One of the toughest moments for me was during my work with a survivor, who was a recovered crack addict. The way she could make enough to provide for her son was to work as a prostitute at a migrant work camp. It was just a really difficult situation for her and her son. What struck me was just how shrewd and practical she was about it. I remember her saying how it’s the way she can make enough money to support her son because it’s such a large amount of people in a small area.

Her husband was abusive and also a crack addict, but she had gotten herself clean. There were so many layers stacked against her: she was a DV victim, she was a woman of color, she was a single mother, she couldn’t go back to him, and honestly I just came to a place of realizing my own limitations to help. I mean, I could help her get a protective order so he couldn’t hurt her, but there were so many layers.

On the other side of the coin, what I’ve learned is that sometimes just listening to clients’ stories and acknowledging their struggles and pain is meaningful. They are so grateful. It really makes a difference. Just that small act seems so little compared to all the issues clients are facing, but it can be both healing and far reaching.

A recent New York case is a good example of the long term impact our work can have. A custody evaluator who clearly did not like our client, the mom, wrote a very negative report and the court took away her custody based on that report without giving her an opportunity to challenge the information or defend herself. It was a clear violation of her due process rights. We had a positive outcome in that case, and within a one year turnaround, other cases have cited it saying: we can’t do this, because of this ruling -- we can’t take away a parent’s custody rights without giving them an opportunity to be heard in some kind of hearing.

I feel so fortunate to work with the attorneys in our pro bono network, they are smart, professional and truly committed to our mission. For example in one case we had, the abusive father lost custody, but his mother was attempting to gain custody of the child as a roundabout way of maintaining access for her son. The pro-bono legal team devoted endless hours to the case. We spent days getting the briefs just right for the appeal. 

The team is from one of the top law firms in the country and their work is so impressive. And it’s not just the quality of the lawyers--it takes a tremendous amount of time and energy. And we could offer this mom the support of a whole legal team--something she never would have been able to afford. This mom had very limited financial resources but that type of legal support is not something even the average middle class person could ever access or afford.

It’s leveled the playing field. You can hear the change just in her voice. She had felt so beaten down. The grandmother has money and is well-respected in the community. Mom takes great care of her son but couldn’t always afford a lawyer and had to represent herself at times. Grandmother’s lawyer took advantage of that and tried to paint her as crazy and unable to properly care for her child. She felt alone, outgunned. But DV LEAP’s involvement has given her her life back. She feels she has a voice, the tables are turned. Mom is harder to bully now.

She is growing more confident with this team behind her; more hopeful.

When the public has trouble believing courts would do this to survivors, first, I try to put myself in their shoes. That was me before I came to DV LEAP. I was a clerk for this really great judge. I practiced in a small town and felt that, for the most part, my clients got justice. Then I came to DV LEAP and there were these cases that were so absurd and contradictory to justice-- I didn’t want them to be true and just had a hard time absorbing it. But over time, the things that we’ve seen... there is no easy way to explain it. The desk is stacked against survivors in so many ways.

Unfortunately, my advice to any survivor is: be strategic. You think, I’ll do the right thing, I’ll go into the court and tell them what’s happening. I’ll report what’s happening and I will be able to protect myself and my children. But often that is not what happens. They need to know, the court might not be a friendly place to a survivor. It’s a sad and depressing piece of advice about this institution that is supposed to protect you, but I can’t tell you how many survivors and mothers have come to me saying: I went in and told them, I did what I was supposed to do, and now I’ve lost everything.

Sasha Drobnick is the Legal Director at the Domestic Violence Legal Empowerment and Appeals Project (DV LEAP) in Washington, D.C., where she litigates appeals, conducts trainings and provides consultations on family violence issues. Sasha formerly practiced family and domestic violence law in Maryland with a focus on low income communities and received service awards from both the Mid-Shore Council on Family Violence and the Mid-Shore Pro Bono Center. In her early career, Sasha worked extensively in South Africa to promote women’s equal access to higher education. Sasha received her B.A. from Georgetown University and J.D. from New York University School of Law.

