National Coalition Against Domestic Violence - Excerpt from Women of the Underground: Resistance
Zora Burden: How did you get involved with advocacy and activism?
Rose Garrity: I was born the oldest of five children in a very poor family during the generation that followed the Great Depression. I was living in poverty with my four siblings, my mom and my grandparents. We lived with my grandparents because my
mom was divorced from an alcoholic man who beat her. She worked in a silk mill and I think she got something like 20 dollars a week for that. We were extremely poor. I also was a very curious child. I learned very quickly. I always wanted to know everything. We lived in a town of about 500 people and had a small, one room library that was serviced by a larger library in the county, so they did get book changes periodically. When I started to read, I would go to the library and bring home anywhere from 10 to 20 books a week. I spent my childhood essentially reading when I wasn’t out playing with other kids. I also spent my childhood as the target of a lot of gossip and being ostracized for a couple of reasons. We were poor and we were obviously unable to dress like the other children, we didn’t have a vehicle, we didn’t have many of the things that other children had. I was extremely skinny as a child. I was also big for my age, so I always felt gangly. At age 10, I was pretty fully developed. I was even taller than my mom. That kind of shows how big I was. Those things, even though it sounds unrelated, all related to my sense of feeling outside the norm, outside of others and ostracized.
So, I was always curious about things that seemed unfair. I remember a neighbor who worked in a kitchen of this exclusive boy’s school and the chauffeur for the school was an African American man who came in a long limousine to pick her up every day to take her to work. It was the first time I had even seen a person of color in my life. One day I was walking to my grandmother’s house and he pulled up beside me and asked me where I was going. I said, “To my grandmother’s.” So, he said, “Well, get in and I’ll give you a ride.” I was taught to obey adults and never told anything about stranger danger, so I crawled into the car to get a ride. He was joking with me and he seemed like such a nice man. He dropped me off and it was a pretty amazing experience for me when I learned to not fear someone I had been told to fear. That was just a small example. I knew there were people of color in the world and when we got a television, I was able to see shows like Amos ‘n’ Andy who didn’t seem like real people to me at all. The racist implications were seen by everybody. When I was in Jr High, I experienced even further alienation. The only advantage I had was that I was getting better grades and smarter than most of them. So, they all kind of leaned on me for help with their schoolwork but I still got ostracized, ridiculed and wasn’t part of the in group. That, plus seeing my mother abused and knowing that we were ridiculed, stirred up a strong sense of injustice. I really fought injustice and reacted to it from an early age. When I was 13, I met a guy who started chasing me every week and I ended up going to the movies with him. He decided to claim me and raped me at age 14. So, when I’m 15, I was married. At 17, I had my first kid. I had five children in six and half years and I was severely beaten in the marriage. So, there’s another place where I developed a very strong reaction to abuse and injustice and oppression. During that marriage, I listened to his racist rants and felt appalled by them. It wasn’t right.
ZV: Did you have to marry the man who raped you? You hear about this happening in other countries where a woman is forced to marry her rapist because her value is gone after losing her virginity. How did you cope with that?
RG: I was pretty young. I was 13 when I met him. He raped me when I was 14 and I didn’t like him that much. He chased me and he was forceful. He was big and strong and muscular. He was a farm boy who was three years older than me as well. Once he raped me, I was his property and I felt there was no way for me to escape. My family said that I had to go out with him or nobody. So, when he asked my parents to sign for him to take me to a state where it was legal to get married at my age, they signed and off we went. I didn’t want that. I wanted to stay in school and go to college, but it wasn’t allowed. I was a virgin and didn’t even know what sex was when he raped me. I then belonged to him forever. He believed a woman was the property of a man. I lived in a marriage that was full of misogyny and violence and fear. It was a marriage I was very unhappy with from the beginning but then I had children and I adored my children. If you can I imagine what it was like for my children to have gone through the divorce and a father who demonized me and never admitted to his violence. He was doing a lot of drinking at that time. When I was 31 years old and divorced, I had never been with anyone but him. The rapes continued in the marriage. I just lived with what I felt I had to live with. When I got ready to get divorced, the first thing the lawyer said to me was, “What man is going to want you if you get divorced and with those kids?” That was awful. That’s what things were like back then, not that there still isn’t a lot of the same thing going on now. I did love my in-laws, I was very involved with my mother-in-law. She was like a mother to me. After 15 years of that marriage, building a business and being beaten, I was able to get an Order of Protection, before there were such things as battered women’s programs or domestic violence programs as they’re called today. I had a friend who worked in a probation department talk to me about an Order of Protection, which I got. I proceeded with the divorce. It was a very long process of horror, of being stalked, broken into, threatened, my children being kidnapped. There was a lot of pressure and hate from his family members because of lies he told about me.
From there, I went back to school and worked in sociology and psychology. I then went to work at a community college running a community education program and built it up into a multimillion dollar training program at the community college. From there I went to work at a major university where I was assisting the president. I couldn’t stand the structure of it after a while. I left that work because I thought it was really pressured and I hated the academic environment. It was a really dog eat dog, vicious environment of one-upmanship. In the meantime, I met some radical people and started working on underground newspapers. I was helping to put out a workers newspaper but people tried to run us down at 4 or 5 o’clock in the morning when we were trying to reach the workers. I was also working to develop a shelter for battered women and a rape crisis center. We got the rape crisis center open and as soon as we opened it, we discovered most of the calls were from women being beaten. It wasn’t long after that, we were able to open our first shelter in our region. The shelter was in Green County, New York. We originally named it S.O.S.
The group of us who started it, meant for it to stand for Save Our Sisters but of course it’s also the international distress signal. That was kind of the core of my early years in activism. The program ran for a few years and I was able to work there as well but it was gradually taken over and co-opted by people who had no feminist politics and have no analysis of racism and oppression. After a few years there, I left and started my own program in the neighboring county so that we could have a program that was political in the sense of doing my work within an anti-oppression analysis. Both programs are still going. I’ve worked for almost 30 years in the one I started in the next county.
Now I’m retired from there. I’ve done anti-racism work most of my adult life. As well as anti-violence against women work and other kinds of anti-oppression work within a real strong analysis about justice and equality or addressing inequality. That’s been my life’s work and where my heart lies. Now, as a retired person, I’m still doing it. I’m doing trainings and I do a lot of writing. I wrote an article on co-optation of the domestic violence field quite a few years back and got published in the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence newsletter called Voice. I’ve always belonged to state coalitions and national coalitions. I’ve been on the National Coalition Board for a while and also served as the president. I came to that coalition work out of my long history of doing domestic violence work. I still write for radical newspapers and I still do activism. I worked with a small group in Tioga County, New York, who met to discuss ways that readdress the danger and lack of safety that many of us felt under the election of Trump as President. Which was frightening to many of us and the news was just full of attacks on marginalized groups in the name of Trump. We were meeting with community folks to try and organize larger groups of people to understand how we could address this issue and try to stay safe and do things that will
impact the national scene. Much of that is about anti-racism. I’m working with a national group called Standing Up for Racial Justice, providing training for a phone bank. A major part of our work is supporting the Black Lives Matter Movement. After my 15-year marriage to a rural white man who was racist and violent, I was with an African American man, who was my partner for 36 years. He passed away from lack of good health care. He was a Green Beret in the Army and died a horrible death with heart failure, kidney failure and COPD. Being with him all those years, he really sharpened my eyes in terms of seeing racism from more of an inside view. I helped raise his four kids and he helped raise my four kids, so we have a multiracial family. So that was a part of my growth as well.
ZB: What an incredible history you have. I’m truly sorry to hear about your partner. Will you talk about how all this led up to the formation of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence?
