National Domestic Violence Hotline Essay ⋆ Criminal Justice Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

The National Domestic Violence Hotline (NDVH) was established in February 1996 from funding allocated in the Violence Against Women Act. NDVH is a national toll-free hotline that provides 24-hour crisis intervention and information and referral services. NDVH was developed and established as a program of the Texas Council on Family Violence, one of the largest and most established state coalitions in the country. NDVH operates on a budget with a combination of federal, state, and private funding sources. In 2006, NDVH fielded on average about 17,000 calls a month. In addition to providing callers with immediate crisis intervention and general information about domestic violence and the dynamics of abuse, the hotline maintains an extensive database of the available domestic violence services and other social services in communities across the nation.

Though many local domestic violence shelters maintain their own hotlines, NDVH with enhanced technical and financial resources is able to provide consistent, coordinated, and responsive services to callers throughout the country. As a result, NDVH has been successfully used to enhance national outreach campaigns, public service announcements, and media presentations about domestic violence. For example, the hotline’s number has been published on the back of stamp packages, women’s clothing labels, and during television shows that feature domestic violence content. In fact, NDVH’s Web site provides a variety of downloadable outreach materials that include numerous posters, information cards, and radio and TV public service announcements.

NDVH receives calls from survivors of domestic violence and from those who have not yet named their experiences as abuse. They receive many calls from friends and family members who are concerned that someone they care about is being abused and from professional helpers, such as police officers, physicians, nurses, and social workers, who are seeking information about how to respond to situations of domestic violence. They also receive calls from batterers and from batterer treatment providers. NDVH staff and volunteers answer calls in both English and Spanish, and interpreter services are utilized for over 140 languages. NDVH provides advocacy services to survivors of abuse in the deaf community through a TTY line and is currently implementing increased outreach to the persons who are deaf, deaf and blind, and hard of hearing using technology that is replacing TTY use. The deaf community is rapidly increasing in their use of personal handheld communication devices, which are widely available, well supported, portable, and require no special equipment, so in the fall of 2006, NDVH piloted interactions with the deaf community via instant messaging, live chats with an advocate on the NDVH Web site, and video conferencing to facilitate sign language interactivity.

Hotline advocates use active listening, safety planning, information sharing, and empowerment techniques to assist callers with their immediate concerns. NDVH is also using technology to better achieve its service mission. The hotline has recently upgraded computerized systems to improve its community resource database and allow for more sophisticated tracking of service requests and resource gaps. The NDVH Web site receives 30,000 (roughly 14,000 unique visitors) visits per month.

Bibliography:

Bell, H., & Kulkarni, S. (2005). Assessing the service needs of survivors of intimate partner violence. Austin, TX: Institute on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault.
National Domestic Violence Hotline: http://www.thehotline.org/

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