Diane Lance, a well-known national advocate for victims’ rights, currently serves as the director of Metro’s Office of Family Safety.
Lance shared that she got into this field through her first job in San Diego, where she ended up running what was then called a “battered women shelter,” a term she had previously been unfamiliar with.
“It really impacted me and turned my world upside down,” Lance said. From there, she went to law school and ended up in the Nashville District Attorney’s Office. “Since I had a domestic violence background, I got put right into the domestic violence division.”
Eventually, she was hired as special counsel to Mayor Karl Dean, where she oversaw the Nashville-Davidson County Domestic Violence Safety and Accountability Assessment that was released in 2013.
In 2015, Metro created the Office of Family Safety, which oversees two Family Safety Centers: One located at 610 Murfreesboro Pike and the other, the Jean Crowe Advocacy Center, a fully court-based center at 100 James Robertson Pkwy.
You have been the director of the Office of Family Safety since its inception in 2015. What led to the creation of Metro’s Office of Family Safety?
When I was a special counsel in Karl Dean’s office, we did a safety and accountability assessment that looked at how Nashville as a Metropolitan city could do better in terms of domestic violence victim safety and offender accountability system wide. It focused only on those areas that the city has [purview] over or has some controls over. Our audit reviewed 911, patrol response, detective response, prosecution response, night court response, general sessions court, probation, and then fatality review, which looks at how our city reviews domestic violence homicides in order to gain lessons learned.
While in the Mayor’s Office, I rounded up a lot of practitioners, interested community members and survivors in each of those areas, so we had over 100 people working on this project. Then for two years, we reviewed all of those things with all of those teams working simultaneously. So, a review of prosecution might be going into court and observing court, sitting beside victim witness coordinators or prosecutors back at the office, understanding their paperwork, understanding their protocols and procedures. Same with detectives. In each area, we were observing their job from many different angles. And through that you find a lot of problems.
We expected from the beginning that the problems were 98-99 percent of the time not the people in the jobs. Instead, [problems arise from] the process. That entire assessment was focusing on what processes need to be improved to eliminate those things that were barriers to victim safety and offender accountability.
After two years, Mayor Karl Dean released that report and its recommendations alongside all the leaders of each of those areas. Then we go to work on [improvements]. One of the first initiatives was to create the Jean Crowe Advocacy Center, which is our court-based family justice center. That took care of eight of the recommendations in the report because it helped prosecutors in their work, the courts, and how victims experience court and their safety in the courthouse. It was a major priority to make sure victims are safe and receive services on their court day.
The Jean Crowe Advocacy Center was the big first initiative and opened while still under Karl Dean’s administration. Then Karl Dean’s second term ended, and there needed to be a place for this body of work to go, and that’s why the department was created. We have many cities across the country come to Nashville to understand our model and how we do it, and how they can bring that back to their own city.
Why was it necessary to convince the city to create a new department?
When I was recommending to the mayor that we become our own department, this is why: a lot of family justice centers start from some city leader like the District Attorney’s Office or the police chief. Rarely are they run out of the Mayor’s Office. That was really unique for Nashville, which was great for us.
Let’s say you’re a family justice center that the police chief had started. So, this is the police chief’s baby. A lot of investment, a lot of energy is going into it, and it’s doing great. It’s thriving. And then that police chief retires and a new one comes in. There is no guarantee that [the] new chief is going to love that baby as much as the first chief. That new chief might come in and say, “OK, that’s going well. But you know the priority for me now is guns on the street.” That’s a great priority that everyone in that hypothetical city cares about. But that [imaginary] police chief has not been given the money to address that problem, so where is he going to get it? He can decide that he is taking a little bit of money out of everything. So, all of a sudden some of the money that was going to their family justice center is now going towards gun violence. And it’s chopped away at, and no city leader can see what’s happening to that initiative because it’s in the bigger overarching budget.
In our situation, because we are an independent department, when our budget gets cut, you know exactly what you’re cutting. So, if you’re going to cut this programming, let’s all be in agreement that’s where the cuts need to be. Hopefully that is not the case here in Metro.
But going back to our example, when that happens in other cities, eventually that program is going to be weakened enough, it cannot sustain. Sometimes what they do is they jump into another friend’s office. Let’s say they’re weakened and there’s a District Attorney that has a lot of energy around interpersonal violence, and they’ll say, “hey, I’ll take all of that program.” Then the program is moved over there, and the same thing happens over time and eventually a nonprofit is formed. Then suddenly you’re competing for the same funding as the partners you are trying to lift up. In my mind, that is not a long-term successful model.