RG: I am now the president of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence. I also spent 10 years on the Board of Directors of the New York State Coalition Against Domestic Violence and two years as its president. During those years, I was also on the Board of Directors of the New York State Coalition Against Sexual Assault. That program was a domestic violence center, with a shelter and also a rape crisis program. I’ve done work with sexual assault for all of my adult life. Sexual assault and domestic violence to me are two faces of the same horrible animal of misogyny, oppression of women and male privilege. I became president of the National Coalition Board and to my knowledge, it is the only organization in the country, that was started in 1978, as a grass roots organization built by activists who were advocates for battered women. They wanted to develop a national organization that would become the voice for battered women, not to take their voice but to expand their voice and take leadership from the members of that oppressed group and use
that information to do activist work in public policy. Also, providing information to change society through local programs, to help local programs to have the skills and tools that they need to provide programs that really drive change in addition to helping individual survivors. We are aware that many women die every day and when we use that kind of tacit voice, we don’t say the truth, many women are murdered every week by the men that they have been partnered with. Whether they are married or not. It’s what our wonderful leader Diana Russell, who has written many books about misogyny, calls Femicide and it is Femicide. Women are murdered every single day by men who feel the right to own and control them. By men who think that once they own a woman by marrying her or having her in their life, that woman has no right to leave or break up with him and that she is his property forever until she dies. They will murder women who are trying to escape. One of the most dangerous things a battered woman can do is leave or attempt to leave. People say, “Why does she stay?” What they fail to understand is many women stay out of sheer terror because he owns her and he will kill her if she tries to leave. This has been shown to happen over and over again. We all have many, many horror stories of women who have been murdered in the period of time when they are trying to escape or right after they do escape.
ZB: Do you think restraining orders actually help or can they make things worse?
RG: Restraining orders can help if they are properly enforced and if the person who is the target, the victim, has a safe place to go where the abuser can’t get to her. Also, once that happens and she leaves, say she goes to a shelter, she could stay up to a year but usually it’s a month to three months on average. If he can find her when she gets out of the shelter, he will kill her. So, they work of a man is willing to abide by them. Often, he is not, sometimes he will. The problem is that our so called criminal judicial system is not adequately interested in protecting women and holding men accountable. Misogyny is throughout all of the system and battered women are frequently blamed rather than blaming the person who is beating and terrorizing them. Batterers are terrorists and women are living with terrorists. That is just a fact.
ZB: What about women who are living in a rental situation where landlords can evict them under the nuisance law, if the police are called to the property too often? Some women are afraid to call the police on their abuser because they don’t want to get evicted and become homeless, even if the neighbor calls on their behalf. I read it’s more the police who are pressuring landlords to evict since they get tired of coming out and dealing with domestic violence. How can we address this issue?
RG: There are laws being passed in a number of states to address this issue because it’s quite common that women can be become evicted and lose their homes because of the abuse. Many women will beg not to have the police called. It’s quite common. Most state coalitions and national coalitions address this issue quite frequently. There are differences in every state and each has their own legislation to address such issues. But I can’t tell you which states have addressed it best or addressed it at all. I know when you’re working with a Federal organization such as HUD, there are laws in the Violence Against Women Act and there are Federal statutes that look at it and try to make changes in the rules that affect subsidized housing like Section 8.
ZB: Does your organization work with male victims of domestic abuse and same sex couples? Are they protected under the same laws and taken as seriously by the police as domestic abuse between a man and a woman?
RG: The organizations that I developed and worked with for almost 30 years were very open to any victims. We were very careful to address homophobia and the rights of gay, lesbian, trans and bi partners and sheltered many people, male and female. Of course, it’s about women when in heterosexual relationships but for those in gay or lesbian relationships, it’s a different story. We always try to be completely open to equal access for everybody. In regard to safety, too often the homophobia of a police officer might interfere and sometimes the state law doesn’t include relationships between gays, lesbians, bi or trans partners. Trans people are going through an awful lot of serious terrorism these days. Always did, actually.
ZB: Some states provide funds to help victims of domestic abuse to escape from their abuser, for poor women who are financially vulnerable. What is your opinion of victims of domestic violence in regard to women who have a financial means of escape? How much is domestic abuse a result of socioeconomic issues?
RG: Some people are more vulnerable. There’s no question about that. Does it happen more in poor homes? I don’t believe so. I believe that it happens across the board because misogyny is universal among males. That doesn’t mean I’m saying all men are horrible misogynists. There are men who work hard to address this issue and who are wonderful allies and do what they can to be good partners and allies to women. But when domestic violence is going on in a wealthy family, she has a lot more to lose financially by addressing it and making it known and her partner has a lot more power to hold her back as well. If you’re working with a woman, for instance, who is married to an FBI agent or to a judge or a police chief or married to a doctor, I’ve seen plenty of it. It’s not like it isn’t happening in wealthy families. It’s a little more difficult to address in some ways because the abuser has access to a lot of power and a lot of privilege and will continue to terrorize the victim and make it harder for the victim to get any justice. So that’s kind of important to remember. There are many situations that are difficult to work with, including those where families are living in poverty. I just don’t want anyone to believe it only happens in poor families and doesn’t go on in wealthy families because that just is not true. There are programs who will provide those financial resources. There may be programs where you can get that kind of help if the advocate or the program knows how to access it. My program would provide that by going to organizations where we could get them to fund bus tickets or something to help the person relocate or to escape. There may be states that provide it but I’ve always just worked in New York State. All of us who ran programs anywhere in the country, did get an awful lot of referrals back and forth and we took people in from other states a lot. That is one way that people can escape because there are directories that tell where programs are. Say I’m sitting in Omaha and I’m dealing with a woman who’s maybe come across the border from a state next to mine and she needs to find some place to escape. An advocate from Omaha can look in the national directory and can say to the person, “Where do you want to go?” The woman might say, “Well, maybe the East Coast.” We can look at programs that are near the Eastern part of the country. That’s an escape mechanism that gets used a lot.
ZB: What are the specific functions of your organization? Does it deal with legislation and laws regarding domestic violence?
RG: With the National Coalition, other than receiving calls and making referrals or hooking someone up with a hotline, we don’t address individuals or do work with individuals. When someone calls and we do get those calls from someone who is trying to escape or needs help or needs access to a hotline, we will immediately hook them up with a hotline and give them any information we can to get them help. But to actually take the call and talk with people, that’s not something we routinely do. What we do is taking social action, trying to affect national laws and address legislative issues in Washington. We have a Washington office and a person to address that. We try to stay aware of any legislation that we should be paying attention to, taking action and trying to lobby. We have lobby days every year, when groups of us will come together en mass to Washington, to talk to legislators. In the meantime however, we do have staff that are responding to and addressing those issues with legislators and lobbyists in Washington.
ZB: What laws have you worked on that will further protect victims of domestic abuse and violence?
RG: We have things like the Violence Against Women Act that comes up for renewal periodically, as well as the Federal Violence Against Women Protection Act. We do a lot of outreach and lobbying and action on getting those addressed, renewed and increased, in terms of their funding. It’s possible, that laws to protect women could get pulled back or cancelled or some of the progress that we made could be undone. We’re doing a lot of talk among ourselves about the future.
ZB: What are some of the warning signs of an abuser women should watch for?
RG: There are lots of articles out there on the internet, some are very good and some are dangerous. In general, if we are looking at a heterosexual relationship, these warning signs can apply to same sex relationships as well. Warning signs of an abuser are things like the person being extremely jealous. For instance, “You’re mine. I don’t want you around anybody else or talking to anybody else.” It’s wanting to know what you were doing. Wanting to know where you are every minute. Never wanting you out of their sight. Being very possessive, you belong to me, that kind of thing. Sometimes, it’s being very traditional or old fashioned in the sense that man is the head of the house and women have a specific role which usually is to be subjected to the man’s desires and authority. When you run into a man who says women belong at home or barefoot and pregnant or you have to slap her a couple times to make her see who the boss is, those kinds of things are certainly danger signs. Also, subtle things are being immediately possessive. Or before you even know each other he’s saying, “I never felt like this before. I’m in love with you. I want to marry you. I want us to stay together every minute. I don’t want you talking to anybody else.” Those kinds of things can sound real romantic in the moment but are real danger signals. Sometimes, just knowing that a person you’re with is automatically violent very quickly without all those other things or brags about getting in fights or brags about being dominant.
There are lots of little indications of a person feeling as though they should be dominant and in control. Like telling you what you should be doing all day, each day. “Did you get X, Y, Z done? Who did you talk to today? Where were you? How long did you stay at such and such a place?” His routine really ought to set the antenna up. My caution would be very careful about the websites you take the information from, making sure that it is a legitimate, upstanding organization. It could be the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, the National Network to End Domestic Violence. It could be Futures Without Violence. Ones that are well known to be good organizations, where you can get this kind of information. Same is true for lists of things that would go into an article as to why does anyone stay with an abuser. Most often, it’s about why does a woman stay with an abuser. There are many reasons. One of them is you fall in love and you feel obligated to stay with a person and do the right thing. Especially for women because we are raised to be nurturing and feel like we are the person responsible in the relationship for holding things together and taking care of family issues and love and romance issues. Those are a couple reasons. A small part in the beginning but there are other reasons. Like financial dependence. If you are in a relationship or married to a person who you are totally financially dependent upon, especially if you have children together, it’s very difficult to get away or know how you could survive. The issue of having children together means that you can’t break up with the person without some obligation to see them or be around them because they’re going to want to see their children. No matter what, usually.
