Domestic Violence in America with Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.), Margarita Guzmán, Rachel Louise Snyder & Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) - Full Transcript
Washington Post Live
October 21, 2021
More than 12 million American men and women a year are victims of rape, physical violence or stalking by an intimate partner. As the coronavirus pandemic has forced many families to shelter in place over the last 18 months, the numbers of domestic violence and child abuse cases have skyrocketed at an outsized pace.
Join Washington Post Live for a series of conversations with experts that go in-depth about how the mental health impact of domestic violence influences other facets of survivor’s lives and how the pandemic has renewed efforts to pass legislation to combat abuse.
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MS. STEAD SELLERS: Hello and welcome to Washington Post Live. I’m France Stead Sellers, a senior writer here at The Post. Domestic violence is a terror that affects millions of Americans every year, and the pandemic has exacerbated concerns around it. Here today to talk about legislative action around domestic abuse and intimate partner violence, I’m delighted to welcome Congresswoman Debbie Dingell and Jackie Speier. A very warm welcome to both to Washington Post Live.
REP. DINGELL: Good to be with you and with my colleague, Jackie.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: We are delighted to have you both. Debbie, I had hoped to begin with a question for you, and I’m hoping you can hear us, there. I gather--I watched last night your 2019 account of how domestic violence is a personal issue for you, and I hope you could address the stigmas and how they have changed in the past few years around talking about domestic violence.
REP. DINGELL: So, thank you for that question. You know, it’s still really hard for me to talk about my own personal situation, and I never know what’s going--how I’m going to react as we have that discussion.
And as you say to me, how things have changed, I think for too many of us, for too many it hasn’t changed. There’s still--when I was a child, I grew up in a home with a father that suffered from--you know, now, we realize that many people self-medicate, take medicine. He was a drug addict, probably because he had an underlying problem. And his mood swings, his temperament could result in very angry situations where the presence of a gun in our home was very dangerous. And there was more than one occasion where we really thought that we would die, the hiding in the closets, my mother running from the house, my getting in between them, trying to grab the gun, trying to keep them from killing each other, the nights he would take the door handles of all of the doors so we couldn’t escape. There are a lot of memories.
And I called the police then, and they wouldn’t even come, because it was our father, it was a family that everybody knew, and you didn’t think things like that could happen. It stayed in our family. Later, as we got--that night--the worst night, the night I remember the most horrifically was the night before my youngest sister was supposed to start first grade, and I don’t think she ever got over that night or was ever okay. And ultimately, she was in a situation that resulted in every bone in her face being broken. She was like many children who’ve lived in homes where they’ve seen this kind of behavior, afraid to fight back, and ultimately, she too died of a drug overdose.
But I talk to a lot of people. I try to help a lot of women. And even today, it’s hard for me--and my mother is still alive. It’s a very difficult time. We don’t talk about it in--I do with my sister. I can’t even talk to my brother about it. I think too many women feel that stigma still. Many women are economically dependent in a situation. The pandemic has made it worse. And while I think we’re more willing to acknowledge that it happens, we are--have passed--we need to reauthorize, but they did pass the Violence Against Women Act in the Congress. It needs to be reauthorized. We passed it in the House. It still needs to be acted on by the Senate. But there I still think for too many there are a variety of reasons that people don’t talk about it, won’t talk about it, and feel--and are trapped in situations they shouldn’t be trapped in.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: Thank you for telling us about that.
It brings me to a question to you, Representative Speier. Representative Dingell had the courage to bring these issues in such a personal way to this program but also to the House floor. Could you talk to us about the importance of reauthorizing the main federal mechanism we have, the Family Violence Prevention & Services Act and what you’re doing--what it will mean moving ahead? There’s a little bit of a lag on that time. I’m going to move onto a question, an audience question.
REP. SPEIER: Here, you know what? I was muted. I apologize.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: That’s okay.
REP. SPEIER: That particular act is responsible for funding the majority of domestic violence shelters across the country, and for decades, much like Congresswoman Dingell--and by the way, every time I hear Debbie tell that story I cringe, so her courage in doing so is quite powerful.
But for all the years that I’ve worked on this issue area, I’m reminded that we are always coming with a tin cup to provide funding for domestic violence shelters. We spend at one point six--we have six times as many animal shelters as we have domestic violence shelters in this country. I think the pandemic has underscored the atrocity of domestic violence, and the numbers went up, the needs went up, the hotline usage went up.
