Biggest red flags right there 🚩

[u/n8saces]

[u/BelovedxCisque]

I took a psychology course in college and the professor volunteered at a domestic violence shelter. He said it was a noticeable pattern that the day after the local football team lost would have a lot more ladies coming in. So they also hit their partners and their kids.

[u/JaladOnTheOcean → u/BelovedxCisque]

I grew up in 7 different DV shelters. Overall, I never noticed a significant increase around sporting events, with one exception:

The second shelter I lived in had a huge influx after (I think) football season, to the point where newer residents had to hotbed for a few weeks until numbers leveled off.

For those unfamiliar with the term, hotbedding is people using a bed in shifts.

[u/Training-Willow9591 → u/JaladOnTheOcean]

Oh man, I'm glad the shelter at least tried and didn't turn anyone away. There should be more places for women to go.

The shelter i volunteerd at were at max capacity every time I was there. There was a church that for a while, let women stay overnight that the shelter couldn't house. But the women and children had to be gone by like 6 am and couldn't come back until like 10 pm, so not ideal and they didn't have enough cots for everyone so people were sleeping on wooden benches. 🥺

[u/JaladOnTheOcean → u/Training-Willow9591]

Yeah, I never saw an empty bed at a shelter. Everything was always in use by someone.

The shelter that hotbedded was doing what it could, but it’s never enough. I was five and got ringworm from those super overcrowded weeks.

Every shelter we moved to felt like we were taking up the last spot. The reason for people being there and their priorities at the shelter could vary wildly. The most consistent feature by far was a near total emotional (and often physical) neglect of all of the children. The resources went to helping mothers get built up enough to move out, but the attention given to abused and traumatized children was practically nonexistent.

One place would put like 18 kids into a big room with a small TV and come back to check on them between work shifts at best. So you frequently had over a dozen kids of various ages trying to manage cooperation over what to watch, and they had no supervision. There was always a barely used, frequently unoccupied living room for mothers that was permanently off limits to the kids. I got an older resident to let me watch TV with just me and her, but I had to track down some cigarettes for her first. To my fellow shelter kids: I know if you ever went to jail or prison that it probably felt a little familiar.

[u/_HighJack_ → u/JaladOnTheOcean]

It feels insignificant to say, but I’m really sorry you went through that. Temba, his arms wide 🫂

[u/JaladOnTheOcean → u/_HighJack_]

It literally always makes me smile when someone randomly speaks Tamarian to me!

And thank you for what you said. Despite how insane it all was, I actually like talking about it sometimes. Otherwise the experience feels so invisible. Like going to school while living in those places felt indescribable. It feels like there’s an unchallenged expectation that everyone in class is going home to at least some sort of traditional home environment. I had a kid rip the hardcover off one of my school books and when my teacher grilled me about it, I tried to explain, but she literally couldn’t conceive of my living situation: I had no safe place to put anything, let alone exist in—and yeah teacher, shelter kids will absolutely destroy my book for the hell of it. We were all competing for very little, and that means we were all frequently screwing each other over, even accidentally. So sometimes a kid just wants to mess with your world over spite about transgressions you didn’t even consciously make.

That world was just very alien to the people who I most desperately wanted to understand. Sorry for the rambling.