The biggest reason though is the fear. There’s a lot of fear. You’re living with a terrorist. They will say that they have friends who will testify that you’re a terrible mother, that you slept around or are a tramp. Terrifying a woman with any kind of threats that can be made. If you’ve lived with a man who’s been abusive to you, or a woman, if you’re in a lesbian relationship, and once in a great while we find a man who has been abused by a woman, it’s usually 75 to 90% of domestic violence in heterosexual relationships is women being abused by men. Men don’t usually have the same kind of fear of women that women have of men because men have automatic control in ways that women don’t. Men have systems of support in male privilege and patriarchy. But the fear that a terrorist engenders in the victim is strong and it is real. “I will kill you if you leave me,” has come through millions of times. Many, many thousands of women are killed over a couple of years by men that they have been romantic with or married to. The fear where they threaten to kill the children is real. We all know of cases where the children are killed or maimed to get at her. We had a case last year, where a woman decided to get a divorce and they had a small girl. Her husband worked in the medical field. He tied the woman up and sliced her Achilles tendons so she couldn’t get up or walk and let her lay there to watch while he murdered the child. Then set the house on fire and killed himself. She was left alive to deal with that. So, when people say, “Why do women stay?” There are those kinds of issues. But they do leave. They leave in droves. Domestic violence shelters all over the country are full of women escaping this kind of abuse. When people say, “Why do women stay?” Or “Why don’t they leave?” It’s a condemning thing towards the victim. It’s a blame the victim issue.
ZB: What in your experience creates the psychology of an abuser? People aren’t born this way. What is generally the cause for abusers to hurt the people that they supposedly love?
RG: I have to start off by saying that intimate partner abuse is not an issue of mental health. People are not abusive because they are mentally ill. Do we occasionally see mental illness causing violence? Yes, occasionally. Although most illness does not cause violence. What creates the psychology of abusers? When you grow up in a society that idolizes dominance, oppression and violence, which we do in this culture, you grow up understanding and believing in dominance. We live in a culture that believes males should be dominant over women and a culture that is full of misogyny. Hatred of women is a real prime root cause of violence against women in general and certainly very involved with men’s violence against women in intimate partner relationships. Women are seen as less than and denigrated in so many ways. In general, it’s just sexism to an extreme. It’s patriarchal attitudes and ideas that creates the psychology of abusers and many abusers have grown up watching men that they’re close to in their lives, being dominant and abusive with women. There’s a general attitude of dominance over women, that men should be the boss, and a lot of males reinforce this together with other males. Another thing is that males, even if they’re not abusive, don’t hold abusive males accountable. It’s put up with, people turn a blind eye, they pretend not to see, they look the other way. We have been running shelters for battered women now since the late 1970s. Certainly in a mass way since the early 1980s. There’s hardly a county any place in our culture, where there’s not a shelter for battered women now. When you think about that, what does it tell us? What does it say about whether we’ve made a dent in our problems of men battering women? Not a lot. Not a whole lot of a dent. This actually grows out into other relationships, be they lesbian, gay or trans people because we all live in a culture that uses the male relationship as the dominant pattern. It is a pattern that one has to be dominant and one submissive. The psychology of an abuser is created the same way we create the psychology of manhood, masculinity, or maleness. You can look at a lot of work by men that have recently started doing some wonderful stuff on addressing this. You can look at Lundy Bancroft and many other men who are doing great work on discussing what it takes to be a man and what is masculinity. A man named John Stoltenberg has been writing about this for decades now. There’s a scholar named Michael Kimmel at Stony Brook University in Long Island, who has written a lot about it. There are many young men today who are writing about this topic wonderfully. There’s a man in Oakland named Paul Kibble who has written amazing work about this. What creates
the psychology of an abuser? It’s created out of a social dynamic of the mandate for rigid gender roles that are reinforced by homophobic people who will say act like a man. Which means don’t cry, don’t be sensitive, don’t be gentle. Be dominant, be the boss. How many times have we heard in the movies, “Get your woman under control. Keep your woman under control. Are you going to let your woman act like that?” That kind of attitude is very common. There are some books on masculinity by some of the most brilliant writers in the country who are addressing this whole issue of rigid gender roles and what is toxic masculinity and why did we get there. Make no mistake, abusers are believing in what males call toxic masculinity.
ZB: Do you think there is a correlation between abusive mentality, misogyny and war or warfare on a global level?
RG: If I spend any time talking about the psychology of abusers, toxic masculinity and gender roles, you have to get into militarism because we live in a culture that is about dominance, control, colonizing, creating empires, and taking over the world. We make military people into heroes in the idea that we go to another country and invade and wage war. It makes us the good guys or dominant guys. When in fact, we’re being used in a horrible way as pawns by the patriarchal, Capitalistic system that is creating these wars to dominate, colonize, create empires, steal their oil and kill people of color in other lands to enrich the coffers of people in this dominant culture. That’s all wound up in the militarism that is related to what creates toxic masculinity. It’s a very complex topic. It’s all there, if anybody wants to open up their eyes and see it. But when you say these things, you get a lot of push back that’s almost violent. And it’s very hate filled if you dare in any way not agree with war or to be pro-peace, saying that you don’t like war. Or if you get into issues like oppression, classism even and question whose children are going to war, whose children are dying in these wars for the enrichment of this nation. When they talk about they’re over there fighting for our freedom, they’re not fighting for our freedom. There’s nothing about what they’re doing that has anything do with our freedom. When we talk about freedom and how much freedom we have, the truth is, we don’t have a whole hell of a lot. If you don’t believe that just start talking out loud in public about Capitalism being wrong and how we ought to be looking at Socialism and see what happens to you. If you believe that we have a lot of freedom, just do something to expose the underhanded, vicious, nasty, evil things that our government is doing. Look at what happens to the whistleblowers. You’ve got to get into all that to really look at the layered dynamics that go towards the creation of what many of us call toxic masculinity. It’s not that men are born that way, certainly not. Men can be just as loving, sweet, sensitive, caring and nurturing as women. And women can be very male identified and vicious in the toxic masculinity role because we are brainwashed in many ways to be like that, whether men or women. Unfortunately, it works best with turning males into these money makers by the empire builders and Capitalism. There are also many books written by the perspective of men as ally to women like Refusal to Be A Man. It talks about the development of masculinity. There are men dealing with this and addressing it. It’s an important topic. There are growing numbers of male allies in our world right now.
ZB: Do you address the issue of emotional abuse, as equally as physical violence? How do you define violence? It seems as if our culture dismisses emotional or psychological abuse.
RG: That is a really big issue. Certainly, it’s not just physical violence. It’s all wound up together, usually, and very often. Hardly ever is there physical violence, unless it also includes emotional violence and terrorism of domestic violence. It’s a really important thing to acknowledge. When you look at the definition of domestic violence, there are a whole range of things that are included. I’m sure anyone who has seen or talked about domestic violence, you’ve seen the Power and Control Wheel. It’s a diagram that shows the elements of abuse. If you picture a line drawing that is a diagram of a wheel with spokes that has a hub, in those spaces between the spokes are different elements of power and control. The rim of the wheel is what holds the whole thing in place. It’s the control dynamic that is wrapped around the wheel. In those spaces between the spokes will be things like male privilege and examples of how it is used to help her be controlled or things like using the children. There will be examples of ways he can use the children to exert his control and make threats. There will be economic abuse and it will list examples of things like not allowing her to know where the money is, not allowing her to have any money, making sure he controls the money, etc. There will be one that says emotional abuse. If you picture these pie shaped pieces around the wheel that say these different things, it will give a broader picture of domestic violence in general, in a relationship and the various elements. The physical violence will be a major part of it and that will have examples in that spoke. There will be the many examples including the emotional abuse. There is one called denying, minimizing, and blaming. It’s making light of what he’s done or making it look like she causes it. There will be a lot of intimidation and terrorism. Abusing or threatening pets is another form of abuse and control. Also, isolation and controlling who she sees or what she does. Coercion and threats will be another one, like making her do illegal things, threatening to commit suicide, making up charges against her, those kinds of things. The pie shaped pieces are the various tactics that are used to maintain power and control. It’s a visual picture of a relationship where abuse is taking place.
