[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 87 (Friday, July 1, 1994)]
[House]
[Page H]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]
[Congressional Record: July 1, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]
A VICIOUS CIRCLE
Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, recently, Elizabeth Bettendorf wrote
an article for the State Journal-Register about spousal abuse.
It is a well-written article that opens the eyes of any sensitive
reader.
Among other things, she points out that in Sangamon County, where
Springfield, IL is located, in 1993, there were 1,161 orders of
protection issued by the courts for domestic situations. In the State
of Illinois, there were 42,964.
I ask to insert into the Record her article, as well as a column I
wrote that also mentions the statistics from her article.
[From the State Journal-Register, June 26, 1994]
Love and Rage
(By Elizabeth Bettendorf)
In the flash of the Polaroid camera, the bruises on Ann
Tavender's body turn the deep, furious purple of overripe
plums. On her neck, chest, upper bicep and right eye, welts
bulge and darken as the blood clots beneath her pale flesh.
Strands of dark hair trickle above the swollen crescent
beneath her eye, and her gaze droops downward as if she is
embarrassed, startled by the click of the shutter.
Around her neck, bruises have blossomed into the shape of
fingerprints where she says her abuser tried to choke her
after she refused to have sex with him and another woman. She
says she met him after her divorce, after she lost her job as
a waitress at a country club and moved into a cheap motel.
``You're dead, bitch,'' was his parting promise as Tavender
gunned her 1984 Grand Marquis out of the parking lot of an
apartment building.
Nine months later, Tavender, armed with a hard-earned order
of protection, is a nonresidential client at the Sojourn
Shelter and Service, a Sangamon County-based haven for abused
women and their children.
``I had black eyes all the time,'' she says, studying the
four snapshots taken shortly after she was released from the
hospital. ``I think he thought the bruises were like an
owner's mark that showed he was a man.''
In the shadow of the recent made-for-TV arrest of ex-
football star O.J. Simpson, accused of fatally stabbing his
former wife and her companion, the picture of domestic
violence becomes even more blurred, almost baffling.
``The thing about O.J. is that people are suddenly aware
that domestic violence can exist at any level of society and
that it can be fatal,'' explains Alice Nathan, director of
Sojourn Shelter and Service. ``Though the majority of our
cities are lower-income, just about every profession in this
community--doctors, lawyers, business owners--have been here
as clients.''
Founded in 1975, the shelter, now in a Victorian medical
clinic turned apartment house, features dormitory-style rooms
where clothes packed in a hurry are stacked in plastic
garbage bags.
Its a serene place, with a farmhouse-style kitchen where a
pot of coffee seems to perpetually simmer, and where children
watch ``101 Dalmatians'' in the rose-colored parlor while
their mothers sleep on the sofa.
The address is a well-kept secret, revealed only to clients
or those on official business.
``They helped me get housing and furniture and sent me to
different agencies to get help with my utilities,'' says
Sherri Spencer, who fled West Virginia after her relationship
turned violent.
Spencer is a gregarious, soft-hearted women who smells of
Ciara cologne and whose fingernails are gnawed to nubs. She
says her father, a construction company owner, used to punch
her mother's face so badly that often the children didn't
recognize her. Once, she says, at a gas station on North
Grand Avenue, he banged his wife's head repeatedly against a
wall until she started bleeding.
Sherri herself was kicked so hard by a man when she was
nine months pregnant that her water broke. She eventually
ended the relationship, and last year, while living in West
Virginia, began dating a cafeteria cook she had known as a
teenager. After they were engaged in March, he, too, turned
mean without warning, she says.
``At first he seemed so nice--he bought me a crock pot and
shower curtain for my apartment,'' she recalls. ``He didn't
drink, smoke or mess with drugs. One day we were shopping for
rafts for the children in the Big Lots store, and right
there, in front of everybody, he punched me in the face
because he didn't like something I said.''
Sherri, who first stayed at the shelter several years ago,
packed her few belongings into a U-Haul trailer and headed
back to Springfield and Sojourn, where she is now living. She
plans to enroll in nursing school this fall so she can get
off public aid and support her three children.
``I want to get out of the system,'' she says. ``I want to
support my family, but I can't do it on $4.25 an hour.''
