Family Violence Council Minutes

3 - 5 pm, Wednesday, February 18, 2015

400 McAllister, Room 617

San Francisco, CA 94102

Present:

Presiding Judge of the Superior Court, or designee: Kathleen Kelly

Mayor, or designee: Paul Henderson

District Attorney, or designee: Liz Aguilar Tarchi; Gena Castro Rodriguez

Chief of Police, or designee: Lt. Edward Santos Jr.; Sgt. Tony Flores

President of Commission on the Status of Women, or designee: Emily Murase

Chief of Adult Probation, or designee: Mark Hudgins, Karen Shain

Director of Domestic Violence Consortium, or designee: Beverly Upton

Director of San Francisco Elder Abuse Forensic Center, or designee: Shawna Reeves

Director of San Francisco Child Abuse Council, or designee: Katie Albright, Abigail Stewart-Kahn

Director of the Department of Public Health, or designee: Leigh Kimberg

Director of Department of Children, Youth, and Their Families, or designee: Aumjio Gomes

Director of Child Support Services, or designee: Freda R. Glenn

Chief of Juvenile Probation or designee: Allen Nance

Public Defender, or designee: Carmen Aguirre, Simin Shamji

Superintendant of San Francisco Unified School District or designee: Erik Martinez

Absent:

President of the Board of Supervisors, or designee

Sheriff, or designee

Chief of Department of Emergency Management, or designee

Director of Human Services Agency, or designee

Director of Department of Aging and Adult Services, or designee

Chair of Batterers Intervention Programs Subcommittee, or designee

Other attendees:

Robin Brasso, NCJW; Allison Ipsen, DOSW; Minouche Kandel, DOSW; Lisa Lightman, SF Superior Court; Sonia Melara, Rally Family Visitation Center; Arati Vasan, APILO

Beverly Upton introduced new tri-chairs Katie Albright and Shawna Reeves. 

Minutes from 12/17/14 were approved. [Murase/Flores]

Update on Justice and Courage Committee

Liz Tarchi updated the group on the Justice and Courage meetings: The group meets on the 2^nd Friday of each month at the Police Commission. It includes Beverley Upton, Minouche Kandel, SVU Officer in Charge Lt. Ed Santos, Bay Area Legal Aid, the Sherriff’s Department, and Adult Probation. They hope to add the Department of Emergency Management to work on codes for 911 calls that are not being captured due to repeat calls for the same situation.  They also have invited Emberly Cross from CROC to collaborate – restraining order expertise is needed. The committee’s goal is to complete all agency recommendations from the J&C Final Report as well as focus generally on policy reform related to stalking, elder abuse, and domestic violence. Currently the committee is working on accurately updating all victim resource information as well as exploring a high lethality risk assessment team composed of law enforcement, community victim advocates, Probation, DCYF, and others. The focus is to intervene at the scene, relying on a strong tool to assess lethality risk rather than hunches.

SFUSD Fact Sheet

The group checked in on the recommendation to develop a SFUSD Family Violence Fact Sheet. No members have started work on this.

There was a discussion of the effort to train SFUSD staff at some of the school wellness centers on trauma informed care and ACES screening. It has been shown in other cities such as Walla Walla, WA, that truancy and suspension rates have dramatically decreased due to adoption of trauma informed systems at the school level.

MDS (Minimum Data Set for Nursing Home Patient Assessment)

Jill Nielson was not present at the meeting so this item will be revisited on the next meeting’s agenda.

Trauma Informed Systems and ACEs

Dr. Leigh Kimberg presented background information on Trauma Informed Systems and ACES.  This fulfilled a recommendation from the Department on the Status of Women in the 2012/2013 annual report.

Trauma Informed Systems:

• Everyone has adversity and trauma in their lives
• Being mindful of this and practicing self-care can enable service providers/teachers/law enforcement to become more healing forces for change in their work (for their patients, students, communities, etc.)
• Pay attention to how one feels in the moment as he/she is exposed to trauma in his/her work
• Pay attention to how this work affects him/her over time
• Create growth and healing opportunities to reduce the consequences of adversity

ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences)