ZB: What defines domestic in domestic violence? Does it include relationships where the person does not live with their partner or are just dating?
RG: Absolutely, it’s still intimate partner abuse. Anything involving abuse. We don’t differentiate. It’s partner abuse period.
ZG: Can you advise the safest way a woman can get out of abusive relationships or to diffuse a possible escalation, that could result in a life-threatening situation? What should a woman do when the police believe the man over the woman?
RG: Women who are being abused know what the safest thing is to do with the particular man they have. What women do to stay safe is, they comply with him to the degree they can. They comply all the time. As much as possible. As much as it takes until it’s safe enough to not get seriously damaged or to save the children. That is one of the mechanisms of staying safe, to comply. Without that, they would not be as safe as they are. Sometimes the safest thing a woman can do is comply with him and stay with him, rather than leave and have him take her children away, especially if he has more money than her or more power than her and very often, he does. When people talk about, “Why do women stay?” Women stay to maintain safety as much as anything else. They stay to protect their children or they stay because they’re fearful of the murder he may commit if they leave or what he will do to their mother. The biggest thing battered women can do is comply with their abuser, in order to stay safe. What else can you do? You can learn tactics of planning to escape. Sometimes, that comes from working with a domestic violence advocate and that’s usually done in secret. It’s not done in a way that the abuser can see because if the abuser can see what you’re doing, you’re going to be in danger. If you talk to an advocate who can help you to do things like plan for escape, that will mean setting aside a couple dollars every minute you can someplace where you’ll have it to escape with. It can mean taking a couple sets of clothing and hiding it somewhere, putting it at your mother’s house, or putting it in a bag and have the shelter keep it or a place he would never go, or having your girlfriend take it home with her. Whatever it is, prepare to leave in the most secret and safe way you can by stashing things, by having clothing, by getting all of your important documents in one place and putting them some place where you can get to them, like your children’s birth certificates, your marriage certificate, your bank account numbers, your social security documents, any of that kind of thing. If you can’t remove it or can’t put it some place safe, try and find a way to make copies of it at the very least, that can be stashed some place.
Those are tactics that can begin to be used to plan for an escape and certainly talking to advocates or somebody who will be your mentor, who will keep you safe and intervene for you if necessary. That can even include having a friend in another town that he doesn’t know about. A friend or a relative where you can go and stay, while you’re trying to get into a shelter.
First and foremost, look for a shelter where you can go and be safe in that shelter while you’re finishing up your other plans and have someone helping you to get these plans made. That can include having an advocate help you go to court, getting an Order of Protection, putting it down in the record. Even if it’s just the records in the domestic violence program. Create a record of the abuse some place that is dated to the degree possible. If there is any way you can keep a diary or a secret notebook that you can write down the dates of what he did. Say, on this day he called my work and threatened my job, etc. Those are all planning things. Not every battered woman has that information or the skill to do those things, until or unless, she is working with an advocate who is helping her and showing her how to do it. Men are far more believed by the people in the system than women are. That’s just the way the system is. It’s a patriarchy system, set up by men for men to serve men, period. It’s sexist and misogynistic. You shouldn’t trust the police. Although, I don’t want to say for a minute there aren’t some good police, that wouldn’t be fair. But the truth is that they are part of a patriarchal system. They have been trained by males in a system set up by males, to serve males. I mean white males. Black males and women who get involved with the police accept that dynamic and work within that dynamic because otherwise there’s no way they could keep a job or work in the system. That’s why we still have as much domestic violence as we ever did. There’s never been a system that was set up to hold men accountable for what it is they believe they have the right to do. As long as we live in a patriarchal, Capitalistic system, we won’t have change. It’s not just patriarchal and Capitalistic, it’s also very racist. Many times, abusers will set the woman up to be accused of what it is that he does. That is one thing abusers do better than anybody else.
ZB: Do you think that the objectification of women in our Capitalist society, which uses sexuality and our bodies to sell products, along with oppressive institutions like beauty pageants, creates abuse as well?
RG: I do. It’s part of women being less than and are a decorative object rather than a human being. All kinds of objectification of women are part of the whole idea of how abuse is perpetrated and maintained. If you’re not a less than human decorative object and if you’re a fully equal human being, how do you own her or maintain power and control? It’s just like the way slavery was maintained, by the scientist who colluded in the idea of turning people of color into less than full human beings. therefore, they had to be used and controlled and beaten.
ZB: Can an abuser ever really change? A lot of women stay in abusive relationships because they believe a man can change.
RG: Yes, of course, anybody who wants to change, can change. The next questions are, how and why would they change? If they’re getting everything they want by being an abuser and they really believe in the dynamic of ownership, control, domination and male privilege, why would they change? But can they change? Yes. Have some changed? Yes. Does it happen very often? No. There are a lot of abuser programs out there that claim they can change men. They haven’t changed men, unless the men themselves want to be changed. It happens when men truly want to change what they’re doing because they realize it’s wrong and that it’s abusive and that they themselves will benefit by changing. Because they can then have an honest and real loving relationship that isn’t based on his control of her, which could then be an equal relationship. What people should be telling battered women who think that their man is going to change because they want to believe they can, of course, they do. We all want to have that hope but what we tell people is make your plans right now based on the man you know you have, not the man you hope they will become.
ZB: How do you advise women cope in this current environment of male entitlement, harassment, and sexual assault that has been emboldened after the Trump administration? There were thousands of stories in the social media group Pantsuit Nation of girls and women being harassed, harmed, beaten and raped just weeks after Trump’s election.
RG: We can organize like we did in the 1960s and ’70s and begin to get together and tell each other’s truths. We need to start to document these things. Like on this date, at this time, I was in the park on my lunch break and six young boys approached me, sexually harassing me and taunting me with, “What are you going to do about it?” What we do is, we get together and start telling each other our stories and we work with the male allies, who are interested in hearing our stories. There’s an organization called National Organization for Men Against Sexism. They have a website and every woman should take a look. They are men who are very good allies to us women. That happens to be one of the groups who are wonderful allies to women and have women as members. I’m actually on the national leadership council of that organization. We’ve got to get together, organize, work with each
other, tell each other our truths, document these truths and appeal to wherever we need to appeal. With president Trump, who had the KKK behind him, who David Duke had celebrated and voted for, he named members of white supremacist groups to his cabinet. Trump is a misogynist, racist, Capitalist pig and he’s a liar. He’s also, I believe, a sociopath. We’ve got to fight back. All of us have got to organize together and fight back. We must. There’s always been Resistance Movements. Even amid the worst aspects of controlling us. Go back to the McCarthy years and you’ll see what I mean. There has always been and always will be a Resistance. It’s often not safe. Look how many people got killed fighting for Civil Rights in the Civil Rights Movement. It’s always been there. It will always be there. Look how many thousands of lynchings were perpetrated against people of color. When the Civil Rights Movement was being developed and people like Martin Luther King Jr were deliberately called Communists and their organization was infiltrated by the FBI and the CIA, they did everything they could to demonize and discredit activists. Don’t think for a minute they aren’t still doing it because they are. We’ve got to resist in any way. We must resist. It’s not a pretty picture but it is what it is. There are enough left-over decent people at this point, who’ve been through watching all these movements develop and succeed that we may have more allies than we think out there.
ZB: Where else can people learn more about you and your organization? What else would you like people to know about you and your work?
RG: I was filmed in a PBS series called Makers: Women Who Make America. It’s a whole series about women who helped make the world, essentially. I had done an interview with Stephanie Combs when she was writing her book, that looked back at the popular book by Betty Friedan called The Feminine Mystique. I had read that book and it had quite an impact on me. I was contacted by the producers of Makers. My whole career in activism has not only been about domestic violence. I’ve done a lot of anti-racism activism, teaching and writing. I really work hard on oppression and economic justice. Where we are right now is how we change our system. Which means we have got to take a look at Capitalism being the root of almost all of our problems. Until then, we aren’t going to change anything. My activism over the years has evolved into where I am now, in my early ’70s, as a continuing change agent, resister and organizer. I will do that as long as I can breathe. Over the years, I have done a lot of things, like putting out underground newspapers, writing, organization, marching, protesting, trying to get people to come together to make a difference. Can we, across this nation, create a broad enough group of people who are brave enough and dedicated enough to try and save us? Resistance has been alive as long as humans have. That’s the only way we can keep moving forward.
