Citing some 7,000 domestic violence calls to Baltimore City police in just one city district so far this year, Carole Alexander, executive director of the 31-year-old House of Ruth Maryland, worries that area spousal abuse may be on the rise.
“I don’t think we know,” she said of the problem she has faced officially every workday for the last 25 years.
She is sure, however, that not enough is being done to punish the abusers. “Rarely do we charge and even more rarely do we convict,” she said of criminal justice action.
But House of Ruth Maryland, a secluded, 115-employee — including 16 full-time attorneys — $6 million-a-year, battered partner shelter that provides a range of counseling, legal and support services at five locations to victims of abuse, is not joking about domestic violence.
“The services we provide are, first of all, intended to create safety for victims of domestic violence and their children,” Alexander said, “and then help the women rebuild their lives — to develop the resources, the skills and the wherewithal to start over again.”
The center accomplishes this through services that include its 84-bed shelter and transitional housing program for women and children; legal help, including protective and custody order preparation; in-house counseling, job training and group work; and prenatal and medical care through partnerships with Johns Hopkins University Hospital and the Kennedy Krieger Institute, Alexander said.
“My involvement comes from the perspective of a victim — isolated, scared, a parent of a single child with nowhere to turn,” said Tina Kline, pediatric neurology administrator at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. “When I left the House of Ruth, I left with courage and hope.”
Alexander said 2,600 women have been helped so far this year by the center’s legal services clinic alone. Another 45, she said, are currently in its temporary shelter and 39 are occupying six apartments in its nearby transitional housing component. Over 150,000 women — and some men — have received some form of center help since its 1977 founding, Alexander estimated.
“They are actually now in the courthouse at North Avenue, a resource where I can direct victims when they come in for protective orders,” said Baltimore City District Court Associate Judge Catherine Curran O’Malley.
A House of Ruth traveling photographic exhibit on domestic violence, called “A Line in the Sand,” currently is showing at the University of Maryland.
House of Ruth
2201 Argonne Drive
Baltimore, Md. 21218
410-889-0840 (office); 410-889-7884 (hotline)
www.hruth.org
www.alineinthesand.org
