"There's nobody to blame right now. You need an elected person at the top of the letterhead who is accountable," Niro says.

Two other states, Texas and Hawaii, have moved their child support programs into the attorney general's office. "Texas was a great example for us. They have a comparable caseload, a comparable population," Niro says.

After testing the program for two years, Texas made the switch in 1985. Since then, "every year has been a record year," says Alicia Terry, spokesperson for the Texas attorney general's office. "The legislature was looking for a better way. They felt bringing child support under a legal division that was poised to assert certain laws was the way to go. It was an excellent idea." Last year, Texas ranked second on paternities established and fourth on court orders established.

Nevertheless, some would move Illinois' child support collection to the Department of Revenue. "When you've battered through a legal environment for years, you start to think there's got to be a better way," says Norman of ACES. "The Department of Revenue is in the practice of collecting, not giving," as public aid is. Since January 1996, when the law changed, public aid has handed 31,000 cases labeled "uncollectible" to the revenue department, which was able to collect $23 million on those cases.

In fact, four other states — Alaska, Arkansas, Florida and Massachusetts — have chosen that route. But that is unlikely in Illinois, where revenue does not want the responsibility. "We have a level of expertise in collecting established debt. But we don't have any expertise in establishing paternity and things like that," says Mike Klemens, revenue's spokesman.

For the time being, only the attorney general is offering a new home for the child support enforcement program.

Meanwhile, Mellor plans to continue his efforts to help parents in this state collect the money their children are owed. "This fight isn't just to get the money my children are owed," he says. "It's a fight so that when my kids are my age, it won't be a battle anymore." 

Lori's husband has beaten her, harassed her and repeatedly threatened to kill her. On Sunday mornings, when he didn't work and she did, he would sit on the edge of their bed and talk to her while she got ready. "He would usually work himself into a state and if I didn't get out of the bathroom before that happened, I was trapped in there. The bathroom is where I got most of my injuries." She pauses, takes a breath. "I really dreaded Sunday mornings."

But it was actually a Friday night in December when she decided she'd suffered enough. "I remember I was trying to get him dinner and he pinned me up against the stove and hit me in the face and mouth. And then he had me pinned in the refrigerator door. At some point in this awful mess, the phone rang and somehow I ducked away from him and grabbed it and screamed 'help, help' into the phone. I didn't know who was going to hear that. I was just hoping he'd stop for a second so I could get away." She did. She ran across ditches and fields to the closest neighbors' house.

That was almost six months ago. Lori is still not free from her abuser, in part, she says, because the legal system won't let her be.

After a hearing in April, her husband was waiting for her outside the courtroom. "The judge had just told him he couldn't talk to me, and he came right up to me and did. And nobody did a thing. It makes you feel hopeless. I know why women give up on this."

Yet Illinois has a model domestic violence law, "one of the first and one of the best," says Jennifer Welch, executive director of the Chicago Metropolitan Battered Women's Network. And nearly every year, lawmakers approve changes that make it stronger. This session, for example, two proposals were sent to the governor's desk. One would allow the death penalty for murderers who violated their victims' orders of protection. The second would recognize orders of protection from other states.

But Lori's story illustrates a more fundamental problem: Good law doesn't equal good enforcement. More to the point, Illinois isn't even sure how well its domestic violence law is enforced. Further, the only legislation before the General Assembly that might have helped beef up enforcement was going nowhere in mid-May. Palos Hills Republican Rep. Anne Zickus chose not to call her bill, which would have directed the Illinois Law Enforcement Training Standards Board to research possible improvements in domestic violence training, because the board's members had "some concerns." Because they do the training, she says, it seemed best to get their support.

"Domestic violence is a problem that is getting more serious every day," says Zickus, who also serves on the Illinois State Crime Commission, a private advisory panel of lawmakers, citizens and law enforcement experts. (Nationwide, there is a domestic violence victim every nine seconds. In Chicago alone, police fielded an average of 655 domestic violence-related calls per day in 1996.)