Zora Burden: How did you get involved with advocacy and activism?
Rose Garrity: I was born the oldest of five children in a very poor family during the generation that followed the Great Depression. I was living in poverty with my four siblings, my mom and my grandparents. We lived with my grandparents because my
mom was divorced from an alcoholic man who beat her. She worked in a silk mill and I think she got something like 20 dollars a week for that. We were extremely poor. I also was a very curious child. I learned very quickly. I always wanted to know everything. We lived in a town of about 500 people and had a small, one room library that was serviced by a larger library in the county, so they did get book changes periodically. When I started to read, I would go to the library and bring home anywhere from 10 to 20 books a week. I spent my childhood essentially reading when I wasn’t out playing with other kids. I also spent my childhood as the target of a lot of gossip and being ostracized for a couple of reasons. We were poor and we were obviously unable to dress like the other children, we didn’t have a vehicle, we didn’t have many of the things that other children had. I was extremely skinny as a child. I was also big for my age, so I always felt gangly. At age 10, I was pretty fully developed. I was even taller than my mom. That kind of shows how big I was. Those things, even though it sounds unrelated, all related to my sense of feeling outside the norm, outside of others and ostracized.
So, I was always curious about things that seemed unfair. I remember a neighbor who worked in a kitchen of this exclusive boy’s school and the chauffeur for the school was an African American man who came in a long limousine to pick her up every day to take her to work. It was the first time I had even seen a person of color in my life. One day I was walking to my grandmother’s house and he pulled up beside me and asked me where I was going. I said, “To my grandmother’s.” So, he said, “Well, get in and I’ll give you a ride.” I was taught to obey adults and never told anything about stranger danger, so I crawled into the car to get a ride. He was joking with me and he seemed like such a nice man. He dropped me off and it was a pretty amazing experience for me when I learned to not fear someone I had been told to fear. That was just a small example. I knew there were people of color in the world and when we got a television, I was able to see shows like Amos ‘n’ Andy who didn’t seem like real people to me at all. The racist implications were seen by everybody. When I was in Jr High, I experienced even further alienation. The only advantage I had was that I was getting better grades and smarter than most of them. So, they all kind of leaned on me for help with their schoolwork but I still got ostracized, ridiculed and wasn’t part of the in group. That, plus seeing my mother abused and knowing that we were ridiculed, stirred up a strong sense of injustice. I really fought injustice and reacted to it from an early age. When I was 13, I met a guy who started chasing me every week and I ended up going to the movies with him. He decided to claim me and raped me at age 14. So, when I’m 15, I was married. At 17, I had my first kid. I had five children in six and half years and I was severely beaten in the marriage. So, there’s another place where I developed a very strong reaction to abuse and injustice and oppression. During that marriage, I listened to his racist rants and felt appalled by them. It wasn’t right.
ZV: Did you have to marry the man who raped you? You hear about this happening in other countries where a woman is forced to marry her rapist because her value is gone after losing her virginity. How did you cope with that?
RG: I was pretty young. I was 13 when I met him. He raped me when I was 14 and I didn’t like him that much. He chased me and he was forceful. He was big and strong and muscular. He was a farm boy who was three years older than me as well. Once he raped me, I was his property and I felt there was no way for me to escape. My family said that I had to go out with him or nobody. So, when he asked my parents to sign for him to take me to a state where it was legal to get married at my age, they signed and off we went. I didn’t want that. I wanted to stay in school and go to college, but it wasn’t allowed. I was a virgin and didn’t even know what sex was when he raped me. I then belonged to him forever. He believed a woman was the property of a man. I lived in a marriage that was full of misogyny and violence and fear. It was a marriage I was very unhappy with from the beginning but then I had children and I adored my children. If you can I imagine what it was like for my children to have gone through the divorce and a father who demonized me and never admitted to his violence. He was doing a lot of drinking at that time. When I was 31 years old and divorced, I had never been with anyone but him. The rapes continued in the marriage. I just lived with what I felt I had to live with. When I got ready to get divorced, the first thing the lawyer said to me was, “What man is going to want you if you get divorced and with those kids?” That was awful. That’s what things were like back then, not that there still isn’t a lot of the same thing going on now. I did love my in-laws, I was very involved with my mother-in-law. She was like a mother to me. After 15 years of that marriage, building a business and being beaten, I was able to get an Order of Protection, before there were such things as battered women’s programs or domestic violence programs as they’re called today. I had a friend who worked in a probation department talk to me about an Order of Protection, which I got. I proceeded with the divorce. It was a very long process of horror, of being stalked, broken into, threatened, my children being kidnapped. There was a lot of pressure and hate from his family members because of lies he told about me.
From there, I went back to school and worked in sociology and psychology. I then went to work at a community college running a community education program and built it up into a multimillion dollar training program at the community college. From there I went to work at a major university where I was assisting the president. I couldn’t stand the structure of it after a while. I left that work because I thought it was really pressured and I hated the academic environment. It was a really dog eat dog, vicious environment of one-upmanship. In the meantime, I met some radical people and started working on underground newspapers. I was helping to put out a workers newspaper but people tried to run us down at 4 or 5 o’clock in the morning when we were trying to reach the workers. I was also working to develop a shelter for battered women and a rape crisis center. We got the rape crisis center open and as soon as we opened it, we discovered most of the calls were from women being beaten. It wasn’t long after that, we were able to open our first shelter in our region. The shelter was in Green County, New York. We originally named it S.O.S.
The group of us who started it, meant for it to stand for Save Our Sisters but of course it’s also the international distress signal. That was kind of the core of my early years in activism. The program ran for a few years and I was able to work there as well but it was gradually taken over and co-opted by people who had no feminist politics and have no analysis of racism and oppression. After a few years there, I left and started my own program in the neighboring county so that we could have a program that was political in the sense of doing my work within an anti-oppression analysis. Both programs are still going. I’ve worked for almost 30 years in the one I started in the next county.
Now I’m retired from there. I’ve done anti-racism work most of my adult life. As well as anti-violence against women work and other kinds of anti-oppression work within a real strong analysis about justice and equality or addressing inequality. That’s been my life’s work and where my heart lies. Now, as a retired person, I’m still doing it. I’m doing trainings and I do a lot of writing. I wrote an article on co-optation of the domestic violence field quite a few years back and got published in the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence newsletter called Voice. I’ve always belonged to state coalitions and national coalitions. I’ve been on the National Coalition Board for a while and also served as the president. I came to that coalition work out of my long history of doing domestic violence work. I still write for radical newspapers and I still do activism. I worked with a small group in Tioga County, New York, who met to discuss ways that readdress the danger and lack of safety that many of us felt under the election of Trump as President. Which was frightening to many of us and the news was just full of attacks on marginalized groups in the name of Trump. We were meeting with community folks to try and organize larger groups of people to understand how we could address this issue and try to stay safe and do things that will
impact the national scene. Much of that is about anti-racism. I’m working with a national group called Standing Up for Racial Justice, providing training for a phone bank. A major part of our work is supporting the Black Lives Matter Movement. After my 15-year marriage to a rural white man who was racist and violent, I was with an African American man, who was my partner for 36 years. He passed away from lack of good health care. He was a Green Beret in the Army and died a horrible death with heart failure, kidney failure and COPD. Being with him all those years, he really sharpened my eyes in terms of seeing racism from more of an inside view. I helped raise his four kids and he helped raise my four kids, so we have a multiracial family. So that was a part of my growth as well.
ZB: What an incredible history you have. I’m truly sorry to hear about your partner. Will you talk about how all this led up to the formation of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence?
