The Violence Against Crimes Act (VOCA) grant is currently seeing a loss in funding, forcing domestic violence shelters to eat the cost.

According to the Office for Victims of Crime’s own timeline, VOCA was introduced on Oct. 12 1984.

The act allows the Office for Victims of Crime to collect funds through Federal crime fees, which is then distributed to the states.

The Arkansas department that overlooks this is Arkansas Department of Finance and Administration, who then allocate the funds.

This funding then goes to various non-profit and public shelters that help victims of domestic violence.

However, starting in 2020 there would be a decline in the funding VOCA could pull in.

“During COVID, courts weren’t collecting fees,” said Executive Director of Saline County Emergency Shelter Safe Haven, Terah Whitley. “People weren’t going to court, they weren’t paying their fines and fees and there wasn’t a lot that the court was doing about it because we were in a pandemic so that started the depletion of that fund by not collecting those fees. It just hasn’t been rebuilt.”

This has led to a slow decline in the funding of various shelters like Safe Haven leading to a significant decrease in what various shelters have and what they need.

Arkansas has made attempts to address this problem but there has not been many that fully address the issue or last long.

“There were gonna be cuts in 2023 but the governor [Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders] gave the money so that there weren’t cuts but in 2022 everyone was cut anywhere from 30 to 70 percent in their budget,” said Whitley. “We thought the Governor was gonna give again this year. I’m not sure if she had said that, but everyone thought that and then for some reason that did not happen.”

If there had been allocations for funding, organizations like Safe Haven would have needed to hear about it by Oct. 1 of this year when the previous pledge to help financially had started so that Domestic Violence shelters could address how to use the funds.

Safe Haven can currently give shelter for up to 15 with single rooms and family rooms that can house up to six people.

In 2024, the shelter had served up to 68 survivors in shelture and 218 out of shelture through their outreach program. They also have an emergency hotline open 24/7.

If funding continues to decline, the shelter would have to downsize on their operations.

“We’ve depended on VOCA for 20 years. It is set specifically for what we do,” said Whitley. “So programs without it probably  will close. I mean, with us, it was almost half of our budget, but you know some programs may have been more and you know if our community doesn’t make up that difference, if we don’t make up those funds somehow, we will either be lowering that amount of services that we provide or if we can’t function at all we would have to close our doors.”

Whitley proposed ideas for addressing these issues on the state level.

“We could have a line item in our state budget to receive funding in the state because right now domestic violence is not included in that budget,” Whitley said. “There’s no legislation that says that fines would go to victim service providers from the state budget. There is legislation that is called the ‘Domestic Violence Shelter Fund Act,’ and that is where fees on order of protection if someone gets a final order of  protection the offender would have to pay $25 fee and then if someone was convicted of domestic violence battery than the offender would have to pay $25 but that legislation was written and then no one followed up to really educate courts and clerks on collecting that fee.”

This led to the “Domestic Violence Shelter Fund Act” only collecting around $2,700 even when it was introduced in 2019.

Whitley said, “If our government federally and locally would acknowledge that it cost our economy trillions of dollars every year, just domestic violence and job loss I think that they would put a bigger focus on it.”

If anyone is interested in donating to the Safety Haven, simply go to https://www.domesticshelters.org/help/ar/benton/72018/saline-county-safe-haven-inc.