(upbeat music) (powerful music) - Organizations around Central Illinois that help victims of domestic violence and sexual abuse are seeing funding reduced from the federal government.

We'll tell you why that's putting a burden on those trying to help the victims and what it could mean for services in the future.

But first, our Phil Luciano shows us some sobering statistics about domestic violence.

(melancholy music) (melancholy music continues) (melancholy music continues) (melancholy music continues) (melancholy music continues) (melancholy music continues) (melancholy music continues) (melancholy music continues) (melancholy music continues) (melancholy music continues) (melancholy music fades out) All right, thanks, Phil Luciano, for sharing those troubling statistics with us.

Right now, we want to introduce you to Carol Merna.

She is the CEO of the Center for Prevention of Abuse.

Good to see you, Carol.

- Thank you for having me; appreciate it.

- You guys do a lot for the community.

And I know the word abuse encompasses a lot.

- It does.

- Probably more than people realize.

So can you kind of give us an overview of what your organization does?

- The Center for Prevention of Abuse is an amazing place.

We're the only agency in the entire state of Illinois that has all the sanctioned services that we do under one roof.

And that really works well for us.

We started as a rape crisis hotline.

And we maintain that hotline 50 years later and have never stopped.

So with sexual assault and sexual abuse services.

Domestic violence, we have two emergency shelters.

Elder abuse, abuse of adults living with disabilities.

Human Trafficking's the newest department.

And then we've got a very large Prevention Education Department where we try very hard to stop abuse before it starts.

- And that includes bullying, right?

- Anti-bullying.

We have a human trafficking curriculum for junior high kids.

Everything that we do through prevention education's age-appropriate and evidence-based, comprehensive.

It's about keeping kids safe.

- Why are we lucky enough to have all that under one roof?

It seems like we should have more places like this across the state.

- Well, it makes good sense.

And we actually have a lot of visitors from across the state that go on a tour and say the same thing.

The agency is unique in the sense that we've had really wonderful leaders in the past that saw the value of having these cooperative services in one location.

So, but say, elder abuse and our domestic violence shelter.

Our first man that stayed in our shelter came from our Elder Abuse Program.

So it all is very cooperative and it makes perfect sense for us.

And financially, it makes good sense for us to have that many services.

- Tell us a little bit about, let's say domestic violence.

A spouse is abusing another spouse, how does it work?

Do you recommend that person call the police first, or you first?

Or how does that work?

- Every case is different.

- Okay.

- If somebody's in imminent danger, by all means calling local law enforcement, 911, is the absolute best thing to do.

But if someone is two o'clock in the morning able to use the phone, able to break away from their abuser, to have a conversation about safety.

Safety planning is one of the first things that we do with somebody that comes to us.

'Cause we know that people that are in abusive relationships typically leave that relationship seven or eight times before they finally come to terms with it.

It's very difficult to leave an abusive relationship.

And we know that takes a lot of courage.

And it should take quite a bit of planning.

We know that when someone leaves an abusive situation, they are 70 times more likely to be murdered by that partner.

Because abuse is all about power and control.

And if you're leaving an abusive situation, that abuser is losing control.

So they act out how they do.

But we work very hard to try to keep people safe at all levels.

So if someone calls us, they're able to do it during the workday or the middle of the night, and we talk about, what's the safest room in your house?

Do you have any funds allocated that you can take with you when you leave?

Because most people who are abused are financially abused.

Do you have children?

Do you have someone that you can signal for help if you need to?

Do you have a phone that isn't owned by the abuser?

Anything like that that might help them gain a little bit of independence to be able to come to the Center for Prevention of Abuse or a shelter somewhere to gain some safety and some help.

- Well, I'm glad you mentioned the kids and the financial aspect.

Because I know people who have stayed in an abusive relationship because they have a pet.

- [Carol] Yeah, absolutely.

- And they don't know what they're gonna do with their pet.

- Yeah, well, we have a Pet Peace Program for that specific reason.

We've been granted funds if somebody comes to us that Tender Hearts Animal Hospital will not only make sure that the pet, the dog or the cat, is up to date on their shots, but they'll also keep them there while the person's staying with us seeking some healing and some hope.

So we know that pets are abused, especially when somebody leaves the home.

So I would be that person.

I would wanna bring my dog with me.

So I understand that completely.

But children are an integral part of the planning for a couple of different reasons.

We know that 26% of all children witness or are involved in a traumatic event by the age of four.

And they carry that with them for the rest of their lives.

So we work with kids through our Safe from the Start Program, through our therapeutic services, through our Children's Room, to really work with them about processing the abuse that they've encountered.

But we have to get them there before that can happen.

So we include them in the safety planning.

We include them in offering to, "You wanna come stay with us, "by all means, bring the children."

Whatever services they might need, we work with them to help determine what those are and then who we can help to bring that hope.