RG: I am now the president of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence. I also spent 10 years on the Board of Directors of the New York State Coalition Against Domestic Violence and two years as its president. During those years, I was also on the Board of Directors of the New York State Coalition Against Sexual Assault. That program was a domestic violence center, with a shelter and also a rape crisis program. I’ve done work with sexual assault for all of my adult life. Sexual assault and domestic violence to me are two faces of the same horrible animal of misogyny, oppression of women and male privilege. I became president of the National Coalition Board and to my knowledge, it is the only organization in the country, that was started in 1978, as a grass roots organization built by activists who were advocates for battered women. They wanted to develop a national organization that would become the voice for battered women, not to take their voice but to expand their voice and take leadership from the members of that oppressed group and use
that information to do activist work in public policy. Also, providing information to change society through local programs, to help local programs to have the skills and tools that they need to provide programs that really drive change in addition to helping individual survivors. We are aware that many women die every day and when we use that kind of tacit voice, we don’t say the truth, many women are murdered every week by the men that they have been partnered with. Whether they are married or not. It’s what our wonderful leader Diana Russell, who has written many books about misogyny, calls Femicide and it is Femicide. Women are murdered every single day by men who feel the right to own and control them. By men who think that once they own a woman by marrying her or having her in their life, that woman has no right to leave or break up with him and that she is his property forever until she dies. They will murder women who are trying to escape. One of the most dangerous things a battered woman can do is leave or attempt to leave. People say, “Why does she stay?” What they fail to understand is many women stay out of sheer terror because he owns her and he will kill her if she tries to leave. This has been shown to happen over and over again. We all have many, many horror stories of women who have been murdered in the period of time when they are trying to escape or right after they do escape.
ZB: Do you think restraining orders actually help or can they make things worse?
RG: Restraining orders can help if they are properly enforced and if the person who is the target, the victim, has a safe place to go where the abuser can’t get to her. Also, once that happens and she leaves, say she goes to a shelter, she could stay up to a year but usually it’s a month to three months on average. If he can find her when she gets out of the shelter, he will kill her. So, they work of a man is willing to abide by them. Often, he is not, sometimes he will. The problem is that our so called criminal judicial system is not adequately interested in protecting women and holding men accountable. Misogyny is throughout all of the system and battered women are frequently blamed rather than blaming the person who is beating and terrorizing them. Batterers are terrorists and women are living with terrorists. That is just a fact.
ZB: What about women who are living in a rental situation where landlords can evict them under the nuisance law, if the police are called to the property too often? Some women are afraid to call the police on their abuser because they don’t want to get evicted and become homeless, even if the neighbor calls on their behalf. I read it’s more the police who are pressuring landlords to evict since they get tired of coming out and dealing with domestic violence. How can we address this issue?
RG: There are laws being passed in a number of states to address this issue because it’s quite common that women can be become evicted and lose their homes because of the abuse. Many women will beg not to have the police called. It’s quite common. Most state coalitions and national coalitions address this issue quite frequently. There are differences in every state and each has their own legislation to address such issues. But I can’t tell you which states have addressed it best or addressed it at all. I know when you’re working with a Federal organization such as HUD, there are laws in the Violence Against Women Act and there are Federal statutes that look at it and try to make changes in the rules that affect subsidized housing like Section 8.
ZB: Does your organization work with male victims of domestic abuse and same sex couples? Are they protected under the same laws and taken as seriously by the police as domestic abuse between a man and a woman?
RG: The organizations that I developed and worked with for almost 30 years were very open to any victims. We were very careful to address homophobia and the rights of gay, lesbian, trans and bi partners and sheltered many people, male and female. Of course, it’s about women when in heterosexual relationships but for those in gay or lesbian relationships, it’s a different story. We always try to be completely open to equal access for everybody. In regard to safety, too often the homophobia of a police officer might interfere and sometimes the state law doesn’t include relationships between gays, lesbians, bi or trans partners. Trans people are going through an awful lot of serious terrorism these days. Always did, actually.
ZB: Some states provide funds to help victims of domestic abuse to escape from their abuser, for poor women who are financially vulnerable. What is your opinion of victims of domestic violence in regard to women who have a financial means of escape? How much is domestic abuse a result of socioeconomic issues?
RG: Some people are more vulnerable. There’s no question about that. Does it happen more in poor homes? I don’t believe so. I believe that it happens across the board because misogyny is universal among males. That doesn’t mean I’m saying all men are horrible misogynists. There are men who work hard to address this issue and who are wonderful allies and do what they can to be good partners and allies to women. But when domestic violence is going on in a wealthy family, she has a lot more to lose financially by addressing it and making it known and her partner has a lot more power to hold her back as well. If you’re working with a woman, for instance, who is married to an FBI agent or to a judge or a police chief or married to a doctor, I’ve seen plenty of it. It’s not like it isn’t happening in wealthy families. It’s a little more difficult to address in some ways because the abuser has access to a lot of power and a lot of privilege and will continue to terrorize the victim and make it harder for the victim to get any justice. So that’s kind of important to remember. There are many situations that are difficult to work with, including those where families are living in poverty. I just don’t want anyone to believe it only happens in poor families and doesn’t go on in wealthy families because that just is not true. There are programs who will provide those financial resources. There may be programs where you can get that kind of help if the advocate or the program knows how to access it. My program would provide that by going to organizations where we could get them to fund bus tickets or something to help the person relocate or to escape. There may be states that provide it but I’ve always just worked in New York State. All of us who ran programs anywhere in the country, did get an awful lot of referrals back and forth and we took people in from other states a lot. That is one way that people can escape because there are directories that tell where programs are. Say I’m sitting in Omaha and I’m dealing with a woman who’s maybe come across the border from a state next to mine and she needs to find some place to escape. An advocate from Omaha can look in the national directory and can say to the person, “Where do you want to go?” The woman might say, “Well, maybe the East Coast.” We can look at programs that are near the Eastern part of the country. That’s an escape mechanism that gets used a lot.
ZB: What are the specific functions of your organization? Does it deal with legislation and laws regarding domestic violence?
RG: With the National Coalition, other than receiving calls and making referrals or hooking someone up with a hotline, we don’t address individuals or do work with individuals. When someone calls and we do get those calls from someone who is trying to escape or needs help or needs access to a hotline, we will immediately hook them up with a hotline and give them any information we can to get them help. But to actually take the call and talk with people, that’s not something we routinely do. What we do is taking social action, trying to affect national laws and address legislative issues in Washington. We have a Washington office and a person to address that. We try to stay aware of any legislation that we should be paying attention to, taking action and trying to lobby. We have lobby days every year, when groups of us will come together en mass to Washington, to talk to legislators. In the meantime however, we do have staff that are responding to and addressing those issues with legislators and lobbyists in Washington.
ZB: What laws have you worked on that will further protect victims of domestic abuse and violence?
RG: We have things like the Violence Against Women Act that comes up for renewal periodically, as well as the Federal Violence Against Women Protection Act. We do a lot of outreach and lobbying and action on getting those addressed, renewed and increased, in terms of their funding. It’s possible, that laws to protect women could get pulled back or cancelled or some of the progress that we made could be undone. We’re doing a lot of talk among ourselves about the future.
ZB: What are some of the warning signs of an abuser women should watch for?
RG: There are lots of articles out there on the internet, some are very good and some are dangerous. In general, if we are looking at a heterosexual relationship, these warning signs can apply to same sex relationships as well. Warning signs of an abuser are things like the person being extremely jealous. For instance, “You’re mine. I don’t want you around anybody else or talking to anybody else.” It’s wanting to know what you were doing. Wanting to know where you are every minute. Never wanting you out of their sight. Being very possessive, you belong to me, that kind of thing. Sometimes, it’s being very traditional or old fashioned in the sense that man is the head of the house and women have a specific role which usually is to be subjected to the man’s desires and authority. When you run into a man who says women belong at home or barefoot and pregnant or you have to slap her a couple times to make her see who the boss is, those kinds of things are certainly danger signs. Also, subtle things are being immediately possessive. Or before you even know each other he’s saying, “I never felt like this before. I’m in love with you. I want to marry you. I want us to stay together every minute. I don’t want you talking to anybody else.” Those kinds of things can sound real romantic in the moment but are real danger signals. Sometimes, just knowing that a person you’re with is automatically violent very quickly without all those other things or brags about getting in fights or brags about being dominant.
There are lots of little indications of a person feeling as though they should be dominant and in control. Like telling you what you should be doing all day, each day. “Did you get X, Y, Z done? Who did you talk to today? Where were you? How long did you stay at such and such a place?” His routine really ought to set the antenna up. My caution would be very careful about the websites you take the information from, making sure that it is a legitimate, upstanding organization. It could be the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, the National Network to End Domestic Violence. It could be Futures Without Violence. Ones that are well known to be good organizations, where you can get this kind of information. Same is true for lists of things that would go into an article as to why does anyone stay with an abuser. Most often, it’s about why does a woman stay with an abuser. There are many reasons. One of them is you fall in love and you feel obligated to stay with a person and do the right thing. Especially for women because we are raised to be nurturing and feel like we are the person responsible in the relationship for holding things together and taking care of family issues and love and romance issues. Those are a couple reasons. A small part in the beginning but there are other reasons. Like financial dependence. If you are in a relationship or married to a person who you are totally financially dependent upon, especially if you have children together, it’s very difficult to get away or know how you could survive. The issue of having children together means that you can’t break up with the person without some obligation to see them or be around them because they’re going to want to see their children. No matter what, usually.