Between July 1, 1992, and June 30, 1993, the shelter's
handful of volunteers and 15-person staff offered solace,
support and education to 516 women, three men and 309
children. About half the adult clients appeared in court with
Sojourn legal advocates to seek orders of protection. More
than 70 percent of the clients were white and between the
ages of 18 and 44. Forty-seven percent identified their
husbands as their abusers; 20 percent said they had been
sexually abused.
Sojourn's 13-member board of directors, comprising police
officers, battered women, politicians, business owners and
professionals, regularly deals with domestic violence issues
that linger despite public education and tougher laws.
With an operating budget last year of $443,000--made up of
federal grants and programs, United Way funding,
contributions and other sources--Sojourn seeks to derail
the disruptive cycle of its clients' lives.
By helping women navigate the county's web of social
service agencies, offering wisdom about domestic violence, or
just lending a shoulder to lean on, primary advocate Marilyn
Hume does just that.
At Sojourn's regular group meetings, where topics range
from manipulation to legal rights, Humes occasionally asks
women who have not yet left violent husbands or boyfriends to
sketch detailed pictures of their houses so they can safely
escape.
``I tell them I want to know every window and door,'' Humes
says. ``Can you get from one room to another without getting
hurt? If it's not safe--and a large majority of these women
don't even have phones--bide your time. Wait until he falls
asleep or passes out. Then pray like hell he doesn't catch
you.''
Brenda Davis wasn't so lucky. She says her abuser barged
into her bedroom at 6 a.m., ripped her nightgown from her
small, wispy body and raped her repeatedly. Her injuries were
so severe that she says she couldn't urinate for two weeks.
``Over and over and over,'' she says in her soft,
southwestern twinged accent, a pack of Marlboros beside her
on the sofa. ``I kept crying for help, but no one heard me.
When he got up, I was bloody, but he wouldn't let me take a
shower. He threw me on the kitchen floor, and he raped me
again. When I locked myself in the bathroom, he punched in
the door and came after me.''
Davis's worry-grooved face is feathered with tears and
mascara. She can't help crying when she talks about her
physical abuse because she says it's all she has ever known.
At Sojourn she can quilt together the pieces of a life that
has been turbulent and repetitive. An Army veteran and
skilled mechanic who has worked as a waitress and supervised
a housekeeping crew, Davis wears a black and electric-pink T-
shirt emblazoned with the proclamation: ``I Suffer From
P.M.S: Putting Up With Men's S---.''
Davis, who has four children, says she can no longer count
on both hands the number of times she has been punched,
kicked or slapped with such fury that she wanted to die.
Once, locked in a bedroom and threatened with a rifle, she
jumped from a second-story window and broke her ribs.
Her oldest daughter, now 20, is involved in a violent
relationship too, Davis says.
At 42, she has been married three times and lived with a
man for eight years. All of her relationships started out the
same way--sweetly.
One husband, ``a real romantic,'' served her filet mignon
by candlelight on their first date and regularly sent her
roses. He, too, turned violent, she says.
Sherri Spencer recalls being hurled down on the bed and
straddled on a second date because the man was wildly jealous
that she had spent the evening with a girlfriend.
``He said: `You will not go out without me again,'' Spencer
recalls.``It was like a compliment, I thought: `He cares, he
really cares. He really, truly loves me.'''
When Kim Daugherty, a petite, brown-eyed convenience store
clerk, met Jim Shaw at a Fourth of July Eagles Club dance,
``he treated her like a queen,'' recalls her mother, Barbara
Crenshaw.
First came the opal and ruby necklace, the gold chain and
watches, then the Saturday night games of Uno with Kim and
her three children. The couple bowled twice a week, played on
a dart team and even won a trip to Las Vegas.
``He didn't even drink in front of the kids,'' muses
Crenshaw. But then Shaw turned jealous and Kim tried to break
off the relationship.
On May 31, Shaw shot Kim in the head outside a Southern
View Tavern and then turned the .25 caliber handgun on
himself.
He died; she didn't.
Today, Kim, 28, is semi-conscious at Memorial Hospital, the
bullet still lodged on the left side of her brain. Her left
arm is paralyzed, and she is fed through a tube. Her
beautiful long, brown hair was so matted and tangled with
blood that the nurses had to cut it off, Crenshaw says.