• In childhood development, the brain is constantly changing in response to one’s experiential relationships with others (known as pruning).
• If one has mostly toxic interactions/experiences, they will stick, and the good experiences will be pruned away.
• A little bit of stress is good and healthy for growth, however, toxic stress or prolonged stress related to maltreatment during childhood leads to dramatic health risks. Strong, frequent, and/or prolonged adversity without adequate adult support (save, stable, nurturing relationships) will disrupt the basic brain functions (like the foundation of a building), which will in turn affect higher functioning.
• The constant “fight or flight” response state negatively affects organ systems, causes inflammation, and alters DNA.
• Understanding of ACEs as a medical concept came from a prominent Kaiser Study:
  • Over 17,000 patients, predominantly white and college educated
  • Questionnaire on childhood adverse events: 10 categories of abuse, neglect, and household dysfunction (i.e. incarcerated relative, domestic violence, mental illness, parental divorce, substance abuse) and a prospective study of health outcomes
  • Results:
    • 21% childhood sexual abuse; 28% physical abuse; 11% emotional abuse; 2/3 of population had a least one ACE; 12% had four or more
    • ACES lead to adverse behaviors (many sexual partners, substance addiction); future violence (risk for intimate partner violence; risk for victimization for women and perpetration for women and men is correlated to number of ACES); and risk to health (unintended pregnancies, adolescent pregnancy, fetal death, STDs, depression, suicide, obesity, heart disease, liver disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease)
    • 48% of those incarcerated in this sample had 4 or more ACEs
    • Life expectancy is 20 years less than average for those with 6 or more ACEs
• Dr. Kimberg discussed briefly how she has begun to incorporate ACEs screening with her patients despite the challenge of having short appointment times; she is using it in simple ways to de-stigmatize harmful behaviors; she has shifted the mentality of her practice from “what is wrong with you?” to “what happened to you?”
• There is opportunity to use ACES as a lens for policy makers to promote policies that increase safe, stable, nurturing relationships in children’s lives, train adults taking care of/interacting with children on screening for ACEs, prevent violence and strengthen families and thus prevent future ACES.
• There was the discussion of additional ACES such as racism, parental dispute and conflict, neighborhood violence, bullying, homelessness, and food insecurity.
  • Resources
    • Harvard Center on the Developing Child
    • ACES Too High
    • ACES Connection: focus on creating trauma informed communities
    • Nadine Burke Harris TED Talk: founder of SF Center for Youth Wellness
    • CDC Connecting the Dots: interrelation of all forms of violence

Ordinance

Andrea Evans helped the council draft proposed legislation to amend the Family Violence Council Ordinance to include new members: Juvenile Probation, Public Defender, Animal Care and Control, Unified School District, Human Resources and Fire Department. This legislation is sponsored by Katy Tang and will be heard in March. The chairs will give testimony in March and ask for the council’s full support. The new sunsetting rule was mentioned: the ordinance now must be renewed every three years.

Reports

Domestic Violence

The recent murder of a transgender woman in Bayview may have been an intimate partner homicide. Law enforcement, the LGBT community, and the domestic violence community came together at City Hall for a memorial. There have already been eight murders of trans women of color in 2015. A recent violence prevention assessment for the LGBT community was released: 72% of incidents of violence go unreported.

There was a discussion of the intersection of family violence and national conversations sparked by Ferguson in the sense that communities do not feel safe calling law enforcement when they need help (e.g. fear of CPS getting involved too early).

There was a discussion of standardizing the San Francisco protocol for domestic violence medical reporting forms. There is not a clear organization system after they are sent to the police. A working group was created to revisit this issue.

Elder Abuse

The Elder Financial Abuse Reporting Conference hosted by UCSF in January successfully sold out; there will be a follow up session on March 27. The Elder Death Review Team has been meeting monthly; an educational component has been added to the meetings (e.g. elder abuse markers in death review).

Child Abuse

April is Child Abuse Prevention Month and the CAPC is hoping to secure City Hall to be lit up blue. CAPC will be doing public awareness throughout the month culminating in its annual luncheon. The Child Advocacy Center is looking to expand services to new populations such as sex trafficked youth.

DCYF, First 5, and FCS have been visiting child resource centers to provide education on strengthening families and information on the upcoming grant cycle.     

Sentencing Commission

Jerel McCrary was not present at the meeting so this item will be revisited on the next meeting’s agenda.

Departmental Updates

• Juvenile Probation: There have been 0 referrals to Juvenile Court for prostitution so far this year.
• Adult Probation: Chief Wendy Still’s last day will be March 30. Karen Fletcher will be the new chief.

Next Steps

Next meeting May 20. Ken Epstein (DPH) will present on trauma informed systems – full training will follow at date TBD after the May meeting.

Meeting adjourned 4:41pm.  [Nance/Kimberg]