Secret addresses provide safety for abuse victims

When your job is to help victims of domestic violence find some measure of safety in their lives, you welcome every little bit of help you can get.

That’s how Francine Starks views a new proposal by Secretary of State Dan Gwadosky to provide abuse victims with a designated mailing address that would help keep their whereabouts a secret. As Gwadosky explained to the Legislature’s Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, the Address Confidentiality Program is designed to help victims who have moved out of their homes in order to escape their abusers. The Secretary of State’s Office, which would run the program, hopes to establish a central location for the collection of first-class mail, which would be forwarded to the victims’ actual mailing addresses.

“The beauty of the thing is its simplicity,” said Gwadosky, who told lawmakers that the program could be enormously valuable to abuse victims and wouldn’t cost the state any extra money to administer.

Starks, the community response and training coordinator for the Bangor domestic violence project called Spruce Run, one of 10 in the state, agrees that the program has some merit. Shelters for battered women have been providing the same kind of mail service for years, and Starks appreciates that the state intends to expand on the idea. She supports any plan that can help abuse victims from being easily tracked by the people who would harm them. But, as Starks pointed out Wednesday, there are limitations to the proposal that make it seem more effective on paper than it could ever be in the real world.

“We just don’t want to give the impression that battered women can ever really disappear,” said Starks. “Their abusers can find them if they want to. So it’s a red herring to think that a private post office box with the state will allow a person to hide and be protected.”

The children that battered women have with their abusive mates make hiding all but impossible in most cases.

“It is incredibly rare for a noncustodial parent to have absolutely no visitation rights with a child,” Starks said. “The fact is we live in a country where both parents have visitation rights, even for someone with a protection-from-abuse order. Unless there is evidence of direct abuse to the child, the man who abuses a woman is still allowed to know where his kids are. Sometimes you are ordered to give your phone number to your abuser so he can call the kids.”

Simple inconvenience also may dissuade many victims from participating in the confidential-address program.

“When you think about it, the delay of at least a week in having all your important mail forwarded could be a factor in limiting the number of people who choose to do it,” said Starks. “At some point, most people will want to have their own addresses.”

Although the program may not be practical for everyone, Starks said, it could be helpful to a limited portion of Maine’s abused population.

“This could be particularly useful to those people who don’t need a shelter, people with the wherewithal to have other places to go,” she said. “A person abused in Connecticut, let’s say, can go live with a friend in Maine that the abuser doesn’t know about. And rather than get a post office box in town, they could use the one from the state. And for women without children, and without all the public records that go along with that, it could be wicked handy. “Gwadosky said he believed his program might attract about 50 participants in its first year or two. That’s a small number, considering that domestic violence workers field an average of 60,000 calls for help each year, and that domestic violence accounts for more than 60 percent of Maine’s homicides. But with legislators now considering a $1.6 million cut to domestic violence programs to help balance the budget, Starks appreciates help wherever she can find it.

“Even if this new proposal helps only a handful of people, that’s fine with me,” Starks said. “At this point, we’ll take all we can get.”

Tom Weber’s column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.