About a week and a half before the shooting, Crenshaw says
Shaw showed up at the apartment that Crenshaw and Daugherty
share in Chatham Hills, demanding to see Kim, who wasn't at
home.
``He pushed his way through the front door, pushed my son
on the couch and threw the phone at him and started looking
through the rooms of the apartment,'' recalls Crenshaw, who
is caring for her grandchildren while her daughter is in the
hospital. ``My youngest grandaughter started screaming and
screaming. She was very upset. I know he scared her to
death.''
Perhaps the most overlooked victims in the pattern of
domestic violence are the children, O.J. Simpson's young son
and daughter--usually mentioned only in passing--are living
with the maternal grandparents while their father's fate is
decided.
At the east end of Sojourn's grassy back yard--littered
with tricycles, Hula-Hoops, a yellow and red play-house, a
Weber grill--there is a spacious outbuilding-turned-
classroom, where children may play Chutes and Ladders or draw
on a green chalkboard easel. Julie Alberts, the shelter's
children's coordinator, regularly deals with the burden of
despair, fear and guilt lugged around by children who grow up
in violent homes.
``Kids are affected in a lot of ways,'' she says. ``Most
have real low self-esteem, can't make decisions or resolve
conflict in a nonviolent way. Their stress is so outrageous
that many kids can't describe how they feel because they're
too afraid to talk about it.''
Alberts, who encourages the children to paint and draw
pictures of their fears, produces a stack of artwork created
over the years by kids who stayed at the shelter. The images
are so profoundly disturbing ``that no child should ever have
to endure this,'' says Alice Nathan.
In one picture, scratched tensely on a sheet of typing
paper, a black Magic Marker stick figure shoots his wife in
the head with a gun. Blood-red droplets cluster on the page
like cherries.
``No No!'' she cries.
In another, a farmer wearing a wide-brimmed hat and blue
jeans drives a sickle into the ground. Behind him, a car has
run over his wife in the driveway. She is frowning, and her
dark hair is flattened.
``The boy who drew this became violent toward his mother,
also,'' says Alberts grimly.
Often the children have been injured when they tried to
intervene to protect their mothers, says Alberts, who tries
to give them a sense of control.
``We teach them to dial 911, to curl up in a ball and put
their heads in their stomachs,'' she says. ``Yes, they're
probably going to get hurt, but not as badly.''
Why such a damning cycle of abuse continues in certain
families is a perplexing question, but not one without
answers. Not unlike an alcoholic in the final stages of liver
disease, ``many women know it they stay in the relationship,
they will die from the abuse--but if they try to leave it
they will die also,'' says Nathan. ``It's not a simple
situation at all.''
Often, despite the perpetual violence, there is still an
attraction between a couple. And many women are simply
reluctant to venture out on their own again.
``There are so many reasons for staying in an abusive
relationship--psychological, sociological, economic, or just
plain survival,'' Nathan explains. ``Sometimes, a woman has
nowhere to go because her family says, ``You've made your
bed, now lie in it.' What if he's threatened to hunt her
down and kill her? Or what if he tries to leave and take
the kids? In so many households, the belief is still that
the husband is the boss and the wife is submissive and
that it's OK to hit a woman.''
The Springfield Police Department maintains a pro-arrest
policy in domestic violence situations, according to Deputy
Chief of Investigations Jim Cimarossa.
In 1993, the department fielded more than 1,600 reports
involving orders of protection, battery and domestic
disturbances (a category that can include ``someone shouting
at their neighbor over the fence, Cimarossa says).
According to the Illinois State Police, 1,161 orders of
protection--all involving domestic situations--were filed in
Sangamon County in 1993. In all of Illinois, 42,964 orders
were filed in the same period, mostly by women.
Jennifer Florence, a Sojourn client, knew all about orders
of protection. She is buried in the shade of a tall pine tree
amidst a cluster of graves called God's Garden at Oak ridge
Cemetery.
More than a week after her June 14 funeral, parched
bouquets of yellow carnations and baby's breath tied with
dark red velvet ribbon are still strewn over the freshly
turned earth. A single wilted red rose pokes up from the head
of the grave, and a pink tissue is still crumpled in the same
place it was tossed the day of the funeral.
