National Domestic Hotline/Sen Biden's /10 year celebration
National Domestic Hotline 1-800-799-SAFE (7233) 1-800-787-3224 (TTY Excerpts from Sen.Biden's interview with FOX News- FOX and Friends February 23, 2006 BRIAN KILMEADE, FOX ANCHOR: This year, the National Domestic Hotline celebrates its 10th year. ANDREW NAPOLITANO, FOX ANCHOR: Our next guest is responsible for its existence. Delaware Senator Joseph Biden joins us from Austin, Texas. Good morning, Senator Biden. U.S. SENATOR JOSEPH BIDEN (D-DE): Good morning. How are you doing? NAPOLITANO: Fine, thank you. So tell us about the domestic hotline. How did you set it up? What is it doing? What's its purpose. BIDEN: In a nutshell, when I wrote the Violence Against Women Act, which provided shelters and changed the way in which we prosecute abusers, et cetera, included in that was this hotline -- and wanted to have one place where a woman in desperate straits or a loved one of hers could pick up the phone and call and get help, get help meaning be told where to go, how to get out of the relationship, what prosecutor to talk to, where the shelters were, et cetera. And what's happened, over a 1.5 million women, 60 percent of whom for the first time they've ever told anybody they were being abused, have picked up that phone and made that call. And, literally, these men and women at this hotline save lives. But what happened was, about three years ago, 26,000 calls were dropped because the technology couldn't keep up. So I went to Microsoft and to Dell and to AOL, and they jumped right in – went down, took a look at it, got invested in it, and now it's like the most sophisticated back office at any bank in America. A woman calls from Duluth, Minnesota, she'll be told where the local cop is, where to stay; they'll pick up the phone and call to get help. So these women are doing God's work here, saving women's life. KILMEADE: First call 10 years ago; now 1.6 million calls. Overall, they get about 16,500 calls per day. You got to feel great about that. http://www.foxnews.com/