For nearly a decade after Jessica Tunon broke up with her boyfriend, the messages kept arriving.
But Tunon still worried about the information he might be able to find about her online. When she searched her name on Google, her home address popped up easily. Living alone in the District and fearing for her safety, Tunon set out to remove her home address from public records.
She quickly discovered that it wasn’t simple. Unlike most states, the District had no streamlined process that allowed victims of stalking or domestic violence to keep their home addresses confidential.
“The fact that we don’t put those connections together for how to protect people online, I don’t know how it’s taken so long to do that,” said Tunon, a 42-year-old business owner who testified to the D.C. Council about her experiences.
Now, D.C. officials will soon launch a program to provide address confidentiality for victims of domestic violence, sexual crimes, stalking and human trafficking, as well as employees of organizations that serve those victims. It will also apply to workers at reproductive-health clinics, who have historically been targets of threats and violence.
A coordinator was recently hired for the program, which aims to begin offering applications for address confidentiality by the fall.
The program, which will be administered through the Office of Victim Services and Justice Grants, was created as part of the Address Confidentiality Act, which the D.C. Council passed last year. In passing the legislation, the District joined 36 states with similar address confidentiality programs.
Eligible D.C. residents will be able to apply for a substitute address that they can use when a D.C. agency asks for a home address. Once approved, the person’s home address would remain confidential for three years, renewable for two-year terms.
One of the driving forces behind the program is Michelle Garcia, director of the D.C. Office of Victim Services and Justice Grants, who previously spent nearly a decade as the head of the Stalking Resource Center of the National Center for Victims of Crime. When Garcia began working for the District in 2015, she was surprised to learn that the nation’s capital had no citywide program for shielding the home addresses of stalking victims in government databases.
“The reality is there really was no process before,” she said.
Because Tunon was a D.C. homeowner, a registered voter, and the owner of a home-based business registered and licensed in the District, her address was made public through numerous agencies, including the Department of Small and Local Business Development and the Office of Tax and Revenue. She had to contact each government agency and fill out tedious paperwork to request to change her home address to a P.O. box, which costs her about $250 a year.
Certain agencies, such as the Board of Elections, required a court order for an address to be removed from a voter’s records.
“Every time, you have to relive what happened in the past,” Tunon said.
The Address Confidentiality Program is intended to make this process easier. The details of how the program will work are still in the planning stages, but the newly hired program coordinator, Sarah Ohlsen, said she hopes to offer the resource through government agencies, domestic violence shelters and other places that provide services to crime victims in the District. One major point of referral will probably be the D.C. Victim Hotline.
Ohlsen plans to train assistants at these locations to walk people through the process of applying to the Address Confidentiality Program.
Under the new statute, the Office of Victim Services and Justice Grants can send a participant’s information to the D.C. Board of Elections, unless the participant opts out. If eligible to vote, the participant can then vote by absentee ballot without his or her home address being made public and without a court order.
Garcia said the program will probably be most useful for people relocating to a new home. If a victim has lived in the same house for years, it might be too late to scrub his or her home address from all publicly available records, especially those collected by online data-mining companies. The program, Garcia said, “is not a guarantee of safety.”
“It does increase safety for victims, but we also know that abusers, stalkers, perpetrators can be incredibly manipulative, can be incredibly committed to finding their victims,” Garcia said. “We have seen too many cases where, despite all of the victims’ best efforts, they have been located.”
For some victims of domestic violence, a lack of address confidentiality creates a major barrier to voting. Advocates like Dawn Dalton, policy director at the D.C. Coalition Against Domestic Violence, recalled people who said they hadn’t registered to vote in years, because they feared disclosing their addresses publicly.
“Abusers are very savvy and will utilize whatever tools and connections available to them, so it’s critical, particularly in this day and age, that we have this program,” Dalton said.
Even when there isn’t an imminent threat to a person’s safety, the fear that his or her address could be shared can be crippling, said Andrea Gleaves, also of the D.C. Coalition Against Domestic Violence.
“It’s not just physical safety, it’s emotional safety,” Gleaves said.
For Tunon, removing her home address from online databases gave her peace of mind. She runs a business focused on networking, but for years, she didn’t feel safe enough to advertise her company on social media. It wasn’t until about a year ago that she felt comfortable creating her own Facebook account.
Even now that she has removed her current home address from seemingly every public database, Tunon still sets an alert on her calendar, every three months, to search her name on Google.
“That trail can just continue on,” she said.