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C)RANGE Ct~UNTY .~:~;~ ..a. ' 4~~ ~- HUMAN RIGHTS ANQ RELA7~ONS To: Laura Blackmon, Gwen Harvey From: Shoshannah Smith Re: Domestic Violence in Orange County Date: March 20, 2009 Domestic Violence in Oran4e Countu Introduction According to the Orange County Family Violence Prevention Center, "Family/domestic violence is the use, or the threat of the use, of violence in an intimate partner relationship to attain and maintain power and control. Family/domestic violence is a pattern of intentionally violent and/or controlling behavior. Domestic violence often involves the use of physical force but can also include emotional abuse, sexual abuse, economic or financial abuse, isolation and stalkingl." All Domestic Violence (DV) incidents in Orange Count It is extremely difficult to come up with a comprehensive total of DV incidents or DV survivors, due to several factors. DV survivors enter "the system" from many different points of access. For example, some call the police; some go directly to the hospital for medical treatment; some call the Family Violence Prevention Center or Legal Aid for support services. Also, there is a question of whether a person is a DV survivor only if they were personally abused, or if the children and other affected friends and family are also survivors. Many of these secondary victims receive support services, such as support groups through organizations like the Family Violence Prevention Center. Finally, many agencies keep separate, unlinked databases on this information. These agencies include all law enforcement agencies within Orange County, UNC Hospital services, the Family Violence Prevention Center, the Women's Center, and Legal Aid of North Carolina. Because many survivors receive services from multiple agencies -each of which may keep its own caseload database, it can become difficult to determine if an aggregate of these diverse case logs contains duplicates. ' http://www.fvpcoc.org/whatshtml