, ready to hitchhike to Anchorage and couch surf until I could get a job,” she said. Her case manager convinced her to wait.

“Housing affects all areas of a person’s life”

Michelle Hicks, the center’s housing director, said managed housing works well for survivors, but it is difficult to run and there needs to be more of it. “You could probably double what we currently have, and it would still be full,” she said.

Hicks said IAC has been in the housing business for 35 years. Its first building, named after Carmen Door, who was shot and killed by her abuser, currently houses six families. Several more buildings followed, but Hicks said she still has to turn housing applicants away.

“We saw that one of the biggest barriers women had when fleeing an abuser, and it was particularly women, was safe housing,” she said from her small, paperwork-filled office in a residential area of downtown Fairbanks. The wall above her desk is lined with drawings and sparkly “thank you” cards from her tenants.  “I think there would be fewer deaths, and there would be fewer complex traumas, if the housing need would be better able to be met.”

Hicks balances Alaska state law, the federal Fair Housing Act, health privacy laws, federal Department of Housing and Urban Development regulations and the Violence Against Women Act to shelter a hard to house population. She has perfectly manicured nails and works nights and weekends.

“Housing affects all areas of a person’s life,” is printed in purple ink on the bottom of her business cards. Binders and filing cabinets full of paperwork line her walls. “It’s the single most important thing,” she said.

At the shelter’s annual meeting, she cried when she described a tenant who planned to move out of managed housing to her own place. Her voice cracked on the words “buy her own home.”

Hicks was emotional because she knew what that tenant was up against: For people who have experienced domestic violence, the barriers to housing include managing their trauma; convincing landlords to take a chance when they may lack rental history, good finances and a clean record; and a tight housing market.

She said month-to-month leases have proliferated in town and she thinks landlords do it to avoid housing people who use housing vouchers, which are for 12-month leases.

“You would be hard pressed to find a year lease anymore in this town,” Hicks said. “You’re not discriminating if everyone’s lease is month-to-month.”

Personal, safe space

A. had to wait for two years to get her housing voucher, but now she lives in one of IAC’s supportive housing units with her sons. Their artwork covers the walls, and a cat darts in and out of the room. She said it likely saved her life.

“I would have gone back to him and been beaten or killed,” she said.

For safety reasons, the Alaska Beacon generally does not identify victims of abuse by name, with the exception of people like Butler who have been public about their experiences and who agreed to be identified. The Beacon is identifying A. by her initial with her agreement.

A. tried to make her marriage work out, despite abuse. After leaving and returning to him multiple times, she said her family gave up on her.

“They didn’t like him. They didn’t like what he’s doing to me. And I kept going back to him and playing the game, and I wanted the family,” she said. “I can’t regret the time that we had because I had my son, but I just wish I wouldn’t have stayed so long. It’s never too late, but it’s really hard to find the guts to leave.”

She was homeless for two weeks before she sought services at the shelter. Then, she had to wait two years for a housing voucher that let her move into one of the apartments managed by Hicks. “Here, I got the code and it’s my place. Any other time I lived, it was his place. And he got to kick me out,” she said. “This is mine. Nobody can kick me out.”

Now A. has a job and can focus on rebuilding her relationship with herself. “For 12 years I gave him my all, and I honestly lost myself,” she said. “I didn’t know who I was, what I like — I still don’t,” she said. Her life was so built around pleasing her ex-husband that she said she is still figuring out what she likes to do, even what she likes to eat.

For A., the best part of the apartment is security: There’s a code to get in the building and a lock on her door. Now, she said, she feels “free, but not free” — because her ex is back in town after several years in prison.

“It was quite nice, because I didn’t have to look over my shoulder,” she said. “We’re getting along great now, but I never know when it’s gonna flip.”

She said she knows he keeps track of her still, even though she hears that he has new relationships and that his behavior has not changed — “He’s got another girl pregnant,” she said. “That girl has no clue what she’s getting herself into.”

Building for a safer future

From her light-filled office with the city of Fairbanks, Butler is working towards increasing the availability of low-barrier shelter in the Golden Heart City. She said greater access to housing and shelter can prevent women in abusive relationships from returning to their abusers.

“It makes a difference when it’s 40-below,” she said. “If people aren’t guaranteed a spot in a shelter, they will return to the abuser rather than stay outside.”

She is working to coordinate a housing solution that connects people who are homeless and addicted to drugs, as she once was, to emergency shelter and services to solve the big-picture problems of housing and sobriety. By 2026, she wants the city to have a complex for transitioning people out of homelessness.

And she said other entities are opening up, too. Fairbanks Help Link is a new overnight, emergency shelter. It isn’t housing, but a place to warm up so people don’t freeze.

But, ultimately, she said the city needs housing its residents can afford. She knows what it is like to have to choose between housing instability and a violent relationship: “I’ve been there, done that, got the t-shirt and the track marks to prove it,” she said.

Housing was critical to her success in ending her addiction, and stabilizing her family. She said her kids witnessed her abusive relationships, but they’ve also witnessed her recovery. She described her husband as a nice, decent man, and she said their relationship is stable — and her daughters see that, too.

“These things are important to heal the trauma,” she said. “And not have it pass on to the next generation.”

This article was produced as a project for the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism’s 2023 Domestic Violence Impact Fund.

A full list of Alaska shelters and victim’s services providers can be found here.