The Quiet Storm

pstrongAbuse of Deaf Women and Children/strong/p pDIV align="left" TABLE cellpadding="5"TR VALIGN="TOP"TDIMG SRC= "../sites/default/files/arch_img/390/photo_1_supplement.jpg" //td/trTR VALIGN="TOP"TD/td/trTR VALIGN="TOP"TDTR VALIGN="TOP"TD pby Greg Paroff/p pWomen often find themselves homeless when escaping situations of domestic violence. As difficult as such violence is for hearing women, Deaf women face additional challenges dealing with abuse./p pJulie Rems-Smario founded Deaf Women Against Violence (DWAV) to serve Deaf women and their children residing in the Bay Area. Rems-Smario, who has been Deaf since birth, taught at the California School for the Deaf in Fremont and saw the profound impact domestic violence has on the children of Deaf women. /p pSome of the Deaf children, Rems-Smario writes, were coming to school on Mondays, relieved to be on safe premises. These children started “acting out” on Fridays as they prepared to go home for the weekend. Rems-Smario realized these children were being abused at home./p pUntil the late 1990’s, there was only one organization in the U.S. dealing with Deaf battered women and their children, the Abused Deaf Women Advocacy Services (ADWS) of Seattle, WA. In 1998, Rems-Smario was five months pregnant with her third child when she was invited, along with representatives from four other cities, to attend an ADWS training seminar on how to organize a similar group in the Bay Area./p pIn March 2001, with the support of the Deaf Counseling, Advocacy and Referral Agency (DCARA) and three years of grassroots fundraising, DWAV opened an office in Hayward, California, with Rems-Smario as executive director. Since the California School for the Deaf is located in Fremont, Alameda County has an especially populous Deaf community./p pDWAV provides services to Deaf survivors of domestic violence through its advocacy in medical and legal arenas. DWAV not only advocates for Deaf women and their children, it also trains public officials how to best serve the special needs of Deaf women and children./p pWhen abused, Deaf women seeking help from police and staffs of hospitals and shelters are often forced to deal with people who do not understand Deaf culture. Police seldom avail themselves of interpreters when called to scenes of domestic violence, wrongly assuming all deaf people can lip-read. This renders communication impossible./p pPeople working in shelters often misinterpret the behaviors of Deaf women and their children. For example, when hearing children want to get the attention of their Deaf parent, they stomp on the floor to create vibrations. At home, these children are used to speaking very loudly. These behaviors are often interpreted as acting-out, and women are asked to leave the shelters, which may return them to the cycle of violence./p pIn August, DWAV will be expanding its services and opening its 24-hour hotline for Deaf battered women. In order for the organization to thrive and further extend its services, it needs support from the community./p pCheck out DWAV’s website at a href="http://www.dwav.org" title="www.dwav.org"www.dwav.org/a. They can be reached by TTY at (510) 538-0107. Hearing people can reach them via California Relay Services by calling (888)877-5378 or (800) 735-2922 and giving the TTY number to the operator./p p/p/td/tr/td/tr/table/div/p