'A New Beginning': Domestic violence survivor shares her story on social media
CHICAGO (CBS)-- Tuesday marked the end of Domestic Violence Awareness Month.
As CBS 2's Jamaica Ponder reported on The Stream, domestic violence awareness is so important because most people will be impacted by domestic violence in their lifetimes, whether that be directly, or through family or friends.
Despite its prevalence, it doesn't seem to come up often in conversation and the less we talk about it, the more difficult it is for people to know what support systems exist, should they ever find themselves in a domestic violence situation.
Ponder sat down with one woman, who found herself in that exact spot.
As of late, Kaitlyn Brown has spent a lot of time dealing with boxes.
"My Amazon drivers were dropping they're like thinking I'm crazy and I'm trying to explain the situation. It's not me, it's TikTok," Brown said.
The dozens of packages were sent to Brown from complete strangers across the internet.
The gifts began pouring in after Brown posted a video of her destroyed apartment, a result of a domestic dispute that left her and her 3-year-old son with hardly any salvageable belongings.
"You look at just the destruction and every step that I kind of took closer into that apartment it was just an absolute kind of defeat," Brown.
She placed a call to the police, and while no arrests were made, she was able to get an emergency order of protection within 24 hours.
"I met with the judge that same day. I was in the courtroom for about 15 minutes," Brown said.
Then she returned home to an unlivable apartment.
"At the end of the day, we're all thinking, how are we going to replace this? Like, we can't afford to replace all this," Brown said. "We can't afford to rebuild the last three years of her life and how do you explain that to a 3-year-old?"
Brown said she has had to go outside of means and "post this all over the internet."
The video went viral pretty quickly, garnering over 4 million views in just a few days.
"Once the comments started rolling in on TikTok, the GoFundMe questions were asked, and pretty soon one turned into two, turned into thousands of people asking about funds," she said.
Unsure of how else to afford to restart and restock her life, Brown took her commenter's advice, creating both an Amazon Wishlist and a GoFundMe. She hoped to make a few thousand dollars.
She passed a "few" grand in several hours and broke $10,000 in three days. Before the end of the week, folks had donated over $30,000.
"I have more than enough to rebuild and start over," Brown said.
Brown ended up closing both her wishlist and GoFundMe shortly after opening them.
Brown's story is an outlier in a pervasive culture of gender-based violence where one in three women and one in four men will experience domestic violence in their lives.
Amanda Pyron is the executive director of The Network, a group of over 40 organizations working to support those impacted by gender-based violence.
"Close to a million people, at least in the city of Chicago, are going to experience gender-based violence at some point. We have, by contrast, 185 shelter beds," Pyron said. "We're trying to build up an infrastructure where survivors can heal themselves, replace what they've lost, get on with their lives."
While Pyron admires survivors like Brown, she doesn't think people should have to post their trauma online to get the aid and services they need.
"You know, GoFundMe [pages] are great, you know, but they're not the government. They're not a safety net. They're not predictable … and you can't leave individuals safely up to the chance of social media. In actual fact, these are things we should be using our tax dollars for," Pyron said.
The Network is funded by tax dollars, $5 million of them through the city's budget. That, along with corporate money, goes to financing their survivor fund.
"Unfortunately, we can't provide $30,000 of support to each survivor, but we do have $1,000 cash grants through the City of Chicago. We're able to make larger grants through private funds, as we have them, to survivors across Illinois.
Pyron says it's not enough, and their survivor fund applications are presently closed due to a lack of funding.
"It's very under-resourced in the city in terms of emergency crisis services, in emergency crisis housing," Pyron said.
Despite the deficit, The Network still manages to grant hundreds of thousands of dollars directly to survivors.
"Almost every person in the country and the city in the state will experience domestic violence either firsthand or through a friend or a family member. And so we want to make sure that wherever you are and whoever you are, you have services and help and support that makes sense to you," Pyron said.
She says The Network is currently working to get more funding through city hall to sustain services and the survivor fund through next year.
In the meantime, we're seeing the continued use of GoFundMe in the place of public services, especially as it pertains to health care and housing.