And if I could, I’d like to just share a letter I received from a constituent in the early part of 2020. She wrote: “I am writing to you as a woman who is living in fear because I have a husband that hurts me and my kids. Since he has to stay home and cannot work because of the virus, he drinks and then screams and then slaps me and my kids. When he’s working, he comes home and drinks with dinner and then falls asleep. Now that he is home all day, he drinks early and gets very mean.” So, the pandemic actually has made matters worse for so many victims of domestic violence.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: Yeah, these are really, really troubling questions. And we’ve had an awful lot of feedback from audience members who have questions for you both. I’d like to turn first to you, Representative Dingell, with a question that came to us from Mary--I’m going to read it to you--in Maryland. And she asks, "Can you speak to the intersection of guns and intimate partner violence?"
You raised that in your introductory discussion just now. Could you address it for Mary, too?
REP. DINGELL: So, I have a bill that has been incorporated into the Violence Against Women Act and working with Jackie that we would continue to do this that would prevent people who have been convicted of domestic violence from being able to own a gun.
We know that 76 percent of women who have been murdered by a former or current intimate partner reported stalking in the year previously to their murder, and we know--so when my father would lose it or hit one of his moods and that gun was present, we know that the gun’s presence in that kind of volatile situation is extremely dangerous. So, we--that’s why we’re--I’m working with Jackie and some of my other women colleagues to try to keep guns out of the hands of those who have had a previous record, because when--if you’ve lived with someone who has these kinds of mood swings, the letter that Jackie just read is so similar to the stories I know she’s heard her entire life in her career of trying to help women I hear. That presence of a gun, when that behavior snaps, when that anger snaps just leads to very dangerous volatile situations.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: Representative Speier, you’ve spent so much time working on these issues in the military, and we know that when women--and it’s not only women but largely women--when women come forward, they’re often not given the protection that they need and ask for. How has your work in the military informed your work on domestic violence elsewhere?
REP. SPEIER: Well, I will tell you not only is it--the issue of sexual assault in the military, where some 20,000 servicemembers are sexually assaulted a year--more women than men but a very large number of men, as well--that so few come forward because the system for so long has been rigged, and so less than 6,000 would report. And of those, maybe 500 would go to a court martial, and then less than 150 would actually serve time in the brig. So, that was initially my effort.
But then we started talking to domestic violence shelters near bases and found out that the way the military was handling domestic violence was really abominable. They would send the violator to cool off for a couple of days in the barracks before they returned home. I was at one base where it wasn’t until they were able to get an ultrasound machine that could detect bruising under the skin that many of these cases had the clarity they deserved, because when you’re being strangled, sometimes there aren’t bruises that you will see visibly on the skin, but with the right kind of ultrasound it can be identified. And the numbers went way up once they were able to employ that particular equipment. So, the military is a microcosm of our country, our ethos, our values, and frankly our morality.
And as Debbie mentioned, the Violence Against Women Act hasn’t been reauthorized for over 900 days, when it used to be a bipartisan measure supported by both Republicans and Democrats. Then Senator Biden was the author of it, and it got renewed every five or six years. It’s been held up now by the National Rifle Association because of the provision that Debbie mentioned about not wanting to have those who have been convicted of domestic violence from owning a gun again. So, this becomes an issue that is far bigger than just violence against women in that it has the overlay of very powerful organizations that have a lot of clout with some of our colleagues on the other side of the aisle.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: Well, I have a follow-up question. We’re talking about these incredibly troubling historic processes that keep on and on and you’re both wrestling to overcome. But, Representative Speier, there’s also the issue of some more modern things like revenge porn. And I know you’ve taken action against that. Could you talk to us a little bit about how prevalent it is and what you’re doing to try to stop this form of terror?
REP. SPEIER: So, it is in this age of technology and social media an opportunity for people to do harm to what was at one point an intimate partner.
So, the SHIELD Act, which I authored which took five years in the making, has passed the House and is now in the Senate. And it has the power, really, to create criminal conduct out of those who would take intimate photographs and without the consent of the person who was photographed, share them online. And once they’re shared online, no matter how many times you take them off, they will reappear. And I can’t tell you the number of witnesses who’ve testified on that legislation whose lives have been destroyed, whose careers have been destroyed because these photographs keep cropping up.
