Video, Audio, Photos & Rush Transcript: Governor Hochul Signs Legislative Package Strengthening Protections and Support for Survivors of Domestic Violence as Part of Domestic Violence Awareness Month

Earlier today, Governor Kathy Hochul signed a comprehensive package of legislation that will strengthen protections for survivors of domestic and gender-based violence by ensuring guns are seized from abusive partners and protecting the confidentiality of survivors. Governor Hochul signed the five bills into law alongside survivors, advocates and legislative champions at Union Settlement, a nonprofit providing resources to survivors in East Harlem.

VIDEO of the event is available on YouTube here and in TV quality (h.264, mp4) format here.

AUDIO of the event is available here.

PHOTOS of the event are available on the Governor's Flickr page.

A rush transcript of the Governor's remarks are available below:

Great to be back with everyone. Thank you so much, Jennifer, for the extraordinary work you do at Union Settlement. This is a point of pride for all of us and to know that people in this community have a place to come, to gather, to heal, to just deal with life's challenges. So, on behalf of the State of New York, we thank you and everyone here at Union Settlement for all you do. Let's give Jennifer another round of applause.

We'll be introducing Kelli Owens, our Director of Prevention of Domestic Violence, in a couple of moments. I want to thank her for all her leadership. We've worked together on this. It's been a long journey since my Lieutenant Governor days, and so we've been working together to try and eradicate this pain in families. It's heartbreaking when there's a situation where there's supposed to be love, and love is replaced by violence and it's very hard for people to heal from that. And I thank you for being such an incredible champion. Kelli Owens, let's give her another round of applause.

We'll be hearing from Margarita Guzman, Executive Director of Violence Prevention.

We'll be hearing from her in a couple minutes to talk about what we're dealing with here. And I also want to thank many of our leaders who are here. I see Senator Jose Serrano is here. Thank you, Senator Serrano for joining us. Senator Shelley Mayer has joined us. I know Senator Kevin Parker's here. No? He must be in traffic. Okay. I've been all over this City. A sign that New York is back is traffic jams. So, let's take that as a positive. Also, Senator John Liu is here. Thank you, John, for being here. Assemblymember Steven Cymbrowitz. Thank you, Steve for being here as well. And also, a great friend I just saw a couple days ago, and that would be Assemblymember Eddie Gibbs. Thank you for your great representation here.

We'll also be talking about our bill sponsors in a couple of minutes, but yes, for a long time this has been a vibrant place in the East Harlem community. And really has been a place for the most marginalized of citizens. People that are just looking for someone to understand them and help them get to their lives, and so it's a fitting place for us to come together today as we talk about programs that center on Lifting up the survivors of domestic violence. And it's a difficult topic, but it's one that's deeply important to me. So to all the advocates and providers, I know firsthand that this is incredibly hard work. It takes a toll on you as human beings, as well as you see others suffering. People who've been through a lot, women, mostly children who are so deeply affected by this. And the reason this is so personal to me, it's because my mother was at one time one of those children that we care about. Back when I was a student at Syracuse University, my mother - Go Orange. Should we talk about the first six and 0 season since 1987? It was a great day for football in our state on Sunday to all three New York teams, but I will not digress. Okay. There is some happiness in life. I mean, all three New York teams win. The Yankees won, will win again at four o'clock today. So, these are great things for halfway. So, in life there are silver linings.

But I was a student at Syracuse and my mother hadn't had the opportunity to go to college. She was smart, she was valedictorian, she was editor of her newspaper, but the reason she couldn't go to college is because she was raising three children. The reason she was raising three children is that her own father, who had been verbally and emotionally abusive to her mother, walked out when she was young. My mother lived above a gas station. Her mother worked all the time as a waitress. Her mom basically had to raise herself with the help of the Dominican nuns, and the nuns were sisters that were in the neighborhood. But when her mother was - when my mom was 16, her mother died, left her with three kids. My mom had to become a parent right away. So, she never had the chance to show how smart she was. And she was really smart, but she was, more than anything, she was compassionate. Because when you have to - when you're a child and you see violence, whether it's verbal or physical, it can affect you in a very profoundly negative way. It can make you harden to other people.

