There is one stereotype of what a woman experiencing domestic abuse looks like: maybe you think she is uneducated, maybe you think she is weak or lacks confidence, maybe you think she is poor. Most likely, you don’t think she could be your friend.
By Gabrielle Antoniadis
Becky Patterson ’91 was an English major with an education minor. She was kind, smart and funny. She was a teacher, a writer, an artist, a mother of two – and she was a victim of domestic violence. Because it was her husband’s first and last act of physical violence, her friends and family could not have conceived of her life ending this way.
“If any of us had known what we know now, we would have carried her out of that house,” says Becky’s best friend and fellow Gamma Phi Beta sister, Bethany Porter Kennedy ’91.
Mourning her death, her friends discovered that just as there are stereotypes about who is in abusive relationships, there are also misconceptions about what constitutes intimate partner abuse. They learned that often – as was the case with Becky – violence is not immediately part of the picture. An abusive relationship frequently begins with a pattern of controlling or demeaning behavior of one partner to another.
Now some of Becky’s friends and family are taking steps to turn the tragedy of her death into something that might change or save another person’s life.
“That is what Becky would want,” Kennedy says. “She would want to help other women.”
After Becky’s death, Christine Updegraff DeZarn ’87 found herself having open conversations with women that, she says, “we unfortunately never had until tragedy had already struck.” It motivated her to create an awareness program specifically designed for college women. She says she remembers that in college, she was certainly “aware” of the issue of domestic violence, but for she and most of her friends, that was something that happened to “other women.”
“Some of us even volunteered at shelters, but we never dreamed of it as something any of us would ever experience,” she notes. “I developed this program to break down those misconceptions and help college women understand that anyone, from any walk of life can find themselves in an abusive situation.”
But DeZarn does not want young women to be discouraged by what they learn – she wants them to walk away empowered.
“This is about prevention. I want them to see the behavior that leads up to violence, and I want them to understand that it is something that they can learn to avoid in their lives.”
While she has presented the program in her home state of Georgia at Emory University, she wants to refine it and create a standard program that can be presented to colleges across the country by anyone interested enough in starting the conversation about intimate partner abuse.
“This was my response to Becky’s death,” DeZarn says. “I was not an expert in this field, but in life we are often faced with the choice of doing something imperfectly or doing nothing at all. I had to do something.”
Another Gamma Phi Beta sister and classmate, Amy Krosnosky Demchak ’92, was also moved to do something after Becky’s death. With two young daughters of her own, she turned her attention first to elementary-age students. Working with parent volunteers at her daughter’s school in Terre Haute, Ind., she hopes to build on an existing program where fifth graders travel to Indianapolis to the Ruth Lily Education Center for classes on reproductive health. (The Ruth Lily Center provides age-appropriate instruction on health topics ranging from nutrition to violence prevention to peer pressure.) She and her daughter’s class teacher will evaluate a course on healthy relationships and then build a case to include it when the class travels to the Lily Education Center. If Demchak receives approval and funding for the new course for the 2011-2012 academic year, she will forge ahead and begin working with her other daughter’s middle school.
“I have 10 and 7 year-old daughters, but this was not an issue that was on my radar before,” she says. “I am absolutely doing this because of what happened to Becky.”
Sparking Conversations on Campus
But what about today’s students? What kinds of discussions about the relationships between men and women or women’s issues are happening on campus? It turns out there are quite a few opportunities to explore these complex topics.
If you have ever walked through the student center in October, for example, and seen T-shirts hung throughout the building, you have seen the Clothesline Project – a joint project of the Wittenberg Womyn’s Center and Project Woman, a domestic violence and sexual assault prevention and intervention agency located in Springfield. (The Clothesline Project started in 1990 in Massachusetts as a vehicle for women affected by violence to express their emotions by decorating or writing on a shirt.)
Meredith Zajac ’13 has been excited to see activities on campus that provide opportunities for women and men to better understand women’s issues. She is a member of the Confidence Coalition, which launched at Wittenberg in February 2010. Begun in 2009 by the Kappa Delta Sorority, the Confidence Coalition is a national alliance of organizations and companies committed to promoting self-esteem and confidence among girls and women. Brought to Wittenberg by Esther Mast ’10 last year, Wittenberg was the first college to become a member of the national Confidence Coalition. This year, what started as a week of awareness activities has grown to a full month (during Women’s History Month) of events.