We also say that in the military when Marines United was going on and we had soldiers who were taking pictures of other Marines and then posting them online on a private website. And it is--it is conduct that needs to be criminally addressed, and hopefully the Senate will eventually take up this legislation.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: So, another recent change, of course, is the pandemic, Representative Dingell. It has upturned so much in terms of increasing economic insecurity and forcing people, as we’ve mentioned earlier on, to spend more time at home. But could you talk specifically, Representative Dingell, about what the pandemic has done to exacerbate the problems around managing domestic violence?
REP. DINGELL: Well, it’s already a very bad situation when you’re living in those kind of moments and situations. And I do want to build on what--Jackie’s been such a leader on this, who was doing things on this long before I got to Congress, and I really want to commend her for all that she’s done. And she mentioned that, you know, men also are victims. One in three women and one in four men will during their lifetime experience some kind of physical violence, rape, or something horrific. So, this is a real problem.
And just one more statistic that’s really depressing is that already 1 in 10 high schoolers has experienced this kind of violence. Now you’re living with that kind of mood. You’re living with that kind of person who is volatile, their mood swings are frequently unpredictable. I lived with it, so I guess it’s--I know what it’s like. And you have nowhere to escape.
I mean, when the pandemic first hit, we weren’t--we were all quarantined in our homes. You couldn’t--if you were scared, you were hurt, you couldn’t--the abuser would keep you from using the phone. And then, how many women left the workforce because of fear issues? They didn’t have jobs. They’re very concerned about how they would economically support themselves, support their children. So, they feel trapped. And the abuser is frustrated and in very difficult times, and it’s just a formula that has made the last year a disaster.
I’ve worked with many people in law enforcement over the last year-and-a-half. It’s the worst kind of case someone from law enforcement can respond to. I know one family who an officer was killed responding to one of these calls. It’s been a really hard time for people that are in these kinds of situations, afraid to get help, afraid to talk about the problem. The issues are--it’s really complicated why people feel that they stay in those situations. And we have seen very, very, very significant increases in domestic abuse this last year.
REP. SPEIER: You know--
MS. STEAD SELLERS: A quick follow-up--oh, go ahead.
REP. SPEIER: We also, as a result of the American Rescue Plan, put a $180 million into domestic violence shelters because we recognize there was an issue there, and then there was another $50 million that was provided for culturally specific services for communities of color. So, we did act, and hopefully that money got to the shelters and to the victims and those resources were used appropriately.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: And how much of that--maybe one of you could answer--and, Representative Dingell, I had intended to ask you how much of that is going to local organizations that are culturally specifically able to address the different issues that come up in different parts of our very diverse country?
REP. DINGELL: Well, I think Jackie talked about it. We were trying to target those dollars there. And you know, so I mean, it’s also when you do talk about culture, we were trying to get into diverse populations.
But for instance, in my district I have a significant Muslim population as well, where ACCESS, which is an organization that was started--socioeconomic organization that was started to provide healthcare and is engaged in another--a number of other issues, began a domestic abuse program a number of years ago. And this is a very difficult issue in that community, and we--thanks to some--Jackie led on getting that money in the American Rescue Plan with the rest of us supporting her. But you have to go to the imams. You have to go to other people in the community. This is a very complicated issue. And I wish that we had made more progress on it than we have. But to too many, the stigma associated with it is very significant.
Actually, as Jackie talked about, men do suffer from this, too. Imagine being a man whose wife hits him or [audio interference] and the stigma, acknowledging that as well. This is a very complicated subject.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: And a quick follow-up for you. How are we addressing the substantial mental health issues that come following these issues for survivors?
REP. DINGELL: I don’t know which one of us--I mean, I would tell you we’re not doing nearly enough for mental health, period, in this country. We haven’t put the resources in it. We don’t treat it like other--and I’ve seen it too often in my own situation.
I believe we do--we have both drug and alcohol abuse problems in this country, but people are self-medicating. They suffer from anxiety. They have--you know, my father may have been bipolar or had more serious issues. We didn’t even talk about it back then. You didn’t--it simply wasn’t acknowledged. We are I think working very hard as communities to try to remove the stigma and get more resources devoted to mental health issues. But it’s still a very, very real problem. And while people like Jackie and myself and my colleagues are trying to get more money devoted to it and trying to remove the stigma, it’s still very real and not nearly enough resources going to it.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: We have another audience question. We’ve had many of them. And this is for Representative Speier, and it comes from Mary in Florida, and Mary says, when can coercive control or emotional abuse be made a crime, like in Ireland, she writes.