I was in law school and a friend of mine was in a romantic relationship; and I remember we were having coffee one day… and she was telling me about an argument that they had and she had mentioned that he had been physically violent with her.

I don’t remember what I said. I’d like to think that it was something supportive and tactful, but I’m not sure. I just remember being really surprised in part because this was a friend of mine who was not what you think a stereotypical victim would be. Since I’ve done this work professionally now, I understand that my vision of a victim was not accurate.

I remember that struck me pretty strongly and I think that it also made me realize that really no one is immune. I never knew much about the person who was abusive to her, but I also knew he was a law student. You know, somewhat educated, probably had a decent number of socioeconomic resources to at least be in law school.

The cases with children always hit me on a more intense level.  

So there was one case, and I’m going to use initials M.R. -- it was a protection order case. I remember the survivor was probably around my age and I think she was in graduate school, and she had a young daughter. And I remember thinking, this is someone I would be friends with. This is someone I would hang out with. And I think up until that point there had always been a little bit of distance, right?

These survivors are older. These survivors, I don’t know, are at a different point in their life, they have a different career. They have lots of kids… they are just somehow, a little bit different than me. And then there was a survivor who wasn’t. And I remember thinking, she goes to the same coffee shops that I hang out at. She does the same things I do on the weekends. She probably does yoga like I do. We would talk about her case, and then we would just talk about, I don’t know, whatever books we were reading. And it just made me think, who else in my daily life, that I see, could be a survivor?

I think that what’s helped me in dealing with disbelief of our clients and our cases [from onlookers] is recognizing that that this kind of disbelief doesn’t come from a bad place. It comes from a place of wanting to believe that the justice system is effective and it does good; [that] it offers protection and abusers will be held accountable and punished. So I try to remember that... It’s hard for someone to understand this kind of sad, traumatizing information. Especially when they haven’t been exposed to it. It’s an education process that has to take time.  

There’s a lot of reasons why DV survivors don’t do well in court. I remember talking to a psychologist once who said, “You cannot create a worse system in terms of survivors’ mental health than the court system.” I think in general, they’re scared, they’re upset. They’re probably stressed out, they probably haven’t slept well. They may not have mental health support. And you’re threatening them with the loss of their children.

They’re going to be angry in court. Given perhaps especially when they don’t have a lawyer to represent them at the trial level. We see this a lot. They’re going to give a bunch of irrelevant information probably. They’re not going to be focused. They’re not going to be clear. They may yell or they may have a really flat affect. Which to us, we understand that may be trauma speaking, but to a judge, it undermines her credibility. Why isn’t she upset? Why isn’t she crying? As if there’s some sort of magical formula about how upset you’re supposed to be: be upset, but don’t be too upset.

And then you have the abuser who’s probably well dressed. Probably very articulate. Probably apologetic enough. And I think it just means that your client is facing an uphill battle.

I’m really proud that we just keep going. I know that’s not a really glamourous quote for the website. But I’m especially proud of Joan because she’s been doing this forever. But I’m just proud of us as an organization for continuing to do what we do.

I also think that all of us are inherently pretty self-reflective people. We’re also good about learning from our mistakes and that’s really important in this field. The DV landscape changes, and I think it’s important that we constantly evaluate ourselves.

There’s definitely survivors we turn away because we don’t have the human capacity to help. Our biggest challenge is making sure we can grow our staff. Some day, Joan will retire. We need to develop our staff to make sure DV LEAP continues. And I’m sure there’s more big picture work about the field that we do if we had more resources; more training, more technical assistance, more litigation.

Beyond the obvious [use for more money], which is hire more attorneys, I would really love to get some sort of therapist who could talk to survivors and help provide them with mental health support. I think we’re all supportive and good listeners, but someone with professional experience to help them manage the trauma they’re going through. I think it would be incredibly useful, because at the end of the day they would be better prepared to fight their cases.

