Facility proposed for West County
Just 16 days before Parisa Siddiqi was killed at her Thousand Oaks workplace by her ex-husband on March 17, she had applied for a restraining order against a member of his family.
It wasn’t the first time she’d sought help from authorities as a result of fear or injury.
In 2014, police visited her home and arrested her husband on suspicion of domestic battery. But the charges were dropped by the Ventura County district attorney’s office when Siddiqi decided not to cooperate with investigators.
Within days of filing the restraining order request in March, Siddiqi decided not to pursue it.
Though she declined to talk about her sister’s reasons for not following through, Mariam Siddiqi implied that threats and fear might have been factors.
“What’s a piece of paper going to do?” Mariam Siddiqi told the Acorn earlier this year. “They couldn’t keep her safe.”
“These women are in the most need and the system lets them down,” she said. “The system let Parisa down.”
Mike Jump of the Ventura County district attorney’s office agrees there are problems inherent in the current system.
“Of course, a woman who comes up to our walk-up window for a restraining order, we’re going to help,” Jump said. “But we have to ask them to go there, to connect, to pick up the phone—and that’s asking a lot of a person in crisis. That’s not real access.
“We just don’t do a very good job as a system of making ourselves really, practically available.”
But, he said, they are working to change that.
Jump, the county’s chief deputy district attorney of victim and community services, is heading up efforts to establish the Ventura County Family Justice Center.
The idea behind the center is to bring all the services needed by victims of crimes such as domestic violence, child abuse, sexual assault and elder abuse together in one place. These would include legal advice, law enforcement help, mental health care and temporary housing.
Don’t call it a one-stop shop, though.
“I shudder a little bit when people categorize this as ‘under one roof,’ because I want it to be so much more than that,” Jump said. “We need to integrate all of these partners. To just have everybody move in together and still operate in their own silos is not all that we could be.”
Instead, he’d like to create an environment at the center where the district attorney’s office and the 40 or so public and private agencies involved with domestic crimes can meet and discuss cases and provide a more integrated, holistic approach in working with victims. Jump is also interested in seeing the center provide a temporary shelter, of which the county has few.
“Last I heard, we have 24 domestic violence beds in all of Ventura County,” he said.
The idea of a family justice center is not original to Ventura County. There are 19 such centers in California and 90 in the United States.
Jump said he’s seeking advice from those centers as well as from “the real experts”—crime survivors and their advocates who’ve gone through the legal system right here in the county.
VOICES, a group of such experts, is playing a large role in the center’s development.
One of its members is Heather Abbott-Gonzalez, whose daughter was 7 when she came to her parents and said that an extended family member had been hurting her. That was roughly four years ago, and it took nearly the entire four years before that family member would be found guilty.
In the meantime, the Camarillo family was driving to Oxnard every week for therapy and to Ventura every month for court. Help was available, but it was spread throughout the county.
“We’re a family, and life had to keep going. We still had soccer practice and school,” Abbott-Gonzalez said. “To have one place for everything to happen, for a surviving family, looking back, that would have been amazing.”
Included in the suggestions she’s made are allowing children to testify via video.
“People are shocked to learn we don’t have that already in Ventura County,” she said. “My daughter had to sit in front of her abuser and testify.”
The county has been exploring the idea of a family justice center since 2015. Finally ready to come to fruition after much research and collaboration between a handful of working groups tackling obstacles and logistics, the next step is finding a space for it.
Ideally, the center would be about 50,000 square feet and be located between Camarillo and Ventura along the 101 corridor.
Hopes are that a second center could one day be built in eastern Ventura County, but because the largest number of the county’s 7,500 annual domestic violence calls come from Oxnard, planners said it makes sense to put the first center nearby.
Jump said he is applying for grants, and although the county may get some of the $10 million the state has set aside for such centers, he doesn’t believe it will be enough to buy a building. A foundation has been set up to raise money and find a location.