REP. SPEIER: Good question. Coercive--I mean, it’s all in the definition. I think we have tried to expand the definition of domestic violence to include not just the violence that happens in the home but the violence that happens after there’s a breakup in a relationship, because, you know, that’s when the stalking occurs. Oftentimes, that’s when the victim is most at risk.
So, I can’t answer your question specifically, but, you know, like everything else, frankly, our country is way behind European countries in terms of dealing with many of these social issues, whether it’s childcare or parental leave. Those programs were embraced in the--as early as 1914 for maternity care and maternity leave in France, and then childcare in the '60s in many other European countries. So, it doesn’t surprise me that Ireland has taken action on the issue of coercive abuse before we have.
For the longest time we had a difficult time having my colleagues recognize that you could have marital rape and that that was indeed a crime as well. So, we are just way behind other countries.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: I have a last question, and maybe you could both answer it just very briefly. And I’ll start with you, Representative, Dingell, if I may. We have a change of administration, a president who has made domestic violence a core concern of his. What do you hope to see from the administration in coming months? First, Representative Dingell, and maybe Representative Speier quickly after that.
REP. DINGELL: Well, as Jackie mentioned, Joe Biden was the original author of the Violence Against Women Act, and he is someone that understands that it’s real. I think that we need to continue to press for more changes in the law. One, we’ve got to get these bills reauthorized, because what Jackie talked about in getting money in the American Rescue Plan to these shelters, they weren’t getting the money from the programs that they needed because we hadn’t reauthorized the bill that needed to get it there.
So, I would look for the White House to help ensure that we are funding programs, taking a lead on mental health issues, and continuing to work with us to raise awareness and to get help to people that need help to escape these situations and try to attack the underlying issues that cause behavior that causes this kind of violence.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: Thank you. And, Representative Speier, if you have a word or two to add, I’d love to hear.
REP. SPEIER: Well, I don’t think we’ve had a more compassionate president serve in the White House than Joe Biden. He truly does get it. And I remember at one point at an event during the Obama administration he talked about his first experience of recognizing that violence against women, or that rape in this particular case, that the woman was struggling with identifying what happened to her as rape because she knew the assailant. And he, you know, made the point that rapists are always known typically by the victim.
So, I’m actually very optimistic that the Build Back Better plan is going to change our country for the better as it relates to many of these social infrastructure issues.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: Well, with that note of slight optimism, thank you both very much, Representatives Dingell and Speier, for joining me, and a particular thanks to Dingell for sharing that very moving story so courageously with us.
I’ll be back in a few moments to continue this program with author Rachel Louise Snyder and activist Margarita Guzmán. See you soon.
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MS. HALL: Hi, everyone. My name is Tamron Hall, and I am so honored to be here with you today on this Purple Thursday. Purple Thursday is our opportunity to join together in solidarity to bring awareness to every level and every layer of the conversation to end domestic violence.
Over the past 10 years, I’ve been open about the death of my own sister and the violence I witnessed firsthand in her life. And I committed myself, along with my family after her death, to use my platform and my voice to help other families. And we are here today, and I’m honored to be with two panelists who are also dedicated to bringing awareness and saving lives. Elise Johansen is the executive director of Safe Voices, the domestic violence and sex trafficking resource center serving portions of central and western Maine. Nina Leigh Krueger is CEO and president for Purina and an outspoken champion and supporter of the Purple Leash Project--an effort of Purina and the non-profit RedRover that is helping more domestic violence shelters across the United States become pet-friendly. Thank you both for being here. Thank you for joining me today.
I would like to just launch in first, Elise, with you. And what is the connection between pets and domestic violence from your experience that you’ve seen?
MS. JOHANSEN: Pets are our family, and for survivors of domestic abuse and violence that is no different. And we know that survivors of domestic abuse and violence are the experts in their lives. And we have heard from them that the abusers in their life will use anything and everything to assert power and control over them, and they often use the pets, too.
MS. HALL: It’s remarkable. Safe Voices operates Maine’s first pet-friendly shelter for survivors. Congratulations, of course, on being the first. But I know you want to be the first with many to follow. What was the process like?
MS. JOHANSEN: So, you know, we were thinking about this for a long time, because, again, survivors are the experts, and they have been telling us that they were not able to flee without their pet. They did not feel that they were able to move forward in a way and seek safety without their family members alongside them. And so, we listened to that, and we wanted to turn our shelter into a pet-friendly space, and with the help of the Purina Purple Leash Project and Red Rover, we were able to do that.