The hardest thing for me in this work, I think it’s the cultural thing, for lack of a better word -- and that is, disbelief of victims. An inability to be able to handle the idea of horrible things happening to women and children, and instead deciding that they must be liars or somehow maliciously making things up. The culture of disbelieving survivors.

I think one of the interesting things about disbelief of survivors is that, I’ve been surprised in my work. I’ve been surprised to the extent at which domestic violence is tolerated. There have been some cases where even when judges don’t completely dismiss it out of hand, I think it’s been interesting how it can be minimized or whitewashed. Especially when it comes to the effects on children.

I’ve seen some cases where there’s recognition that the father was abusive with violence towards the mother, and the kids saw it. And [the court will] say it has nothing to do with whether or not he’s going to be a good father. They’ll say he’s still safe. He didn’t physically hurt the kids and he’s probably learned his lesson. It was probably just a push here, or a slap there, and she was being really annoying anyway. I think it’s a combination of some level of tolerance in our society of violence against women when it’s in the context of a family.

It really has meant a lot to me to be able to help survivors of DV, both the individual clients, and then knowing that the work that I’ve done also helps improve the ability of other survivors to get justice. One of the unique things about DV Leap is that you help the individual client, which is incredibly rewarding and why we do this work; but you also know that there’s, I don’t want to say larger, because that minimizes the individual's experience, but I can help so many more people doing the work that I do. The ways that the impact is magnified through appellate work is something that I found really rewarding.

Elizabeth Liu is currently a Consulting Attorney with DV LEAP. She was previously DV LEAP's Managing Attorney and litigated domestic violence appellate cases and helped lead various training, advocacy, public speaking, and outreach efforts. Prior to joining DV LEAP, she was a Women’s Law and Public Policy Fellow at Georgetown University Law Center’s Domestic Violence Clinic where she supervised law students litigating civil protection order cases and co-taught the clinic seminar. Ms. Liu has served as the president of the board of directors for the Asian Pacific Islander Domestic Violence Resource Project. She was also a member of the board of directors of the D.C. Coalition Against Domestic Violence. She received her LLM in Advocacy from Georgetown University Law Center, her J.D. from Harvard Law School and her B.A., with honors, from the University of Chicago. She is the co-author of Representing the Domestic Violence Survivor, with Barry Goldstein.

Lee Ann brings a unique combination of nonprofit leadership and academic scholarship to her new as Executive Director of DV LEAP. An ardent advocate for women's and human rights, she has over two decades of experience linking research and action for change to benefit vulnerable groups in the US and in Africa. Dr. De Reus is an internationally recognized expert on gender, sexualized violence, women’s rights, and activism with speaking engagements at TEDxPSU, the Oslo Freedom Forum, and France24 TV.

She is the co-founder and chair of the board of directors of Panzi Foundation USA, a nonprofit that assists survivors of gender-based violence at Panzi Hospital in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Under her leadership, the funds raised by the Foundation increased tenfold in only four years. Her efforts on behalf of PFUSA were recognized by Purdue University, her alma mater, with the 2017 Distinguished Service Alumni Award. At Penn State Altoona, Dr. De Reus was an associate professor for 20 years in the departments of Human Development and Family Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies where she conducted research on gender-based violence and taught courses on intimate partner and family violence.

DV LEAP is excited to have Lee Ann on board, and we confidently look forward to new growth and the expansion of our footprint with Lee Ann at our helm.

The youngest hire to the team, Flora Patel joins DV LEAP as the Development Associate. In addition to running DV LEAP’s social media pages and website, Flora analyzes data, coordinates events, and cultivates relationships with donors.

Flora discovered her passion for nonprofit work and college football as a student at the University of Georgia where she double majored in International Affairs and Political Science, with a minor in Women’s Studies. She’s held internships at the Human Rights Campaign and with the University of Georgia’s Division of Development and Alumni Relations, which opened her eyes to the world of fundraising and development. As a first-generation American and a double minority, Flora’s desire to help others stems from her own experiences, and she takes pride in that she is able to use her skills to advocate for people in need.

DV LEAP is excited to bring Flora on board!