But my mother's case, it made her a completely different person. There was no person more empathetic and deeply felt the pain of others than my own mother. She decided when I was a student that she too would go to college. And with six kids, juggling all my younger siblings and my father's career, she said, "I'm going to become a student.

I'm going to become a champion. I'm going to become a social worker." And one of her projects was to embrace the whole specter of violence in homes. Back then, they used to call it wife beatings. Not a very beautiful term, way to describe it, but it was wife beatings, and she talked about how she had clients, and these were well-to-do women in the suburbs often. And talked about a doctor who had come home from a hard day at work and used the telephone cord. Now, young people will not know what a telephone cord is, but literally try to strangle his wife and to beat them down. And so, it was not just something that affected poorer populations. It was affecting everyone, and women at the time, and now we know there's more men affected, but women at the time had no rights.

My mother became an advocate, a champion. She went to our state legislature, tried to get hearings. She had hearings held in Buffalo. She allowed people to come forward who had never had their voices lifted up to talk about what it was like to live in the shadows because society, and indeed law enforcement did not recognize them. It was a time when a woman can call 911 and ask for help, the police would come to the door, and the husband answered the door and said, "Everything's okay here, officer. Nothing to see here." They literally would walk out the door and leave the woman being tormented in the confines of her own sanctuary, her own home. That was going on - this was the 1970s. So, my mother worked on getting legislation so the police had to respond differently. She was involved in starting the first domestic violence home, Haven House. She was one of the founders of the Erie County - She's one of the co-founders of Erie County Commission on Domestic Violence. And of course, she brought her daughter along with her.

I attended meetings with her. We went as a family to help bring toys to the centers and to help paint the rooms that women would be living in. So, this was a family journey for us, even as a college student. And so I'm proud of that, but I also feel the weight of that responsibility of my mother to carry on in her name. We lost her eight years ago to ALS. It was horrific to see a woman who's used her own voice for the voiceless to lose her own capacity to communicate because of a horrible illness. But even for her 70th birthday, my mom didn't want a party. She decided that she was going to start a home for victims of domestic violence herself. And she named it after - she named it the Kathleen Mary House, my name is Kathleen Mary, but it's named after my grandmother, her mother, who had endured so much. It's the Kathleen Mary House.

They bought an old funeral home, kind of scary down the basement, I have to tell you. All of us went there, all of us. My kids, myself, all of our families. We painted the rooms. We put in a computer lab. We knew that this could be a nurturing place for children, particularly - get enrolled in the local schools here, have an advocate go to the court hearings with the people and be a real friend to people who felt friendless and so alone. So, we started that. My aunt, my mother, and I started this transitional home just, you know, a number of years ago so people could all of a sudden learn life skills and to know that there are people who believed in them, and really have a new path in life. And I tell you this only because, despite the efforts of people like my mother and others, there's still violence in homes - whether it's physical, emotional - it has not stopped.

And that's why as Governor, I've made this one of my top priorities. And we could not have foreseen the effect of the pandemic on families where people who might have been able to leave their home and go to a job, or go to a support system, or just have coffee with a friend, escape that environment. When everybody had to be locked down, you couldn't go to your job, so many of them, you're literally locked and trapped in an environment that was abusive and you had no way out. So, we have seen, since the pandemic, that the number of calls to our hotline, we saw it early on. I mean, something happened very quickly during this whole phenomenon known as the global pandemic, COVID. And the statistics are now even more alarming. One out of three women, and as many as one out of four men, have experienced some form of intimate violence or emotional trauma from a partner. And the operative word being partner. A partner is supposed to lift you up and be your friend and be your emotional support system, not be someone who abuses you.

