On several occasions in this space I have emphasized the need for a shelter in Panola County for stray animals, especially dogs. There’s simply nothing to do with the many strays, castoffs and unwanted canines that we keep allowing to reproduce in our midst.

Jake Julian has another concern that also arises from somewhere within the darkness of our human psyche: women so severely abused by husbands or boyfriends that they need a secret refuge where they can be sheltered and protected.

Julian is Tri-Lakes Medical Center’s chaplain, and he became uncomfortably aware of the lack of a shelter recently when the hospital treated a female patient for the physical abuse she had suffered at the hands of her husband.

When time came for the patient’s discharge, she had no place to go.

“Statistics say she probably went back to where she had been battered,” Julian said. “Statistics say these women go back an average of seven times.”

Julian said that after making a number of inquiries, he learned that the one place that offered refuge to battered women in this area, a facility in Oxford, had closed this year after it was discovered its director had mishandled funds.

With the burden of that knowledge, Julian and other Panola citizens have founded Batesville Safe Shelter, appropriately incorporated as a non-profit charitable organization, to raise funds to make their namesake a reality.

Directors include Dr. Cedric Edwards and his wife, Inmaculada; Alene Ncogo, Chris Smith, Teresa Towles (you’ll remember Teresa’s role in Save-A-Life), Mary Hoskins, Faith O’Conner, Kimberly Phillips, Dr. Tommy Snyder, Dr. Joe Gardner, Gina Sigler and Barbara Bonnell.

Julian will serve as executive director and as a non-voting member of Batesville Safe Shelter’s board.
Though the board is heavily invested with people affiliated with Tri-Lakes Medical Center, “it’s not a Tri-Lakes venture,” Julian said. However, it’s good to have the facility, with its emergency room a likely receiving point for many abuse victims and its behavioral health center’s mission closely aligned with treating some of the causes of abuse, closely affiliated, the Batesville Safe Shelter executive director said.

Batesville Safe Shelter has been founded as a faith-based but non-denominational organization that will not seek government funding. Julian said that as the fledgling organization has evolved he and other directors have learned more about the demise of the Oxford facility and are organizing Batesville Safe Shelter with built-in safeguards to avoid making the same mistakes.

It is an ambitious project. Batesville Safe Shelter hopes to build a 12-bed facility. That means, Julian said, the capability of hosting 12 women plus attendant children. After all, how many mothers could be convinced to leave the situation in which they are being abused if they could not take their children with them?

There are many other facets of this project that you will soon read more about: the Batesville Police Department’s records show that domestic abuse is a growing problem, yet the closest facility that shelters abused women is located in Tupelo and can accept them on a space-available basis.

The state says, “Send them back to their communities and let them talk to their pastors,” according to Julian.

These lines are written to share with readers something of the scope of the Batesville Safe Shelter project. Having written occasionally since 2005 about the need for an animal shelter in Panola County with no brick and mortar yet in fruition, I hope not in 2019 to still be writing about the need for either an animal shelter or a secret respite for victims of domestic abuse.

Both needs are entirely different. Writing about them in the same paragraphs is not to trivialize but to point out that our disregard for both the treatment of helpless animal creatures and human victims of violence implicates us as tacit accomplices.