- Sure.

And I wanna talk a little bit more in a few minutes about the services.

But first, this obviously costs money.

Can you tell us a little bit about how the Center is funded?

- Center for Prevention of Abuse relies very heavily on state and federal sources.

So about 75% of our $9 million budget comes from public sources.

But we have a very large supportive audience in the community that believes in the work that we do and knows the value of what we've brought to the community for the last 50 years.

So our donations and charitable sources are extremely important to us.

But those state and federal dollars typically fund things that are very, very difficult to talk about.

Sexual abuse, elder abuse, those are hard conversations to have.

And very rarely will you have someone that'll say, "I wanna fund sexual assault."

So the federal government has always done that, and so has the state government.

So we rely on their generosity.

- Well, the federal government has something that is called the Victims of Crime Act.

And through that, organizations like yours get funding through the Crime Victims Fund.

But I understand that that amount of funding is being lowered or has been lowered.

- Since 2017, it's reduced 92%.

And it serves about 6 million individuals, victims of crime.

And it's not taxpayer dollars.

These are funds that come from prosecutorial fees and court fines and from federal criminals.

So it's a really good use of those dollars.

And we use it very wisely.

It funds therapy services, medical advocacies when we're called to the hospital because someone's presented for domestic violence or human trafficking or sexual assault.

It funds Children's Services.

It funds some Prevention Education.

And it serves many agencies that serve victims of crime across the country.

So it's certainly not just the Center for Prevention of Abuse, but we do rely on it.

But some agencies who are smaller than ours rely on it a lot more than we do.

Last year, we took a $555,000 cut in the Victims of Crime Act dollars.

And Congress just finished passing the fiscal year '24 budget, and we're in line to take another 35% cut.

- Has there been an explanation as to why?

- Because those funds have depleted, especially during the pandemic when the way that people were prosecuted and sentences were determined changed.

And those fees were not coming in as plentiful as they were before.

So that fee has gradually reduced.

What really needs to happen is there needs to be a new way to fund the Victims of Crime Act.

Or we need to work with the court system to help them learn, you know, how beneficial it is to bring those fines and fees in.

'Cause it really does help the people that they're trying to help.

- Sure.

- But it is, it's hurting a lot of agencies, which subsequently hurts a lot of victims.

We're gonna see agencies that are gonna lose satellite offices, that are going to reduce hours on their crisis hotline.

Ours operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

It's staffed by people who are well-trained at our Peoria facility.

I would hate to see that diminish.

But there are agencies that because of what's happened, unless another source of funds comes in, we're gonna see their services shut down.

- Well, speaking of which, the YWCA of McLean County has a program called Stepping Stones, which is a rape crisis center for the community.

And their decrease was more than $325,000.

They've actually had to get help from the McLean County government to make sure they can still give those services.

And how long that help will last, we're not sure.

Have you had to make any specific cuts because of this cut in funding?

- We've been very fortunate.

Leader Jehan Gordon-Booth was very helpful to us last year to keep us whole so that we wouldn't have to make dramatic cuts.

That was not necessarily sustainable.

We don't know if that's gonna ever happen again.

So those cuts will continue.

Fortunately, we save for a rainy day, but that doesn't mean that we wanna deplete our reserves.

We wanna stay as solid as we possibly can to be in existence for as long as we can.

So we'll probably keep the public informed about what our needs are.

Everybody says it: Peoria is a very generous community.

It is, I've seen it, I believe it.

And I think that we'll probably be okay.

But we're gonna rely on the people that see those services in action every day.

- When you have that type of funding cut and you have to look at your books and look at the services you provide, that has gotta be so difficult to decide: If we have to get rid of something, what do we get rid of?

I mean, that's gotta be heartbreaking.

- Well, everything that we do is essential.

And even during the pandemic, we were declared an essential service.

Complete in operation, as effective as we are now, we were during the whole pandemic.

So there is nothing that is gravy, that I would call that we can take off the plate.

Everything is very important.

And typically what happens is you reduce the size of your staff, which is not anything that I want to do.

It's not anything I believe in doing.

I think that the numbers don't necessarily save you.

It's the people that save you.

And we have wonderful superheroes that work with people and help them through their healing process.

And we can't afford to lose any of them.

- Well thankfully, in an organization like yours, the people that work there, they're not doing it for the glory or the money.

They're doing it because they believe in what they're doing, so if you have to give them a little extra work, I guess that's your ideal situation, having folks like that that are dedicated to the cause.

- I said to the management team yesterday, we meet regularly, and somebody said, "Oh, I don't have much to report today."

And then at the end I said, "I beg to differ.

"You all have so much work, you don't know what to do.

"There is so much on your plate."

They bring tremendous value to what they do and the people that they serve.