And to the core, that is deeply disturbing for any human being who puts their trust in someone else, who loves someone else, who gives them themselves and have it returned with violence. But sometimes in a situation, you can't escape. When there's children involved, you often just can't escape because who's going to help pay for the kids' lunches the next day and their books? And you become emotionally reliant and physically reliant, but also financially reliant. And my mother saw this as well, and I'll tell you one other thing she did, she started a small business, a flower shop. It never made a dime. She was not, she's not great in business. The reason she started a flower shop in my hometown, even when all the shops were closing, after they're all boarded up, the steel plant left, the jobs left, the people left. My mother decided, "Right after I got out of law school, I'm going to start a flower shop." "Mom, why are you starting - you don't know anything about flowers." She says, "I'm going to hire women who've had to leave their homes and I'm going to teach them skills." So her little flower shop became a training center for women, you know, displaced homemakers they were called at the time. Kind of a quaint phrase these days.

So again, understanding, again, that there's people who just need that extra help. And we talk about what we can do as a state government, we can talk about it. We can declare Domestic Violence Awareness Month. We do it every year. We'll continue to do that, that is a reminder of what's going on. We can wear purple, pull out our nice purple dresses and scarfs. Everybody looks great today. Even some nice purple ties gentlemen, well played. But we also have to build supportive communities for survivors. I mean, let's just get real about this. I mean, talk is nice, but it's not what we need. We need people to know that there's a place for them to go. And when people go to a place, we need to let them know that they're going to be safe and secure. And sometimes it's even making sure that their abuser can't track them down. There's so many places that people's addresses are out there publicly, and it's so easy to be found again. I can't tell you how many times we got calls for the Kathleen Mary House and we had to go over there and help people whose abuser had tracked them down, they're trying to find them and hurt them. So we were always involved with our local police. It was — we know it's real.

And I'm going to be signing five bills here today, and I thank the champions, the legislators, it's great to have partnerships in the legislature. They bring their own passion and the needs of their own constituents to Albany. When they leave their districts, they're there fighting for all of you, and it's a beautiful manifestation of a relationship that is so important when you get the Governor's Office and the legislature working like this in a real partnership as well. This is the right kind of partnership. And we're going to continue to do everything we can to keep people out of harm's way and give them flexibility to make the best decisions for themselves and their families, and just literally give them a new lease in life. So, I'm going to take a minute to describe some of these changes that we're going to be enacting into law by our virtue of our action here today.

And the first one is sponsored by Senator Tim Kennedy from Buffalo and Assemblymember Fred Thiele. And this will allow victims of sexual violence to apply to the Board of Elections to have their voter registration information sealed from the public. Again, one more way that an abuser can track down the location of someone and very easily show up there or go to the children's school. I mean, there's a lot of vulnerability when you're in this situation. Even if you have an order of protection, it is still a frightening time for these women. So, we have to keep finding all the ways, and if it's that someone's going to find you from your voter registration rolls, then we're going to stop that as well. So it should not be easy for an abuser to track down the address of any individual. Also, you know, you think about someone who's living, you know, in a married relationship, partnership, in a home or an apartment, there's usually utility bills that are being paid for, and both names may likely be on it, but when someone has to flee that home to save their lives or their children's lives, they should not have to continue to pay on a contract when they are not in that facility anymore, not in that home.

So, our second bill requires utility companies, including electric and gas, wireless companies, cable companies, you name it, to allow victims of domestic violence to opt out of their shared contracts with abusers without any fee or penalty. Let them make that clean break without having to be tied to that individual because when they do need to flee for their own safety, they shouldn't be continued to be obligated under the contract. And I want to thank John Liu for his sponsorship of this bill as well as Steven Cymbrowitz. Also, now we're going to be requiring on our third bill for insurance companies, health insurance companies, to provide domestic violence victims with the options of providing alternative contact information so they can access their claims and benefits. Think about, again, the tangled web of connections, especially when someone's been in a relations for a while, they may well be beneficiary to someone else's contract and it gets very complicated. They need to be able to access their claims and benefits in a way that protects them from their abuser. And also the last two bills we'll be dealing with, seizing firearms from domestic violence defendants.