The biggest reason though is the fear. There’s a lot of fear. You’re living with a terrorist. They will say that they have friends who will testify that you’re a terrible mother, that you slept around or are a tramp. Terrifying a woman with any kind of threats that can be made. If you’ve lived with a man who’s been abusive to you, or a woman, if you’re in a lesbian relationship, and once in a great while we find a man who has been abused by a woman, it’s usually 75 to 90% of domestic violence in heterosexual relationships is women being abused by men. Men don’t usually have the same kind of fear of women that women have of men because men have automatic control in ways that women don’t. Men have systems of support in male privilege and patriarchy. But the fear that a terrorist engenders in the victim is strong and it is real. “I will kill you if you leave me,” has come through millions of times. Many, many thousands of women are killed over a couple of years by men that they have been romantic with or married to. The fear where they threaten to kill the children is real. We all know of cases where the children are killed or maimed to get at her. We had a case last year, where a woman decided to get a divorce and they had a small girl. Her husband worked in the medical field. He tied the woman up and sliced her Achilles tendons so she couldn’t get up or walk and let her lay there to watch while he murdered the child. Then set the house on fire and killed himself. She was left alive to deal with that. So, when people say, “Why do women stay?” There are those kinds of issues. But they do leave. They leave in droves. Domestic violence shelters all over the country are full of women escaping this kind of abuse. When people say, “Why do women stay?” Or “Why don’t they leave?” It’s a condemning thing towards the victim. It’s a blame the victim issue.
ZB: What in your experience creates the psychology of an abuser? People aren’t born this way. What is generally the cause for abusers to hurt the people that they supposedly love?
RG: I have to start off by saying that intimate partner abuse is not an issue of mental health. People are not abusive because they are mentally ill. Do we occasionally see mental illness causing violence? Yes, occasionally. Although most illness does not cause violence. What creates the psychology of abusers? When you grow up in a society that idolizes dominance, oppression and violence, which we do in this culture, you grow up understanding and believing in dominance. We live in a culture that believes males should be dominant over women and a culture that is full of misogyny. Hatred of women is a real prime root cause of violence against women in general and certainly very involved with men’s violence against women in intimate partner relationships. Women are seen as less than and denigrated in so many ways. In general, it’s just sexism to an extreme. It’s patriarchal attitudes and ideas that creates the psychology of abusers and many abusers have grown up watching men that they’re close to in their lives, being dominant and abusive with women. There’s a general attitude of dominance over women, that men should be the boss, and a lot of males reinforce this together with other males. Another thing is that males, even if they’re not abusive, don’t hold abusive males accountable. It’s put up with, people turn a blind eye, they pretend not to see, they look the other way. We have been running shelters for battered women now since the late 1970s. Certainly in a mass way since the early 1980s. There’s hardly a county any place in our culture, where there’s not a shelter for battered women now. When you think about that, what does it tell us? What does it say about whether we’ve made a dent in our problems of men battering women? Not a lot. Not a whole lot of a dent. This actually grows out into other relationships, be they lesbian, gay or trans people because we all live in a culture that uses the male relationship as the dominant pattern. It is a pattern that one has to be dominant and one submissive. The psychology of an abuser is created the same way we create the psychology of manhood, masculinity, or maleness. You can look at a lot of work by men that have recently started doing some wonderful stuff on addressing this. You can look at Lundy Bancroft and many other men who are doing great work on discussing what it takes to be a man and what is masculinity. A man named John Stoltenberg has been writing about this for decades now. There’s a scholar named Michael Kimmel at Stony Brook University in Long Island, who has written a lot about it. There are many young men today who are writing about this topic wonderfully. There’s a man in Oakland named Paul Kibble who has written amazing work about this. What creates
the psychology of an abuser? It’s created out of a social dynamic of the mandate for rigid gender roles that are reinforced by homophobic people who will say act like a man. Which means don’t cry, don’t be sensitive, don’t be gentle. Be dominant, be the boss. How many times have we heard in the movies, “Get your woman under control. Keep your woman under control. Are you going to let your woman act like that?” That kind of attitude is very common. There are some books on masculinity by some of the most brilliant writers in the country who are addressing this whole issue of rigid gender roles and what is toxic masculinity and why did we get there. Make no mistake, abusers are believing in what males call toxic masculinity.
ZB: Do you think there is a correlation between abusive mentality, misogyny and war or warfare on a global level?
RG: If I spend any time talking about the psychology of abusers, toxic masculinity and gender roles, you have to get into militarism because we live in a culture that is about dominance, control, colonizing, creating empires, and taking over the world. We make military people into heroes in the idea that we go to another country and invade and wage war. It makes us the good guys or dominant guys. When in fact, we’re being used in a horrible way as pawns by the patriarchal, Capitalistic system that is creating these wars to dominate, colonize, create empires, steal their oil and kill people of color in other lands to enrich the coffers of people in this dominant culture. That’s all wound up in the militarism that is related to what creates toxic masculinity. It’s a very complex topic. It’s all there, if anybody wants to open up their eyes and see it. But when you say these things, you get a lot of push back that’s almost violent. And it’s very hate filled if you dare in any way not agree with war or to be pro-peace, saying that you don’t like war. Or if you get into issues like oppression, classism even and question whose children are going to war, whose children are dying in these wars for the enrichment of this nation. When they talk about they’re over there fighting for our freedom, they’re not fighting for our freedom. There’s nothing about what they’re doing that has anything do with our freedom. When we talk about freedom and how much freedom we have, the truth is, we don’t have a whole hell of a lot. If you don’t believe that just start talking out loud in public about Capitalism being wrong and how we ought to be looking at Socialism and see what happens to you. If you believe that we have a lot of freedom, just do something to expose the underhanded, vicious, nasty, evil things that our government is doing. Look at what happens to the whistleblowers. You’ve got to get into all that to really look at the layered dynamics that go towards the creation of what many of us call toxic masculinity. It’s not that men are born that way, certainly not. Men can be just as loving, sweet, sensitive, caring and nurturing as women. And women can be very male identified and vicious in the toxic masculinity role because we are brainwashed in many ways to be like that, whether men or women. Unfortunately, it works best with turning males into these money makers by the empire builders and Capitalism. There are also many books written by the perspective of men as ally to women like Refusal to Be A Man. It talks about the development of masculinity. There are men dealing with this and addressing it. It’s an important topic. There are growing numbers of male allies in our world right now.
ZB: Do you address the issue of emotional abuse, as equally as physical violence? How do you define violence? It seems as if our culture dismisses emotional or psychological abuse.
RG: That is a really big issue. Certainly, it’s not just physical violence. It’s all wound up together, usually, and very often. Hardly ever is there physical violence, unless it also includes emotional violence and terrorism of domestic violence. It’s a really important thing to acknowledge. When you look at the definition of domestic violence, there are a whole range of things that are included. I’m sure anyone who has seen or talked about domestic violence, you’ve seen the Power and Control Wheel. It’s a diagram that shows the elements of abuse. If you picture a line drawing that is a diagram of a wheel with spokes that has a hub, in those spaces between the spokes are different elements of power and control. The rim of the wheel is what holds the whole thing in place. It’s the control dynamic that is wrapped around the wheel. In those spaces between the spokes will be things like male privilege and examples of how it is used to help her be controlled or things like using the children. There will be examples of ways he can use the children to exert his control and make threats. There will be economic abuse and it will list examples of things like not allowing her to know where the money is, not allowing her to have any money, making sure he controls the money, etc. There will be one that says emotional abuse. If you picture these pie shaped pieces around the wheel that say these different things, it will give a broader picture of domestic violence in general, in a relationship and the various elements. The physical violence will be a major part of it and that will have examples in that spoke. There will be the many examples including the emotional abuse. There is one called denying, minimizing, and blaming. It’s making light of what he’s done or making it look like she causes it. There will be a lot of intimidation and terrorism. Abusing or threatening pets is another form of abuse and control. Also, isolation and controlling who she sees or what she does. Coercion and threats will be another one, like making her do illegal things, threatening to commit suicide, making up charges against her, those kinds of things. The pie shaped pieces are the various tactics that are used to maintain power and control. It’s a visual picture of a relationship where abuse is taking place.
