Taking to the Road to Help Women Escape Domestic Abuse
September 16, 2004 | Read Time: 6 minutes
I grew up in a household with a father who was a drunk and who was physically and sexually abusive. I remember the
|
||||||||||
fear of watching my mother being beaten, what it was like to feel helpless and hopeless and being unable to protect any of us.
But growing up in Vermont, my three sisters and one brother and I were able to take refuge in the beautiful rural outdoors and in each other. I was able to find a haven at school, where I did very well. School was definitely a safety net for me.
After high school I held a number of clerical positions but then went on the road with my husband, Harold, as an independent truck driver. We drove thousands of miles every year for 16 years, throughout the United States and Canada, and hauled everyone from Disney on Ice to Cirque de Soleil.
Things changed in 1992, when my brother was convicted of sexually molesting a child, whose family I knew. He and I had been buddies as children, and he tried to protect us from my father’s abuse. The fact that now he was doing what my father had done was very upsetting. As a result I worked as a volunteer victim’s advocate for the family of the child my brother had molested and came to realize how scary the legal system can be for families and their children. Parents often would refuse to let their children testify in court for fear that the system would re-victimize them.
At that point I decided to finish my undergraduate degree at Vermont College of Norwich University, in Montpelier. (I had previously completed two years at Boston College.)
Vermont College had a program for older adults that required one to be on campus twice a year for 10 days. The rest of the time my husband and I were on the road making a living. I’d do my course work in the truck, write papers on my computer, and send them to my professors via Federal Express. Originally I thought I would focus on children who were abused, by becoming a social worker or child psychologist.
I got my degree in 1995 and applied to Vermont Law School, a private school in South Royalton, about 20 miles from where we live. During law school I remained at home, while my husband stayed on the road in order to support both of us. I’m actually glad he was on the road that year — my life was eat, sleep, and study law with kids young enough to be my children.
I came up with the idea for Have Justice-Will Travel when I was in law school. As part of my Albert Schweitzer Fellowship, which is a yearlong fellowship in community service, I did statistical research for a local victim-advocacy group. I sat in family court reading close to 200 affidavits by women who were seeking relief-from-abuse orders, and what I saw were women who were suffering the same thing that my mother had suffered. I found that they often couldn’t finalize legal matters because they could not get to the courthouse — there is very little public transportation in rural Vermont — or the abuser controlled the purse strings, or there was no phone for them to call for help.
Well, I thought, in that case I’ve got to bring the law to these women and, in turn, bring them to the law. In 1998, while still in law school, I received a fellowship — $32,500 the first year and $16,250 the next — from Equal Justice Work, which encourages and provides money for law students who want to go into public-service law. It made it possible for me to establish Have Justice-Will Travel. The money allowed me to pay my law-school loans, my living expenses, and my mortgage, and offer free services through Have Justice- Will Travel.
From the beginning, we had no problems finding clients — and, unfortunately, we had to turn people away every day. We got our referrals from law-enforcement and victim-advocacy groups. While Vermont has a very low crime rate, more than 50 percent of the homicides that occur here every year are related to domestic violence. This is a very serious public-safety and health issue.
To reach the women in need, I began driving a four-wheel-drive vehicle and taking along a portable telephone, a laptop computer, a portable printer, and all my case files. I’ve taken many affidavits in kitchens and picked up women and taken them to shelters.
Of course, as we have expanded, my role has changed, and I spend much more time writing grant proposals, doing public speaking, and raising money. We were given a grant of $360,000 from the Violence Against Women Act and even though Have Justice-Will Travel now has four full-time attorneys, we still have to turn people away. We have four offices — in Brattleboro, Bennington, and Washington County, as well as the entire first floor of my home. A spare bedroom upstairs, which I’d planned to turn into a sitting room, acts as our storage room.
While I’d rather be able to work with 20 women directly, I know that if I get enough funding we can help 200 people a year. All of our services are free, and if I don’t write grant proposals, we’ll be out of business. It’s just like truck driving — it you don’t work, you won’t eat. Still, I’d much rather have a development director who could handle fund raising, so I could work more with battered women.
I also want to expand what we already do. In addition to the legal services we provide, our attorneys try to connect our clients with other social-service organizations that will help them find jobs, get a driver’s license, and so forth, but I wish we had a full-time case manager to do that.
Still, we try to follow up until a woman really is on her own. Have Justice-Will Travel has developed a Women in Transition support group for women in abusive relationships, and I’m trying to develop a Have Justice-Will Travel Institute so that what we do can be replicated in other parts of the country.
One of the things I’ve learned from victims of domestic violence is that they do not realize how strong they are and how much strength it takes to survive an abusive relationship. It requires so much courage for them to protect their children. But once they are out of the abusive situation, they just soar. All of the energy they previously used to survive they now put into doing positive things for their kids and themselves.