And we'll be talking more about our red flag laws. But it's amazing to think that we have the tools out there that sometimes aren't being used. Red flag laws are designed to protect people when there's evidence that an individual will cause harm to themselves or others. It gives law enforcement, and I signed an executive order that directed, not made it optional, directed State Police to seek out an extreme risk order of protection, known as a red flag law when they have evidence of this. So, we could be more in the business of preventing harm, preventing violence, preventing crimes instead of just solving them afterward. That's what I'm focused on, crime prevention here. So, we have a number of bills that'll be dealing with the seizure of firearms from domestic violence defendants. And we are working directly between this connection between the proliferation of guns, someone having access to them, and it's frustrating for us, and we're dealing with it still, that the Supreme Court overturned the Governor of the State of New York's, for the last 108 years, ability to protect people from concealed carry weapons. Again, more guns out there, more vulnerabilities for people who are victims of domestic violence. And so, this cycle continues until we stop it. And that's what we're trying so hard to do here in the State of New York, is to get guns off the streets, but not say it's okay for people to be carrying guns on our subways in our schools, in our parks, in our synagogues, in our churches, in our temples, in our mosques. We don't agree with that, and so that's why we're going to continue to fight in court to make sure that that follows the law that we had here for over a century.

So, even when we're trying to reverse the trends of gun violence and the numbers are trend downward, I know people are insecure. I understand that. Again, like my mother, I'm very empathetic. I understand, I feel. But we are reversing the gun violence trends with shootings going down all over the state, which is a good dynamic. But we still see a trend of increasing domestic violence. And so, we're going to be talking about when abusers with firearms, when we know that they're five times, if they have firearms already, abusers are five times more likely to kill their victims with a gun. And so it's about access. It's about access. In the heat of anger, whether you're in a home or on a subway, if you have the ability to whip out a gun, that's when tragedies happen.

So, we're going to continue using all of our tools and these next two bills from Senator Mayer and Assemblymember Sarah Clark. I want to thank you for your leadership in this. We're ensuring that firearms owned by people subjected to a protective order, that can be seizure of this, that can seize firearms when there's an order of protection, when a judge has already determined that continued possession remains a danger, and this will apply when a defendant willfully disobeys a previous order to surrender the. Because right now, they can be told to surrender the firearm. Guess what happens when they don't do it? Nothing. There's no enforcement mechanism, so it's like a toothless tiger. It doesn't do anything. So this is just a common sense way to have a requirement that they be seized when they're subject to a protective order.

And also, I want to thank Senator Mayer and Assemblymember Clark for our bill which protects victims of domestic violence by requiring criminal or family court judges to ask about this. Right now, they don't even ask, "Do you have a firearm?" And they're before you, and there's someone whose life could be in danger or children whose lives could be in danger, and the family court judge is not required to find out whether or not there's guns in the house. Seems like common sense to me, doesn't it? Well, I'll take, in five minutes, the ability to use a pen to correct that wrong, we'll know that we can make people safer, so we're going to be able to do that as well.

So, I want to thank the legislature for their work here, our state budget, past year and going forward, we're going to continue to have a record amount of funding for domestic violence and sexual assault prevention programs. We're going to continue protecting people from housing discrimination. We've signed legislation protecting individuals from housing discrimination, increase financial assistance, particularly for crime victims overall, but those who are survivors of gender-based violence, and also to protect workers from sexual harassment. So, we're the only state in the country that has a cabinet-level agency devoted to addressing gender-based violence as well. So that is how New York State is leading.

So, I'm proud to say, as I stand here, I do feel my mother's spirit. My mother would be happy to know that her daughter is continuing the work she began when I was back in college, and I know that my own daughter will carry the torch passed to us from our mother, my mother and her grandmother, and my own little granddaughter, Sophia, will know the work that my mother did as well. We're going to carry this on, not just through my family, but hopefully through all families, that we all feel committed toward the common cause of lifting people up, those who've been in situations that none of us want to find ourselves in. Having that empathy, that sense of purpose that a Governor can convey, but also the people on the ground here can convey. Our elected leaders, the providers, the survivors themselves, who have the courage to get up and face another day after what they've witnessed and perhaps restart their lives and know that yes, despite the circumstances you found yourself in, there is still love out there. You can still find love in your lives, and you'll always have the support and love of all New Yorkers, so thank you very much. With that, let's bring up Kelli Owens and thank her again for her great work.