Driving home the point that domestic violence occurs behind closed doors, regardless of socio-economic status, culture, religion, race or gender, Jessica McCarihan, executive director of A New Direction, seized on the idea of using a photo poster created by North Beverly resident Dale Fast for an awareness-building effort.
The photo collage shows doorways of homes located in North Beverly and Beverly. It carries a fitting message for Domestic Violence Awareness Month in October.
“The message is that no one is safe behind closed doors,” McCarihan said. “It doesn’t matter where they’re from, even if it’s a middle class or upper middle-class neighborhood. One out of three women in America are likely to be victims of domestic violence.”
Since 2011, A New Direction has provided counseling services, education, legal advice, therapy, and referrals to additional resources to victims of domestic violence and their children. Based in North Beverly, the agency mainly serves the Beverly/Morgan Park area, but through word-of-mouth, it has helped other Chicago area residents, Indiana residents and residents of Illinois’ North Shore.
While women are the most likely domestic violence victims, men also can suffer, McCarihan said. She added that children often fall victim or suffer trauma from having witnessed domestic violence.
Fast’s poster sells for $45 on AND’s website. So far, it has raised about $3,000, and the money couldn’t come at a better time, McCarihan said. The pandemic forced the agency to cancel annual fundraisers, while incidents of domestic violence are on the rise.
Calls to Illinois’ 24-hour domestic violence hotline, 877-863-6338, increased 8% in April over the same period in 2019, according to The Network: Advocating Against Domestic Violence, which runs the hotline.
That trend worsened with additional comparable increases of 23% in May, and 47% in June, a month that recorded 3,168 calls in comparison to 2,160 calls in 2019.
“When stay-at-home orders were lifted at the end of May,” McCarihan said, “you see a flood of phone calls. Maybe because people were able to go for a walk or maybe because the abuser left to go somewhere. The need is definitely there.”
The state’s domestic violence hotline added a new texting feature in 2018. Text messages also soared during the pandemic from 10 or less per month for March through July of 2019 to well over 100 texts per month during the same months of 2020. So far, May 2020 registered the highest number of texts ever at 116.
“The hotline may be a better indicator than police reports,” McCarihan said. “A lot of women don’t call police for many reasons. If the abuser is living in the household, it may just exacerbate the situation.”
Domestic violence in Chicago may be underreported, according to a new 103-Page report recently released by Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s administration. “Our City, Our Safety: A Comprehensive Plan to Reduce Violence in Chicago” regards domestic violence as a public health crisis. The report also says domestic violence garners less media attention than gun violence but is statistically more common.
Opening the door to a good cause
Fast’s poster for A New Direction sprang from his desire to help others.
After teaching biology for 30 years at St. Xavier University in Chicago, he retired and turned his attention to photography, a passion from his days at Taber College in Hillsboro, Kans.
While on a trip to Mexico, he began photographing interesting doorways. Not long after, he started photographing doorways near his home.
He set the doorway project aside for almost eight years, but when COVID-19 stay-at-home orders went into effect, he went back to wielding his Nikon SLR D750.
“It might have been because we couldn’t go anywhere and were doing lots of walking in the neighborhood. I kept noticing new doors,” he said.
In all, Fast photographed 225 front doors, more than 200 of them since mid-March, all of them in Beverly and North Beverly.
“I liked that some builders put so much effort into entranceways, even when the homes themselves might not seem that interesting,” he said. “It also occurred to me that some really impressive homes had doorways that were nothing special.”
In selecting the 46 images for his poster, Fast said, “I just took the doors that intrigued me the most.” A firehouse entrance and a couple of church doors figure into the mix.
Wanting to donate his artwork for a good cause, he contacted Scott Smith, a friend with connections to businesses and local charities. Smith, who recently served on the board of the Beverly Area Planning Association, put Fast in touch with McCarihan at AND.
“First we thought it was really special that someone was reaching out to us,” McCarihan said of Fast. “It’s great having someone come up with a creative idea. We liked that every door may appear beautiful and safe but that may not necessarily be the case.”
For now, to prevent the spread of COVID-19, A New Direction serves clients online instead of providing in-person counseling and therapy at its private meeting space.
Though challenged by the pandemic, AND is doubling down on its mission and mounting a campaign to secure additional sponsors, McCarihan said. For more information about the organization, visit https://www.anewdirectionbmp.org/.
Susan DeGrane is a freelance reporter for the Daily Southtown.