“Since Esther started the Coalition last year, it has just taken off,” Zajac says. “What is appealing about the Coalition events is that each highlights a different aspect of being a women – it’s all about the whole woman.”
But, given the national domestic violence statistics (see box, page x), drawing attention to that issue is clearly an important part of the Coalition’s work. Of the several outreach activities it sponsored this year, two focused specifically on violence against women. For Zajac, the very different events were effective and moving in their own ways.
“Walk a Mile in Her Shoes” challenged men to literally step into a pair of women’s shoes in order to raise awareness of domestic violence and sexual assault. More than 100 Wittenberg fraternity men participated, many of them donning heels, platform shoes and strappy sandals to express their support. Zajac thinks that this light-hearted approach to a deeply troubling topic brought more men into a conversation that they might never have had or thought about having.
“For change to happen, we have to educate men too,” she says. “This was one way to do that.”
“Take Back the Night,” which Zajac helped plan and organize, included a speaker from Project Woman and the opportunity for women to share their experiences of abuse. Afterwards, the group of nearly 120 participated in a walk and candlelight vigil on campus. With deans, faculty, staff and students, as well as members of the Springfield community attending, the event was powerful proof of how the issue crosses all lines and touches people from every community.
“I saw the spirit of Wittenberg come out – the support and trust in that group was an amazing thing to witness,” Zajac says.
It is not necessarily a surprise to hear that Wittenberg students are creating campus events and organizations like the Confidence Coalition– it is, after all, part of the Wittenberg mission to develop “wholeness of person” and to challenge students to “...lead personal, professional and civic lives of creativity, service, compassion and integrity.” With leading experts in women’s history and gender studies and a Womyn’s Center dedicated to raising awareness of women’s issues, Wittenberg has a history of engaging students, faculty and community members in meaningful dialogues relevant to women.
Recently, that became a topic for the Center for Civic & Urban Engagement at Wittenberg. When the Advisory Council of the newly created Women’s Partnership Funds at the Springfield Foundation wanted a complete picture of the state of women in Clark County, the Center was there to help. It recruited Wittenberg student Maranda Moore ’10 to conduct research comparing Clark County women to national and state statistics in the areas of safety, education, childcare, healthcare and financial stability.
The completed report, “The Status of Clark County Women,” provides valuable baseline research that will guide the future work of the Women’s Partnership Funds. The Women’s Partnership Funds aims to address the “root causes” of women’s problems by establishing anendowment fund that will build a permanent source of funds for local programs that already address some of the biggest challenges facing women in the community.
“Some of the Clark County statistics from the report, particularly domestic violence and teen pregnancy, just jump off the page,” says Stephanie McCuistion, administrative director of the Center.
McCuistion, who is herself a member of the Advisory Council of Women’s Partnership Funds, says that Center will continue to play a vital role as they decide where to channel funds in the future.
“The Center is well-suited to helping harness Wittenberg resources to better understand women’s issues here in Clark County. That information will help the Women’s Partnership Funds make informed decisions about how to help women,” she says. “I am so proud to be part of both organizations as we work together to build a stronger community.”
On the heels of the tragedy of Becky Patterson’s death, the varied efforts of the Wittenberg community – its alumnae, students, faculty and staff – seem even more urgent. It is painful to contemplate the truth about domestic violence, but in knowledge and understanding lies hope for change – and prevention.
On May 1, 2011, Becky’s parents, children, family and friends gathered at the Gamma Phi Beta house at Wittenberg to pay tribute to her and establish a memorial bench, plaque and perennial garden in her memory. Kennedy led the service. “I try to make sense of this tragedy, and there is no sense,” she said.
Her emotions still raw, Kennedy herself is searching for her own way to raise awareness, but still finds the issue difficult to talk about: “My hope is that Becky’s story will help another woman understand the warning signs of domestic abuse. Then she might have a better chance of walking away before it is too late.”