MS. HALL: So, how’s it going?
MS. JOHANSEN: It’s great and amazing. You know, I’ve been thinking about this story recently knowing that this interview is coming up, because there is this young boy in our shelter who was laying on the floor with his head back reading a book, leaning on a big dog. And the dog wasn’t his. It was another shelter resident’s dog. But it was this really beautiful moment of normalcy that would not have happened prior to us being able to allow pets to be in that building. And it’s been--it’s been remarkable. Survivors feel less alone. They feel that they’ve been able to flee with the things that matter most to them. And it has been nothing but a really wonderful experience for everyone involved.
MS. HALL: What’s your message for other advocates about the importance of supporting survivors and their animals?
MS. JOHANSEN: I would ask that every single advocate and every person who is supporting survivors to make sure that they’re asking about the pets during safety planning, and once that happens, we’re going to be able to wholly support the wholeness of survivors.
MS. HALL: Yeah, I love that, the "wholeness of survivors."
Nina Leigh, I know you’re standing by. It’s great to be with you again and talking with you about how Purina became involved in the domestic violence space and why.
MS. KRUEGER: So, it’s a great question. Almost a decade ago now we first learned about the lack of resources that domestic violence victims with pets had and how it had impacted their ability to leave.
Elise just said, you know, it’s--when a victim is in an abusive situation and they have to choose between their own safety or their safety for their pets, that’s really a heartbreaking situation. And the reality that nearly half of victims would delay leaving if they can’t take their pets was truly sobering. And really, we were shocked. And as a pet care company and a company of pet lovers, we really felt a responsibility to help that.
So, the first step on our journey was just to simply reach out to a shelter and offer to help them on their mission to accommodate pets. But as we all know, that bond that we share with our pets is unbreakable and universal, and so we saw an opportunity to have a role in protecting that bond at really a much larger scale. So that’s why we expanded this work nationally in 2019 by creating the Purple Leash Project with our non-profit partner RedRover to help more domestic violence shelters like Safe Voices become pet friendly.
MS. HALL: I know the numbers were around 10 percent of shelters when you started out in 2019. Now you’re 15, and the numbers are increasing with the shelters being able to take in pets. So, what is your vision for the Purple Leash project?
MS. KRUEGER: Our vision really, it’s--there’s a couple--it’s a couple fold. But really, it’s not an easy issue to address, as you know, but it’s having an undeniable impact on the safety and welfare of our friends and neighbors with their pets.
So, we believe we can help create a better future by advocating for changes that will make life a little easier for pets and their owners in a crisis, and the purpose leash project is one way to do that. My vision and hope, frankly, is that we can help fundamentally change the way survivors with pets are treated in America, and maybe even globally. I’m personally committed to continuing to advocate for change at the federal level, which we’ve been doing for years with members of Congress. And Purina has committed more than a million dollars so far to help, and that’ll continue to grow.
Our short-term goal is to help ensure that at least 25 percent of domestic violence shelters in the U.S. are pet friendly by 2025. So that’s our current focus. But we will have to continue to think bigger and do more as we look into the future to see how we can make a difference in this area.
MS. HALL: Well, I know your efforts are saving lives, and it’s been an honor to participate and spread the word, and it’s just been remarkable.
Elise, thank you for everything that you are doing for your community and survivors who are now able to leave with their pet and not leave a family member behind. I’m blown away by the passion of Purina, Red Rover, and organizations like Safe Voices that are serving survivors and shining a light on this incredibly important issue.
To find out how you can support the Purple Leash Project, visit purpleleashproject.com. And now I’ll hand it back over to The Washington Post.
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MS. STEAD SELLERS: Hello and welcome back to Washington Post Live. I’m Frances Stead Sellers, a senior writer here at The Post. We’re talking today about domestic violence, and we want to look in this next section on some of the mental health issues associated with it. I’m delighted to welcome two experts on these subjects, the author, Rachel Louise Snyder; and advocate for survivors, Margarita Guzmán. A very warm welcome to you both to Washington Post Live.
MS. SNYDER: It’s good to be here.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: Rachel, maybe I could start with you. Your new book is No Visible Bruises, and I wonder if you could talk about some of the invisible kinds of domestic violence that we often don’t think about when we focus on physical abuse and guns and other very dramatic forms of domestic violence.
