I’ve been struggling the last few days on how to write this diary. Should it be mostly about her, how to I balance telling her story with the need for her safety. Or should this dairy be more about my own experiences as the victim of domestic violence. Even still this dairy could be about the reality that with the holiday season domestic violence rises and that domestic violence rises when people loose their jobs and our economy is in recession. Those last two facts combined promise to make this a season of terror for many woman and children, and that alone is enough of a reason to write a diary.
But last week . . .
Let me ask you, if you were to see a woman being beaten in a parking lot, what would you do?
Would you scurry on by pretending you don’t see? Would you turn a blind eye and say that this doesn’t concern you? Would you assume that there are enough cameras that you aren’t needed? Would you risk getting hurt yourself and try to intervene? Or would you do the simplest thing, use your cell phone and call the police? Or not having one, would you duck into a store front or an office building, and ask to use the phone to call the police?
Could you do that much . . . . . at least?
None of those things happened last Tuesday, as a man from a New York city suburb upon receiving contact from the state of Massachusetts about paying child support, drove the 6+ hours to Boston, waited for the mother of the child he doesn’t want, outside her work, and beat her when she got to her car.
He was angry that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was contacting him about his obligations. He blamed her, and he maintained that anger through a 6+ hour drive and the wait for her to get out of work. He had time to cool down, but he didn’t, and that makes him all the more dangerous.
There were people who passed by this scene, who could have stopped it, who could have, at the very least, called the police, but they chose to do nothing.
She is a single mother in her mid twenties. When she found out she was pregnant she made the decision, over his objections to keep the child. In doing so she walked away from the Ivy League education that her mother and grandmother had worked so hard for her to have the chance to have.
She is now working a full time job, with long commutes. She’s not on welfare and is struggling to make ends meet. And she’s African American.
Much of that could have all changed Tuesday. The beating could have maimed or even killed her, especially due to a medical condition. And I wonder: Would all those people who chose to look the other way then bemoan an African American single mother on welfare? Even though their callousness and inhumanity helped put her there.
Physically she has a black eye, many bruises and cuts on her cheek. Emotionally, well those wounds won't heal as quickly, if they ever do.
Saturday her family called me in to help. I’ve been where she is. I told her my experiences and in the telling relived some of the beatings I took from my now deceased ex-husband. It was necessary, we share a sisterhood, a club that no member ever wanted to join. She had to know that I was there, that I survived.
When she curled up in a ball, I went where she was, to that pool of helpless aloneness and I told her that she wasn’t. Those feelings for her are compounded because while people passed by, no one helped. No one even called the police.
This holiday season will be one of the most violent in recent memory for thousands of woman and children. Domestic violence knows no boundaries, not religion, not race, not socio-economic status. And it could be your sister or friend, the woman you work with, the lady two houses down the street who is the victim.
It maybe easier to summon the courage to intervene when a child is being abused . . .
but I ask again, if you hear or see a woman being beaten, doesn’t matter where, what will you do?