ZB: What defines domestic in domestic violence? Does it include relationships where the person does not live with their partner or are just dating?
RG: Absolutely, it’s still intimate partner abuse. Anything involving abuse. We don’t differentiate. It’s partner abuse period.
ZG: Can you advise the safest way a woman can get out of abusive relationships or to diffuse a possible escalation, that could result in a life-threatening situation? What should a woman do when the police believe the man over the woman?
RG: Women who are being abused know what the safest thing is to do with the particular man they have. What women do to stay safe is, they comply with him to the degree they can. They comply all the time. As much as possible. As much as it takes until it’s safe enough to not get seriously damaged or to save the children. That is one of the mechanisms of staying safe, to comply. Without that, they would not be as safe as they are. Sometimes the safest thing a woman can do is comply with him and stay with him, rather than leave and have him take her children away, especially if he has more money than her or more power than her and very often, he does. When people talk about, “Why do women stay?” Women stay to maintain safety as much as anything else. They stay to protect their children or they stay because they’re fearful of the murder he may commit if they leave or what he will do to their mother. The biggest thing battered women can do is comply with their abuser, in order to stay safe. What else can you do? You can learn tactics of planning to escape. Sometimes, that comes from working with a domestic violence advocate and that’s usually done in secret. It’s not done in a way that the abuser can see because if the abuser can see what you’re doing, you’re going to be in danger. If you talk to an advocate who can help you to do things like plan for escape, that will mean setting aside a couple dollars every minute you can someplace where you’ll have it to escape with. It can mean taking a couple sets of clothing and hiding it somewhere, putting it at your mother’s house, or putting it in a bag and have the shelter keep it or a place he would never go, or having your girlfriend take it home with her. Whatever it is, prepare to leave in the most secret and safe way you can by stashing things, by having clothing, by getting all of your important documents in one place and putting them some place where you can get to them, like your children’s birth certificates, your marriage certificate, your bank account numbers, your social security documents, any of that kind of thing. If you can’t remove it or can’t put it some place safe, try and find a way to make copies of it at the very least, that can be stashed some place.
Those are tactics that can begin to be used to plan for an escape and certainly talking to advocates or somebody who will be your mentor, who will keep you safe and intervene for you if necessary. That can even include having a friend in another town that he doesn’t know about. A friend or a relative where you can go and stay, while you’re trying to get into a shelter.
First and foremost, look for a shelter where you can go and be safe in that shelter while you’re finishing up your other plans and have someone helping you to get these plans made. That can include having an advocate help you go to court, getting an Order of Protection, putting it down in the record. Even if it’s just the records in the domestic violence program. Create a record of the abuse some place that is dated to the degree possible. If there is any way you can keep a diary or a secret notebook that you can write down the dates of what he did. Say, on this day he called my work and threatened my job, etc. Those are all planning things. Not every battered woman has that information or the skill to do those things, until or unless, she is working with an advocate who is helping her and showing her how to do it. Men are far more believed by the people in the system than women are. That’s just the way the system is. It’s a patriarchy system, set up by men for men to serve men, period. It’s sexist and misogynistic. You shouldn’t trust the police. Although, I don’t want to say for a minute there aren’t some good police, that wouldn’t be fair. But the truth is that they are part of a patriarchal system. They have been trained by males in a system set up by males, to serve males. I mean white males. Black males and women who get involved with the police accept that dynamic and work within that dynamic because otherwise there’s no way they could keep a job or work in the system. That’s why we still have as much domestic violence as we ever did. There’s never been a system that was set up to hold men accountable for what it is they believe they have the right to do. As long as we live in a patriarchal, Capitalistic system, we won’t have change. It’s not just patriarchal and Capitalistic, it’s also very racist. Many times, abusers will set the woman up to be accused of what it is that he does. That is one thing abusers do better than anybody else.
ZB: Do you think that the objectification of women in our Capitalist society, which uses sexuality and our bodies to sell products, along with oppressive institutions like beauty pageants, creates abuse as well?
RG: I do. It’s part of women being less than and are a decorative object rather than a human being. All kinds of objectification of women are part of the whole idea of how abuse is perpetrated and maintained. If you’re not a less than human decorative object and if you’re a fully equal human being, how do you own her or maintain power and control? It’s just like the way slavery was maintained, by the scientist who colluded in the idea of turning people of color into less than full human beings. therefore, they had to be used and controlled and beaten.
ZB: Can an abuser ever really change? A lot of women stay in abusive relationships because they believe a man can change.
RG: Yes, of course, anybody who wants to change, can change. The next questions are, how and why would they change? If they’re getting everything they want by being an abuser and they really believe in the dynamic of ownership, control, domination and male privilege, why would they change? But can they change? Yes. Have some changed? Yes. Does it happen very often? No. There are a lot of abuser programs out there that claim they can change men. They haven’t changed men, unless the men themselves want to be changed. It happens when men truly want to change what they’re doing because they realize it’s wrong and that it’s abusive and that they themselves will benefit by changing. Because they can then have an honest and real loving relationship that isn’t based on his control of her, which could then be an equal relationship. What people should be telling battered women who think that their man is going to change because they want to believe they can, of course, they do. We all want to have that hope but what we tell people is make your plans right now based on the man you know you have, not the man you hope they will become.
ZB: How do you advise women cope in this current environment of male entitlement, harassment, and sexual assault that has been emboldened after the Trump administration? There were thousands of stories in the social media group Pantsuit Nation of girls and women being harassed, harmed, beaten and raped just weeks after Trump’s election.
RG: We can organize like we did in the 1960s and ’70s and begin to get together and tell each other’s truths. We need to start to document these things. Like on this date, at this time, I was in the park on my lunch break and six young boys approached me, sexually harassing me and taunting me with, “What are you going to do about it?” What we do is, we get together and start telling each other our stories and we work with the male allies, who are interested in hearing our stories. There’s an organization called National Organization for Men Against Sexism. They have a website and every woman should take a look. They are men who are very good allies to us women. That happens to be one of the groups who are wonderful allies to women and have women as members. I’m actually on the national leadership council of that organization. We’ve got to get together, organize, work with each
other, tell each other our truths, document these truths and appeal to wherever we need to appeal. With president Trump, who had the KKK behind him, who David Duke had celebrated and voted for, he named members of white supremacist groups to his cabinet. Trump is a misogynist, racist, Capitalist pig and he’s a liar. He’s also, I believe, a sociopath. We’ve got to fight back. All of us have got to organize together and fight back. We must. There’s always been Resistance Movements. Even amid the worst aspects of controlling us. Go back to the McCarthy years and you’ll see what I mean. There has always been and always will be a Resistance. It’s often not safe. Look how many people got killed fighting for Civil Rights in the Civil Rights Movement. It’s always been there. It will always be there. Look how many thousands of lynchings were perpetrated against people of color. When the Civil Rights Movement was being developed and people like Martin Luther King Jr were deliberately called Communists and their organization was infiltrated by the FBI and the CIA, they did everything they could to demonize and discredit activists. Don’t think for a minute they aren’t still doing it because they are. We’ve got to resist in any way. We must resist. It’s not a pretty picture but it is what it is. There are enough left-over decent people at this point, who’ve been through watching all these movements develop and succeed that we may have more allies than we think out there.
ZB: Where else can people learn more about you and your organization? What else would you like people to know about you and your work?
RG: I was filmed in a PBS series called Makers: Women Who Make America. It’s a whole series about women who helped make the world, essentially. I had done an interview with Stephanie Combs when she was writing her book, that looked back at the popular book by Betty Friedan called The Feminine Mystique. I had read that book and it had quite an impact on me. I was contacted by the producers of Makers. My whole career in activism has not only been about domestic violence. I’ve done a lot of anti-racism activism, teaching and writing. I really work hard on oppression and economic justice. Where we are right now is how we change our system. Which means we have got to take a look at Capitalism being the root of almost all of our problems. Until then, we aren’t going to change anything. My activism over the years has evolved into where I am now, in my early ’70s, as a continuing change agent, resister and organizer. I will do that as long as I can breathe. Over the years, I have done a lot of things, like putting out underground newspapers, writing, organization, marching, protesting, trying to get people to come together to make a difference. Can we, across this nation, create a broad enough group of people who are brave enough and dedicated enough to try and save us? Resistance has been alive as long as humans have. That’s the only way we can keep moving forward.