MS. SNYDER: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you see--you see it again and again, where people expect that there will be some physical injury and that will be the obvious case of domestic violence. But in fact, what you find over and over and over again is, like one of your previous questions for the representatives is coercive control, emotional abuse, financial control.
You know, I covered the Orlando Pulse trial for The New Yorker, and one of the things that Omar Mateen had done was not give her access to any money at all. And so, she was really trapped. There’s somebody in my book that I write about whose husband went and got a rattlesnake and kept it in a cage in their house and threatened to use it on her any time she would do something that angered him. He said I’m going to put this in bed with you or put it, you know, in the shower with you. That’s an extreme example, but you see children used as leverage. You see pets used as leverage. There’s really--there’s really a misunderstanding when it comes to what we define as domestic violence in this country and abroad.
And I want to just mention actually that California, Hawaii, and Connecticut have all passed coercive control laws in the last year or so. So, we have some possibilities of kind of seeing how they work and how they’re interpreted, and hopefully other states will follow.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: So that’s a little glimmer of optimism in making these sort of family secrets public.
But, Margarita, maybe you can talk to me a little bit about how abuse plays out in long-term mental health problems.
MS. GUZMÁN: Yeah, thank you so much for that question. And I agree with Rachel that there’s so much more that needs to be done in this country.
I think that it’s also something to consider the different intersections that people are experiencing when we’re talking about their mental health, and at the Violence Intervention Program we work primarily with Latino, Latina, Latinx immigrants. So, when we’re talking about their mental health, it’s really important to remember the context, that before the last 20 months we were at the tail end of many years of targeted anti-immigrant policies, increased ICE activity, increased social/political hostility against them for just being here, being in existence. And all of that forms a context for the mental health implications connected to COVID, because they had been abused and sought after by governments to find themselves trapped in abusive relationships with partners, stalked by a deadly virus, rendered penniless because of sudden job loss, and all really hinged to the visceral fear of not being able to feed themselves or their children, all was connected to the COVID crisis that we’ve been experiencing.
So, the mental health implications are complex, and they are really going to be longstanding. And if there’s something that we know about mental health, it’s that it will be intergenerational in nature. And the way that we choose to respond right now will have a huge impact on what that means for us down the road, for our children, for their children. So, I do want to note that when we’re talking about mental health, we’re talking about a real marathon, and we’re talking about unique experiences that really deserve a diversity of responses, right? There’s no one mental health answer for the diverse communities that we all work within and live within.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: I think we heard some of that so powerfully from Representative Dingell in the last segment.
Rachel, talk to me if you could about the specific loss of agency that so often characterizes these issues and how that contributes to a sense of powerlessness for people who are survivors of domestic violence.
MS. SNYDER: Sure. That’s a really complicated question. And you know, you see--I’m trying to not put a big historical frame on this, but, you know, throughout the '80s we had this idea about learned helplessness, that victims were passive, that they had all agency taken away from them, and you see that sometimes.
But you also see victims who really do fight back, and that gets turned against them as well, right? We saw that in the Gabby Petito case. I don’t know how many of you watched the hour-plus bodycam footage, but I watched it. And you know, you see all the dynamics play out that law enforcement, the judiciary, the people in positions of power get wrong again and again and again. You know, they looked for visible injury, they found some scratched on Brian Laundrie. They didn’t ask about the context. They didn’t do any kind of lethality assessment on her. And you see that in cases again and again and again now.
We live, fortunately or unfortunately, in a time in which bureaucracy really holds many of us in place. You can’t, for example, just take your children and go to a different state and put them in school, right? The bureaucracy of moving your children from one school to another requires that an abuser will also sign that documentation. You can’t get your name off a bank account or someone’s name off of your bank account without having, you know, your abuser sign that paperwork. So, there’s a way in which all of these different forces keep people in a violent or emotionally abusive relationship. And what happens year after year after year is just this sense that none of these systems can really help you.
I spend a hundred pages in my book trying to answer the questions of why systems fail again and again and again. So, it’s a really complicated issue, and I think it’s important that we’re talking about it. But it’s also--it’s also sort of up to the rest of us to understand this because victims are in such precarious situations.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: A quick follow-up for you before we move on, but what are the risks, and are they documented, of a survivor coming forward surfacing issues or actually trying to prosecute them? I gather there’s a debate in the legal community about the risks there.
