A road to recovery for families of murder victims
Julie Good stands in the waiting room redesigned with money raised by the family of murder victim Leidy Bonanno. (Photo by Amy Brisson)
by AMY BRISSON
The pain experienced by families of homicide victims can be debilitating. Few know this better than Julie Good, executive director of the Germantown-based Anti-Violence Partnership of Philadelphia.
In a sit-down interview last week, Good took out a blank sheet of paper and wrote the word “victim” across it. Then she crumpled the paper into a small ball.
“This is the [family’s] experience. It doesn’t destroy them, but it changes them forever,” she explained. She opened up the ball and flattened the now wrinkled paper on the table. “You can never make this piece of paper like it was before, but now it has the function of a piece of paper again.”
It was a demonstration of how the counselors at the Anti-Violence Partnership (AVP) try to help families — “co-victims” — find a way to go on and live a constructive life, to find a “new normal.” AVP’s free programs are designed to help families deal with the many-faceted problems and emotions they experience after a violent or criminal incident, including loss of financial income, post-traumatic stress disorder, dealing with the courts and crisis of faith.
AVP is a one-of-a-kind organization in Philadelphia, but its future funding is in doubt. According to Good, 90 percent of AVP’s funding comes from the federal Victims of Crime Act (VOCA), which the Bush administration has proposed absorbing into the general budget. The transfer may make funding fluctuate from year to year or even shut down AVP and other victim service agencies for a time.
Out of tragedy
AVP was originally founded by the parents of Nancy Spungen, the 20-year-old Bucks County native stabbed to death by British punk-rocker Sid Vicious in 1978. Her parents, Deborah and Frank Spungen, were devastated by the murder, but when they sought help from a national organization called Parents of Murdered Children, they found there was no chapter established in Philadelphia. The Spungens organized with other bereaved families to form a support group that in 1983 became the nonprofit Families of Murder Victims.
In the early 1990s, homicides were on the rise and the perpetrators and victims were getting younger and younger. In order to take a more proactive role in preventing violence, Families of Murder Victims was renamed the Anti-Violence Partnership of Philadelphia and expanded to include outreach programs for children in schools and a broader range of services for victims and co-victims.
Now AVP has expanded further. It has five primary programs and teaches over 2,500 Philadelphia students a year about preventing violence, as well as counseling and supporting over 1,600 co-victims of homicide. Though now living on Long Island, Deborah Spungen is still involved with AVP as the director of special projects.
Therapy and support
One of AVP’s five main programs is their counseling center at 633 West Rittenhouse St. in Germantown. There are five part-time licensed social workers who offer counseling, and three who work primarily with child victims and co-victims. During the past year, the counseling center provided service to around 230 clients, half of whom were children.
Although adults can learn to cope by talking about their experiences with the counselors, children are often unable to express their feelings directly. The counselors work with children as young as two years old, 80 percent of whom are co-victims of homicides. The other 20 percent are witnesses or direct victims of domestic violence.
“We try to find a way for them to express their feelings without words,” explained Good. “We use a lot of play therapy ... we have these sand trays where they can play out things with little figurines, constructing little universes. We have lots of people and cops and cars and they can play these things out in ways that are really significant.”
Many children respond to the trauma of their experiences by lashing out in school or becoming antisocial and aggressive. Through play therapy, making artwork and positive family support, children can learn to express their feelings and manage being in school.
For Oreland resident Kathleen Sheeder, the mother of Leidy Bonanno, a former Mt. Airy resident who was murdered in 2003 at the age of 21, the counseling center has been invaluable.
“The counselors are great. They’re young, they’re energetic, they’re positive,” Sheeder told the Local. “It’s a challenging profession. Choosing to do counseling for families of murder victims, I think that takes a special kind of strength, courage and energy.”
Educating faith leaders
A new initiative is the U.S. Department of Justice-funded Collaborative Response to Crime Victims Program, which focuses on coordination between victim assistance programs and faith-based organizations. Someone dealing with violence in their life often turns to their religious leader first, Good explained. The purpose of the program is to educate religious leaders about the effects of trauma on victims and co-victims and create linkages between those leaders and professional agencies that can help.
Domestic violence in particular is a tricky issue for coordination between religious leaders and secular agencies, because of differences in attitudes toward marital relationships. Good related a story in which a religious leader told a woman to return to an abusive husband, who subsequently murdered her. The AVP program helps religious leaders know there are other options for women in abusive situations, and it also teaches secular agencies not to fear working with faith leaders.
“A lot of those linkages have to do with trust,” explained Good. “For example, a lot of domestic violence agencies don’t trust the faith leaders to protect the woman because they’re afraid that they’re all going to have that paradigm of ‘go back to your husband.’ So the more people get to know each other and communicate, the more they’re going to trust to work with each other.”
SAVEing students
One of AVP’s oldest programs is the Student Anti-Violence Education Program (SAVE), which has provided weekly violence prevention training to more than 20,000 Philadelphia children since 1991. SAVE staff visit middle and elementary schools and teach age-appropriate 16-week curriculums. The course focuses on teaching kids how to calm themselves when they get angry, about win/win solutions to conflicts, and how to talk things out using “I” statements (“I get angry when …”) and not “you” statements (“you are so mean …”).
The plaque hanging in ‘Leidy’s room.’
“You can learn ways to talk about a conflict,” explained Good. “Everyone says to kids ‘talk it out, talk it out,’ but they don’t know how to talk it out. So when they talk it out they start hurling all these terms at each other, and that actually leads to the fight because it escalates it.”
From tests before and after the program, essays from students and teacher responses, SAVE demonstrates that it is having an impact on how children behave in school and at home.
One teacher wrote: “I have noticed some positive changes in my children’s attitudes that I attribute to SAVE training — I hear them reciting things about calming down before striking out at someone.”
For Sheeder, SAVE is one of the most important and admirable programs run by AVP.
“It’s necessary to comfort the grieving and help them find ways to live fully, but preventing violence is really critical,” said Sheeder. “I imagine the only way you can do that is by starting with children who are at risk.”
Funding in danger
The main source of money for all of AVP’s victim services, the Victims of Crime Act (passed in 1984), is funded by fines and penalties paid by federal lawbreakers.
The Bush administration would like to take the money set aside for VOCA and incorporate it into the general budget. Victim services will still get funding, the administration has argued, but Good claims that the changeover would disrupt the funding cycle for organizations such as hers.
“What would happen is there would be a lag period in which we would get no money at all,” she contends. “If we all of a sudden didn’t get any VOCA money, which is a possibility, we’d pretty much have to close our doors and all of our programs would be shut down”
Also, VOCA has developed a surplus from fat years that has been held back to help victim service agencies in years when less money is collected. The funding change would remove the surplus altogether, which Good argues would endanger AVP and other organizations by making them vulnerable to annual fluctuations. Despite the “surplus,” Good says her organization has already taken 20 percent cuts over the past two years.
The issue will not be resolved until the budget votes in Congress this fall. Good hopes that support from politicians like Sen. Arlen Specter will help ensure the fund stays as it is.
Sheeder, who says she has received support from not only AVP but from other victim service agencies such as Parents of Murdered Children and Bucks County Women in Crisis, told the Local that she emphatically opposed any change to the funding, and said that she hoped victim service agencies would continue to benefit from private supporters as well.
“These are all places that are in continuing need of support from the public,” said Sheeder.
As for now, all Julie Good and others at AVP can do is wait. “In the last minute [budget] crunch anything could happen,” said Good. “So we just have to keep monitoring it.”