So I would hate to try to dump more on their plate because that shows in the bottom line of service.

And we need to spend as much time as we can with people in therapy and with people in counseling and with people who are staying with us as guests in our shelter.

They deserve all of our attention inasmuch as we can give it.

- You've touched on it briefly earlier.

Is it difficult to go to a big business in the Peoria area and say, "Hey, you know, we need some funding."

Because, you know, those businesses, they are very charitable, but the Center for Prevention of Abuse, it's a different kind of animal.

- Yeah, it's a different dynamic.

It's difficult, yes and no.

It's not always comfortable to do that.

But I think that the companies in the area and even individuals in the area really understand the value of the work that gets done at the Center for Prevention of Abuse.

We have some long time, very generous people that support us.

Whether it's Pickett Insurance or Caterpillar or you name it, we've got wonderful folks.

Bob Lindsay.

The Par-A-Dice is a big one.

So yes, we go to them regularly, and they're always there for us.

But they run into difficult times too.

So we always need to save for a rainy day.

So we take as much as we can and set it aside to make sure that we're there.

We went through a 736 day state budget impasse, and we lived through that.

And we were able to withstand the uncertainty of whether we were gonna get paid or not paid.

So we're prepared as much as we can, but we still rely on the people that are always generous to us.

- Absolutely.

We showed those numbers at the beginning, the domestic violence in America.

The numbers are unbelievable.

You've been with the Center now for nine years.

It's been in existence a lot longer than that.

Are we seeing any improvements in these numbers?

Or is the problem just consistent, getting worse?

- I don't know that it gets worse.

I like to put a positive spin on that.

Because when we see more numbers, and we're seeing about 6,000 people a year through the Center for Prevention of Abuse not counting the Prevention Education where we reach 41,000 students.

Those numbers continue to grow.

We continue to increase our capacity as we can.

But I think it would be foolish for me to think that domestic violence will ever go away.

It's always existed, and I think it will always be there.

But we see things that improve.

I think more people are understanding that they can come to the Center for help.

They're understanding that there are options.

They're understanding that the resources are available, and there's always gonna be somebody there to listen to them and to say, "We believe you and we're here for you."

- I think it's gonna be interesting in five to 10 years looking at the outreach you're doing now with younger people to see what these numbers are like.

Again, these are national numbers we showed you.

But, you know, you could make a big difference in how you mold young people to think.

So when they grow up to adults, hopefully they will... - The cycle of violence is very real.

We know that a young boy has a 10% more likelihood of becoming an abuser because he's been in a home where abuse happened.

That's the cycle of violence.

And a young girl, it's the same situation.

She could become an abuser, but she is far more likely to be subjected to abuse and sexual abuse.

So when we can teach kids about body safety, we can teach them when they come into therapy how to regulate their feelings and maybe just to come to terms with what's happened to them or what they've seen, it makes a difference.

We're hosting a conference in May called Light 2024 where we shine a light on childhood trauma.

It's become so prevalent in the understanding of a mental health situation in school or anything to do with children and trauma.

We have wonderful speakers and workshops that are gonna take place in East Peoria, nationally known speakers, because we have that institutional knowledge.

We're very lucky to have that.

So being able to provide those tools, those resources, whether it's internally at the center or because we're hosting a conference, we're very lucky to be able to do that.

I think we will see better numbers.

I think we will.

I observed, I'm gonna interrupt you just for a second.

I observed our prevention educators at a local grade school and it was a third grade class.

And they knew the teacher, our prevention educator coming in, because they recognized her from second grade and first grade.

So there was relationship that was being built.

But as she was presenting the lesson of the day, there was a little boy and he said, "Miss Laura, are we talking about empathy?"

And he knew the word empathy before I understood that we were talking about empathy, which is fantastic.

We couldn't ask for anything better than that for an 8-year-old to understand what empathy is because we've provided that step up in education on it for the last three years of their lives.

We couldn't ask for anything better.

That kid's got a lot of chance ahead of him.

- Good, that's a great story.

I wanna hear some other success stories.

I know you hear terrible things every day, but I wanna hear some success stories out of the Center for Prevention of Abuse.

- We have a success story.

We were talking about this yesterday.

Probably every hour of every day, there's something that we can really just enlighten someone's day about the work that we do.

A story that always comes to mind for me is, I don't always see the people that come to the Center.

We have a lot of staff that work with them directly.

But a woman asked to see me specifically, and sat down and told me the story about being abused for 20 years.

Afraid to leave her situation because you have to think about, what are you leaving?

She was leaving home.

She was leaving family.

She was leaving financial security.

But then what was she running to?

She was running to uncertainty.

She was running to poverty.

She was running to fear because fear of leaving someone who is that controlling is very real.

It's big.

But she told me, for the last 10 years of the abuse, the abuser would send her to the grocery store with a very specific list of groceries to get with the exact amount of money that they believed would need to be spent.