MS. SNYDER: Yeah, there absolutely is. And you know, what happens oftentimes is, somebody calls the police, maybe only one time. There--you know, there’s a woman my book whose story I spend a long time telling, and she only ever called the police once. And they come and maybe they undercharge the situation, or they get it wrong, as we saw in the case of Gabby Petito, right? They read the situation wrong, because law enforcement, the judiciary, all of the systems that we work in that sort of hold somebody accountable are event-based systems, right? They’re just interested in why did you make this one call on this one day today. And domestic violence is what I call a narrative situation. It’s a long-term sort of whittling away at someone’s power. Margarita used the term marathon, and I think that’s a really good frame for it.
So, what happens is, the police come. They may arrest the abuser, but probably they’ll be able to bail out almost immediately. And that’s just one example. What does a victim understand when something like that happens? Well, the victim understands that an abuser’s freedom is prioritized over a victim’s safety. And very often he or she understand that message because an abuser comes back, is angry, and has to ramp up the level of abuse. And so, there’s this constant sort of cause and effect. This is why they don’t reach out to, you know, prosecutors, why they don’t reach out to police, because they are convinced that their abuser has more power than those systems that could help them.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: I just want to add there that although we know that Gabby Petito’s death was ruled a homicide, we actually don’t know if she was a victim of domestic violence at the moment.
But, Margarita, let me come to you and ask you specifically about the need for culturally specific answers to some of these very, very troubling questions we’ve been raising.
MS. GUZMÁN: Yeah, thank you so much for asking that question. I was thinking, Rachel, when you were responding how different communities just experience law enforcement differently, right? We work with a community who really measures their good fortune by the fact that law enforcement may never know they exist. And so, they’re not going to reach out to those resources because they see them as predatory, because they are terrified of unintended consequences that might come connected.
Even if they do believe that that system is more powerful than their abusive partner, or maybe they are--they know for a fact that it is, they don’t want there to be the unintended consequences connected to deportation, right? In New York City we had a series of arrests and deportations that took place in court, and whether or not those were outcomes that were important for the safety of the people involved, it had a chilling effect on our communities who chose to not go to court and not seek out any services, even civil orders of protection, because ICE was in the courthouses or waiting outside the courthouses to pick people up. So, there are so many--it’s just so important to have a culturally specific response because we’re a bridge. We’re a trusted bridge for community members, right? One of the things that mainstream and law enforcement entities have not been that successful at doing is reaching out to the communities, and we’re able to do that.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: Rachel, we mentioned the pandemic already today, but I really would like to ask you about how these prolonged periods of isolation and forced intimacy has exacerbated problems and what we know and what we should be doing as we move ahead and, we hope, out of this pandemic.
MS. SNYDER: Well, I think--I think Margarita answered that. Sorry, I didn’t mean to call you Margarita. I think she answered that in terms of priorities. The number-one thing we have to do is programming for young people.
I talked about, gosh, I don’t even know how many cases, a hundred cases or something like this in my book, and every single one of them had a young woman meeting the person who would eventually kill her when she was 14, 15 years old. So, this--so teen dating violence, sexual assault, consent, all of these issues are combined, and they’re so important.
The other thing we saw, though, with the pandemic was that there was--initially there was this sort of bracing among, you know, shelters and hotlines, like they thought there was going to be this flood of victims. You saw many cities like Chicago, for example, where I’m originally from, renting out blocks, huge blocks of hotel rooms just kind of waiting, and that flood didn’t come. And what we learned was that people were really stuck. They couldn’t get to the hotlines. They couldn’t get out of their house to escape.
Those--the levels now are sort of back where they were pre-pandemic in terms of the hotline and shelters. But what’s happening is, there’s just no money. We talked a little bit about Representatives Speier and Dingell earmarking, you know, several hundred million dollars. The entire Violence Against Women Act was only--at its last passage was only $500 million. It’s just nothing. It is just nothing when you consider the unbelievable catastrophic effects on so many different social issues that we’re--that we’re facing today. It’s not--it’s not an isolated event, domestic violence. It interacts with homelessness, it interacts with mental health, it interacts with mass shootings and lost wages and all kinds of other, you know, medical bills and things like that--so all kinds of other issues that we face.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: Margarita, there was surge of unemployment created by the pandemic. How do you see this playing into these problems going ahead?
MS. GUZMÁN: I mean, it’s been one of the single most devastating, you know, events to happen to our communities. They were suddenly--just suddenly left with absolutely no resources, and we were part of--we’ve served communities for whom the safety net did not activate, right? They weren’t getting stimulus benefits. They weren’t qualified for unemployment benefits. They were people who had historically participated in exploited labor and were abused in the workplace in addition to other places.