They’re all over the country with that model, but our model and this building are designed for longevity. It’s a statement that the city cares about some of the most vulnerable among us who are victims of interpersonal violence and their children. To me, that’s a city I want to live in because that shows the city’s values.
What happens in this building here at the Family Safety Center on Murfreesboro Pike?
This is a building that is designed to house partners that can be helpful in the situation. We have very close relationships with nonprofits that work out of this building, too. We work together on a lot of multi-disciplinary teams. When we get a high-risk victim and that victim needs to go into shelter, the YWCA is very familiar with the risk determination and will prioritize that case knowing how crucial that moment is to survival. The Mary Parrish Center does a lot with housing, they have someone who works through here. We also work closely with the Sexual Assault Center.
My team, the Office of Family Safety, has crisis advocates. Those are the people who meet you on a walk-in basis. There is no need for an appointment to get help. That crisis advocate can help you with an order of protection, safety planning, can help connect you with a detective — if you want to meet with law enforcement — do the needs assessment, and connect you with resources.
We also provide a lot of trainings in the community because we want everyone else to benefit across the state and the country from what we know.
There has been news about potential funding cuts. What are your main concerns in that area?
The big funding that’s our concern is the VOCA (Victims of Crime Act) money. And everyone across the country is concerned about this. That money comes from federal fees and fines. Those have been going down. And because that pot of money is going down and that is the only fund that the VOCA money pulls from, those grants have been reduced.
We did have a lot of grants through VOCA, and they diminished greatly because the state cannot give us as much money as we once had. VOCA positions are also in the District Attorney’s Office, they’re in the Police Department, they are in nonprofits, they are in child advocacy centers — it is a huge way that the state supports services for victims, and it’s dwindling, and it’s alarming right now.
I am a very firm believer that a victim of a violent crime should never have to pay for the help they need. Period.
Public safety is a priority of most, if not all, elected officials in city and state government, and when there is a violent crime, victims shouldn’t have to pay. I cannot image being raped and then having to struggle with my budget to pay for the therapy that I need to recover from this. It’s further abuse.
Can you talk about the interconnectedness of domestic violence and homelessness?
We know that there is a high percentage among people who struggle with homelessness who are also experiencing domestic violence, sexual assaults, or being trafficked. They are being preyed upon by sexual predators who may do it under the disguise of being a person’s intimate partner and end up abusing or trafficking them.
And then, anyone who wants to leave their offender, they’re struggling with homelessness. They’re going to a shelter or they’re living with a relative while they’re trying to hide from that offender. Whatever happens, I mean, domestic violence drives you into homelessness.
What a choice! I mean what a choice! The fact that there is the question of, “Why don’t they leave [their abuser]?” That question is so hard for me to understand. It shows a lack of empathy.
Let’s look at this example. If a woman is abused by her husband and has children, she has to think about where she will go. Shelter sounds really scary or there are no shelter beds. Shelters have to turn away 40 percent of calls for a lack of availability of beds. So, maybe this woman has called shelters and there were no beds available for her and her children.
Secondly, her offender has threatened her all along the way that he will take the kids away from her. If she believes that, that’s a horrific decision to make. So, why would she leave if she is the only protection for them at this point? And if she leaves and he gets partial custody of the children, then again, she is in that situation of letting her kids be alone with an abuser. Why would she do that?
Even when you take the children out of the picture, the financial dependency and all the other things that are in the mix that create a complete lack of options for her as a victim are all in play. And leaving, she’s got the highest risk of being killed. If he has told her over and over again that he’s going to hunt her down and kill her, why would she leave? She’d rather be alive.
What is your main focus right now?
Right now, the budget. Everyone across the country who works in government is concerned about their budgets.
Our overall goal is homicide prevention and making sure people know that we are here and what services we provide. We were open almost one year when COVID happened, so we lost two years of time of being able to do strong outreach. We’re working really hard on our outreach right now.
It’s tricky in this field. Setting the goal of saying, we want less sexual assaults in Nashville — of course, that’s what we want — but you can’t judge that by the number of reports because the better your city services are, the more people will come forward to report a sexual assault. When you’re doing really well in providing services, your numbers will appear to go up.