Sometimes she'd find a coupon, she'd come back with an extra 75 cents.

And she'd hide that money under the carpet in the spare bedroom.

And it was to get respite.

Her form of respite was to go get a cup of coffee somewhere.

But it was sitting in a coffee shop that someone told her about the Center for Prevention of Abuse where she was able to safety plan, where she was able to learn about her choices and her options.

And out of a 20-year relationship, she was able to find the courage and the voice to break away.

And that is a very difficult thing to do.

There's something that I like to tell people about.

They say, "Why wouldn't she just leave "five years into the relationship instead of waiting 20?"

It was all of those things about what's she running to: fear, uncertainty.

And when you leave an abusive relationship and the fear of maybe even losing your life is very real, it's like seeing the shark's fin in the water.

And you know it's dangerous but as long as you can see it, you have some sense of safety because you can tell how far away that attack might be.

And she told me that when that fin goes under the water and you no longer have a sense of when that attack will happen, that's what it's like leaving that abusive relationship.

So I've never forgotten that.

But she was able to find hope and healing.

And she's still in the area.

And I run into her occasionally.

And I'm very proud of what she's accomplished.

I don't use the word empowering people because they've always had the power.

We might embolden them.

And we don't rescue people, they rescue themselves.

We just facilitate it.

- Yeah, it's not an easy thing to do.

I mean, people that say, "Oh, why didn't you just do that?"

Well, much easier said than done.

- Well, we're in the cheap seats.

- Right.

- We have a different perspective.

And it's practicing that empathy that that 8-year-old is beginning to understand.

But being able to see things from the abused person's perspective and not blame them for what they're enduring, that perspective's really important.

- Well, some of these abusers, they have a psychological hold over people.

And sometimes, that's a lot scarier and more powerful than physicality if you can get inside somebody's head.

- Absolutely.

And abuse isn't always just physical.

It is emotional.

It could be gaslighting.

It could be a number of tactics that people use to control somebody else.

Human trafficking is about force, fraud, or coercion.

And it does, it gets inside your head and makes you believe that you owe your abuser money, you owe them your time.

Everything that isn't true is somehow brought into the forefront of that person's brain.

But we always try to help people gain the education they need so they can come to their own decisions about what they can and cannot do, and gain that independence, hopefully, in the long run.

It's always their choice.

- Well, again, we are glad we have a facility like yours here in Central Illinois.

- Me too.

- We appreciate the work that you do and we hope those funds come in.

- Thank you.

Appreciate you, Mark.

- All right, Carol; appreciate you too.

Phil Luciano joins us now.

And Phil, those numbers that you dug up for us at the very beginning of the show, pretty startling.

- It's astounding.

I mean, we know how horrible the problem is of abuse, right?

But then you see 20,000 calls a day to domestic abuse hotlines.

You see that 20 people a minute are abused by partners.

And what's in that black and white, you're like, "Wow, that is just mind blowing."

So hopefully, funding and everything else can move in the right direction.

- Yeah, we need at least as much as we've been getting, if not more.

Let's transition now to our favorite show, "You Gotta See This," which starts in just a few minutes.

All new episode.

- We have a really interesting story that I think leads it off.

It's about a Peoria firefighter who for more than two decades has been saving lives there.

But now, he also has another vocation where he helps lives.

He's a painter.

And he helps people through grief and other really heavy emotions.

And to see how he does this, it's really kind of touching.

And you've got a story about one of the most famous aviators in American history, right?

- Yeah, Charles Lindbergh.

He has got a storied history here in Central Illinois.

I would say it's not bad news because he lived, but he crashed twice, twice in Central Illinois and walked away.

- Learned how to bounce.

- Learned how to bounce, yes.

Bounced off a barbed wire in one instance.

(Phil laughs) But we're gonna tell you about where he crashed and some monuments that have been built to commemorate the occasion.

- And also, and I know everyone's still excited that today is National Eight Track Tape Day.

I don't know if you got off work.

(Mark and Phil laugh) I did not.

We should, right?

- Yes.

- But if you haven't yet celebrated, we have a special salute to eight tracks coming up on the show.

- Now, do you have just one eight track player?

- I have one eight track player that works.

But I have others that are waiting for their moment in the sun.

- All right, waiting to be refurbished?

- Yes, sir.

- Very nice.

- Next man up, next deck up.

- The kids that are watching don't know what cassettes or records are, let alone an eight track, so you get a history lesson here.

Very good; all right, thank you, Phil.

Well that is our time for now.

We appreciate you watching.

You can get with us anytime at wtvp.org.

And be sure to check us out on Facebook and Instagram.

We've always got a lot of cool stuff on there that you won't see on WTVP television.

Again, thanks for joining us.

Have a good night.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music fades out)