The recovery from this is something that can be an opportunity for transformation, right? We don’t necessarily want our communities going back to underpaid exploited labor practices. We want them to be able to build out and re-envision an economic future that creates sustainable paths for them and their children for the long run.
One of the things that we do in our organization is that we help survivors to establish small businesses. And during the pandemic that switched up to online sales. So, we do a lot of work with vendors here and survivors to helping them to get their licenses, make sure that they’re getting lawyers and legal services so that their businesses are properly registered and they’re paying their taxes. We want to be able to continue that in an online form so that they can continue to sustain themselves beyond this.
But I do think that along with the rest of, you know, non-profit sector and private sector re-envisioning what workplace practices looked like going forward after the pandemic, we’re also really thinking about how survivors can sustain themselves economically in a way that is re-envisioning going forward, where they are their supervisors, their own bosses.
We established a cooperative last year, and that’s a cooperative that’s run by and for domestic violence survivors, all of whom are immigrants and they’re all their own bosses now. And that certainly suffered a great hit during the pandemic. They lost a lot of members because they weren’t able to sustain that business at the time. They’re coming back slowly, and with a lot of support from our organization and through other small business development initiatives are really able to sustain that going forward.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: We’re getting very close to the end of time, but we have some audience questions and I’d like, if I can, to ask you each one of them. The first one, Margarita, is for you. And it comes to me from Amy from Virginia, who says, "Restraining orders are ineffective in preventing harm. What ideas do you have to prevent further harm against victims under threat?"
MS. GUZMÁN: So, I think that the effectiveness of restraining orders might really depend on the jurisdiction’s enforcement of them. And you're going to see that in Virginia--it might not feel as effective in New York City. It is a fact that when people have an order of protection, violence against them is reduced significantly by about 86 percent. So, the question is whether the order of protection is the right answer for that particular situation.
Other opportunities might exist like community-based interventions where there are, you know, opportunities to engage the person who is being abusive in a different way. And I know that Rachel speaks to this so brilliantly in her book. But the--part of the challenge is that we’re only addressing the survivors’ needs and not thinking about how we’re engaging the abusive partner, and we can’t solve the problem with only half the equation being addressed. So, I think that those are--
MS. STEAD SELLERS: You know--I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt you. I thought you’d finished. But it brings me exactly to a question for Rachel. And it comes from a man writing from California. This is John, and he asks, "How do we educate and discuss domestic violence with young people and guide them in a way where we break the generational cycle of violence that exists in the home?" What an important question.
MS. SNYDER: That’s a really important question. And I think the first thing we have to do is get kids, young kids involved at ages that probably would be very surprising to us. What the research says is middle school, sometimes even elementary school. They have to learn that what they may witness in their own homes is not--is not normal. And there’s a lot of effective programming around there. Futures Without Violence has a wonderful peer education program. My daughter, in fact, is a youth ambassador for them, I’m proud to say.
Also, Yeardly Love, if you remember the case, she was killed at the University of Virginia some years ago. Her mother started the One Love Foundation. It is--it is probably the best resource I know where kids can get questions, answers, they can download apps, because I think--I think there is this idea of not quite knowing what’s okay and what’s not okay.
And of course, we see violence against women everywhere. I mean, every cop show I turn on starts with the dead body of a woman, right? And so, I think we need to complicate those narratives. I think we need more diverse voices in every room, every room of our culture.
And you know, I’m really--Margarita, I’m really glad that you brought up some of the things that you brought up because I feel like--with the question from Virginia, I feel like one of the things that is so important that we don’t talk about enough is the responsibility that we have to try and get that abuser to be not violent, right? We tell victims to leave. We tell them to go to shelter. To me, that seems ridiculous. Why are we putting the impetus for change on the victim of a crime, right? Let’s put the impetus for change on the person who is doing the harm. So, that’s my two cents.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: Thank you both very much. I mean, that’s a huge message at the end, changing where the--we put the impetus for change. Rachel and Margarita, many, many thanks for joining us today.
MS. GUZMÁN: Thank you for having us.
MS. SNYDER: Thank you.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: That’s all we have time for. I’m Frances Stead Sellers from The Washington Post. If you want to see more of our upcoming programming and register for it, please go to WashingtonPostLive.com. Thank you for joining us.