Last year, the commission successfully pushed legislation in both Illinois and Congress to take away gun ownership rights from convicted domestic abusers. But commission executive director Jerry Elsner notes that is only one step. "You can go to any emergency room tomorrow morning and see a woman beat worse than I ever was," says Elsner, a former prize-

30 / June 1998 Illinois Issues

fighter. "If I beat a guy in a bar as bad as some of these guys beat their wives, I'd be in prison for the next 15 years. And yet they get a slap on the wrist. There's something really wrong with that."

Again, it's not because Illinois law doesn't allow for severe penalties. (Depending on the case, repeat domestic violence offenders can face felony charges.) Instead, critics like Elsner say it's because some police, prosecutors and judges aren't doing their jobs.

Elsner is one of the few who will criticize the legal system for the record. But many domestic violence advocates can't risk ruining good working relationships. Indeed, Lori doesn't want her full name used because she "still has another six to eight months working with these people." But in private she is critical of police officers who refused to file reports or listen to answering machine tapes of her husband "graphically describing where he's going to dispose of my body" and a prosecutor who "told me right before we walked into the courtroom that I had a choice between two years' probation and a fine or counseling" for him.

"I had no idea I'd be pressured to make that call. And, of course, [the prosecutor] is telling me we should go for the counseling because he's not sure he can win this case against [my husband's] attorney ... It seems like I keep running into one stumbling block after another."

On the bright side, there are promising initiatives underway. Still, it's impossible to say there is progress because no one has examined how well Illinois fights domestic violence.

"At this point, all we have is anecdotal information," says Vickie Smith, executive director of the Illinois Coalition Against Domestic Violence, noting that each police department and state's attorney's office has its own approach.

"Prosecutors have full discretion. And if they haven't been well-trained [in domestic violence]. ... Well, let's just say I've heard them give all kinds of reasons why they can't prosecute."

But Smith is quick to add that more and more prosecutors are picking up domestic violence cases. In the past year, there have been four domestic violence training seminars for prosecutors. Another is scheduled this month. A key focus is helping state's attorneys build cases without the victim's help if necessary. Federal money from the historic 1994 Violence Against Women Act funded the seminars. Last summer, Sangamon County State's Attorney Patrick Kelley started prosecuting domestic violence cases without the victim when possible, something that has "tremendously increased our volume" of cases. Indeed, Welch of the Chicago Metropolitan Battered Women's Network says this is the new trend nationwide. Kelley also set up a domestic violence court in January that routes all such cases to one prosecutor and judge. This, too, is another trend.

Illustration by Mike Cramer

Since 1993, 17 Illinois judicial districts have set up these special courts, which aim to help victims more quickly and more consistently.

There have been other strides. Last year, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley established a new domestic violence coordinator in that city. And he more than doubled — from $700,000 to $1.9 million — the amount of grants the city gives to domestic violence agencies involved in counseling and other services.

At the national level, Congress is now considering revisions in the federal law that would authorize $3.9 billion over the next five years. The bulk of that, $2.3 billion, reauthorizes programs currently in force; $1.6 billion is for new programs focusing on violence against older women, disabled women, college students and women battered in the workplace.

Still, as Bonnie Campbell, director of the U.S. Department of Justice's violence against women office, said shortly after Congress passed the initial landmark domestic violence legislation four years ago: "Even today, the victim of a domestic assault runs the risk of being asked, 'What did you do to make your husband angry?'"

Lori says she wasn't asked that, but "I always felt like I was interrupting them with something not important."

Perhaps that would change if we took a look at how the state as a whole — police, prosecutors, judges. Victim and abuser advocates — handles domestic violence.

As Smith says: "Evaluation is always helpful. You never know what works well until you take a good hard look at it. And right now, if you asked me how many people die each year of domestic violence, I'd tell you we have no clue. We should know. We should look at ourselves, even if it sort of puts our feet to the fire. "

Illinois Issues June 1998 / 31