Florence, a 31-year-old secretary, was 4\1/2\ months
pregnant at the time of her death. She left behind three
small children. Terrell, 10, Titus, 3, and Tiffany, 23
months.
On June 9, as she lay dying from gunshot wounds in her legs
and chest, Tony Shoultz, her longtime boyfriend and father of
her children, was arrested in a stairwell at the Union
Baptist Church on Monroe Street.
Their tempestuous relationship can be traced to 1984, when
Shoultz allegedly pushed and threatened her in front of their
infant son. Florence obtained her first order of protection
against Shoultz then. She obtained her final order of
protection last fall.
Shoultz has been charged with first-degree murder and with
the intentional homicide of an unborn child. He pleaded not
guilty Thursday.
Jennifer's death cannot be undone, says her mother, June
Florence.
``Jennifer was a beautiful person and full of love, but
Tony didn't allow her to function at all,'' she says. ``She
tried to get away from him a million times. He beat her, held
guns to her head and knives to her throat. But he always
lured her back with kisses, flowers and I'm sorry.'''
Jennifer spent her last day on earth in the company of her
mother, who picked her up at a drugstore near Sojourn and
drove her to the family's home on 14th street. There they
talked and ate a breakfast of eggs, waffles, sausage and
coffee.
``I noticed that Jennifer looked like she was getting
sick,'' June recalls. ``She was thin and little incoherent,
and well, when it's your child you know something's wrong.
All day she kept saying, `Mom, I have to go.' Looking back. I
think God was already calling her. Tony had pulled her into
this circle and she couldn't get out.''
Brentwood Slayings Awaken Nation to Domestic Violence
Out of the tragedy that surrounds the O.J. Simpson charges,
something good may emerge.
Just as the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill hearings made us
much more sensitive to the problems of sexual harassment, so
the deaths of two people who may have been killed by a
celebrity can awaken us to the problems of domestic violence.
The problem is much more widespread than most of us knew.
In Sangamon County, Ill., where Springfield, the state
capital, is located, 1,161 orders of protection involving
domestic situations were issued by the courts last year,
according to an excellent article on the problem by Elizabeth
Bettendorf in the State Journal-Register of that city.
Statewide there were 42,964 orders. And a much higher
number of cases of spousal abuse never reached the courts.
Years ago a respected attorney startled me in a
conversation when he said, ``You have to beat up your wife
once in a while to keep her respect.'' When I related this to
a friend, he told me of an engineer who told him that he
occasionally batters his wife ``to maintain authority in the
home.'' I am sure neither of these cases reached the courts.
The Nicole Simpson case made headlines and riveted the
nation to the O.J. Simpson car surveillance. But when
Jennifer Florence of Springfield, Ill., a 31-year-old
secretary and mother of three, was killed--and there have
been thousands like her--it did not register on the national
television screen.
What can be done? Let me suggest four steps:
1. Bring the problem out into the open. If you or a friend
or a relative are involved in an abuse situation (almost
always men attacking women or abuse of children), don't
hide it. Hidden problems tend to grow. Physical abuse
within a domestic situation is not normal behavior.
2. Men and women brought up in homes were there has been
physical abuse of spouses or children are likely to abuse
their spouses and/or children. If that was your experience,
you may need professional help.
3. Don't abuse your children. It is conduct they are likely
to pass on to their children.
4. If you are in a home situation where you are either
abused or are the abuser, seek help. Inquire from a social
agency or a religious leader or your physician or the police
where you can go for help. You must protect yourself and
others.
5. Women should find the phone number and address of a
center for abused spouses where they can go if violence
erupts. In an emergency, call that center if you do not have
transportation.
6. Judges need to become more sensitive on these matters.
Part of the crime bill that may emerge from Congress is a
Violence Against Women provision that Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del.,
is the chief sponsor of and I am cosponsoring. It includes a
provision I inserted to offer sensitivity training for the
judges of the nation, who are overwhelmingly male and often
not as understanding of domestic abuse cases (as well as rape
and other problems women have) as they should be.
Finally, there are centers for women who face these special
problems. They need support from government agencies, but
almost all of them are also dependent on charitable
contributions. All of us can help.
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