In Lawrence, when police respond to a domestic violence call, the abuser often spends the night in jail.

The victim almost always a woman stays put. If she wants help, she’s encouraged to call Women’s Transitional Care Services.

Sarah Terwelp, executive director of The Willow Domestic Violence Center, is stepping down from the position after nearly 12 years.

Some do, but many don’t.

Sarah Terwelp, who runs WTCS, would love to have a worker accompany police to the scene so that help could begin immediately. But she can’t.

“We don’t have enough money for that,” she said.

Terwelp also wants to make sure that when victims go to court, they’re accompanied by a worker or a volunteer who’ll guide them through the process.

“Right now, we do some of that,” Terwelp said, “but it’s pretty much luck of the draw. It depends on whether someone’s available.”

Again, not enough money.

WTCS’s $400,000-a-year budget, Terwelp said, is barely enough to run its 40-bed shelter, which last year took in about 150 women and 150 children.

“We’ve seen people with broken ribs, broken arms, black eyes and several who had been raped by their partner or spouse,” Terwelp said.

“We had one woman who was so threatened by her abuser that she was afraid to leave the house; she would not go outside. Her boyfriend had threatened to take her out to the country somewhere, tie her to a tree and leave her there.”

For victims, the average stay at the shelter lasted 22 days.

“Our biggest expense,” Terwelp said, “is salaries, withholding and benefits we have 13 employees. After that it’s building maintenance, running the 24-hour crisis (telephone) line, and then the costs of personal care items and food.

“A lot of people see that $400,000 and think it’s a lot of money and it is,” Terwelp said. “But most of our funding is restricted, it has to be spent on services. It can’t be used for administration-type things like maintenance or everyday supplies.”

The shelter, Terwelp said is a large, older home. Its location is kept secret.

State’s role

More than half of WTCS’s budget comes from federally funded grants administered the Kansas Attorney General’s Office and from fees on marriage licenses ($23) and court filings (50 cents).

Across the state, these fees and grants add up to about $5.8 million, which is divided among 26 shelters statewide.

Kansas contributes nothing. It never has.

That’s not likely to change anytime soon, said Rep. Rocky Nichols, D-Topeka.

“This is an amazingly tough year,” he said. “As everybody knows, there’s no money in the budget. There’s interest in doing something; it just won’t be this year.”

Nichols, whose older sister was murdered by her estranged husband last year, is one of several legislators backing four bills aimed at toughening the state’s domestic violence laws.

One of the bills would add $1 to the $101 docket fee charged in civil courts throughout the state. The increase would raise about $176,000 statewide, which would be set aside for programs that help victims of sexual assault.

In Lawrence, that could mean more money for the Douglas County Rape Victim Survivor Service, but it wouldn’t help WTCS.

WTCS is not considered a program for sexual assault victims. Instead, it’s a domestic violence shelter.

One of a few

Lawrence is one of three Kansas cities with separate programs for victims of domestic violence and sexual assault. The others are Wichita and Kansas City.

“A lot of agencies have merged their domestic violence and sexual assault programs, but we’ve remained separate from WTCS,” said Sarah Jane Russell, executive director of Douglas County Rape Victim Survivor Service. “But we ally very closely with WTCS; we mutually support each other.”

The two programs haven’t merged, Russell said, because the needs of sexual assault victims often differ from those of domestic violence.

Terwelp said that for another $70,000 WTCS would be able to dispatch counselors to domestic violence calls and fully cover victims’ courtroom appearances.

For WTCS to get more money this year, it’ll have to come from either federal sources or an increase in local contributions.

“I not expecting any increase from the state level,” Terwelp said. “The only way I see us getting more money is by doing more fund raising and seeking out more private-foundation grants.”

Lynn Toonen, who runs the Family Crisis Center in El Dorado, doubts that Kansas will increase spending on domestic violence anytime soon.

“It’s still an unpopular cause,” she said. “There’s still a stigma out there that says ‘She must done something to provoke it or not done something to stop it.’ And it’s not a pleasant topic, nobody wants to hear about the woman who went home to find that her abuser had skinned her cats and nailed them to the garage door that’s a case we had last week.”