This week I have the privilege of hosting a half dozen former employees of what used to be the Prudential Service Bureau of Louisville, Kentucky. They are visiting New York City and I’m in effect their free hotel. The Service Bureau was an outsourcing company I started a few decades ago to handle mundane tasks for large employers as well as for some Prudential functions. One of those functions was to provide 24 hour/365 day telephone assistance to our Group Legal customers. During the day, the telephone calls were routed to various law offices around the country depending on the state of the originating phone call. After hours the calls all were routed to Louisville.
One of the things I did in managing the various companies I was responsible for was to actually sit and try to perform some of the functions. So when I went for my monthly visit to Louisville, I would volunteer for sit on the 11:00 pm to 7:00 am telephone shift. What an eye opener. After my first shift, I gave all the night operators a $1.00/hour raise.
The vast majority of night calls involved Domestic Violence. Our expectations were lots of DWI calls and the need for bail money but what ended up was thousands of women who need help right away. The calls would come in, sometimes from women crying that they were badly hurt and needed help. Sometimes it was the man himself who called and explained his wife was hurt because she pissed him off – what should he do? Sometimes kids themselves called and said Daddy hurt Mommy and she won’t wake up. It is hard to convey the absolute horror of a woman having a spontaneous miscarriage because her husband kept kicking her in the belly. The hurt and the humiliation of another human being is something that will never, ever , leave your mind.
These nights were spent calming families down, having other operators call police, ambulances etc while we stayed on the phone with the woman. The data base we built included telephone numbers for virtually every emergency service in every town in America. What started out as Group Legal ended up being a nationwide 911 service. Back in the 1980’s when I was involved there were no Domestic Violence hotlines like are currently available. The current Louisville employees say this has cut down the number of their calls from what it was like in the “old days” but it still is pretty overwhelming. I am currently awash in tears as I relive some of the memories of those phone calls with my old Louisville employees.
Domestic Violence still impacts more than 5 million, mainly women, every year. It is a huge problem and the ramifications of the violence impacts the kids also and lasts many years. It has the same impact on hotline telephone operators. If you take a few of these calls, you will hear the voices of the woman and children screaming for help for the rest of your life.
To hear a fellow human being whose body is so broken she cannot hardly even talk. The pain of broken arms, jaws and surprisingly common having all 10 fingers broken leaves emotional scars that never quite heal. It is the children who seem most impacted. Trying to calm a hysterical 10 year old on the phone is a task of biblical proportions.
This is something all of us need to be aware and offer help when possible. The biggest problem is the hidden nature of the violence and women being reluctant to bring it out in the open unless there is no other choice. Since I’m a musician, of course I picked a song to illustrate an important point in this discussion. As a piano teacher I am one of the few really trusted adults in the lives of teens and we currently have 23 teen girl students. After spending 30 to 60 minutes every week one on one with a person for a decade or more, a solid relationship is established. I’ve had to deal with umpteen cutters, a 15 year old pregnant girl etc. One of my goals is to help build strong independent women and I counsel them that men should be a companion and helpmate not their savior. You, alone determine your worth, not what some man says about you. Listen to this song and you will understand what the singer/songwriter gets wrong about male/female relationships.