WEBVTT

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[sil.]

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[music]

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What we do unintentionally really does
scar them down because they become,

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umm… naturally their emotions
not, not caring if anyone cares,

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or expecting no one to care about how they feel
is, it becomes everyday way of life, in that way

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putting themselves second, you know, afraid to say
anything because of, you know, bruised harassment you get.

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When I use a term battering,

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I mean a much broader term than the legal
definition that the police department might use.

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To me battering is not only getting punched on the
nose, but it\'s the criticism, it\'s the control,

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it\'s the power issues, it\'s the
intimidation, it\'s the threatening,

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it\'s the tearing down of one, what one is.

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You don\'t look at. You don\'t look like you\'re an
abused person. What does the abused person look like?

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An abused person looks like every
single person in the world.

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And if they continue,

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then they\'re violating you. They\'re
abusing you. They\'re… they\'re…

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they\'re taking away your rights. And I think
that\'s what abuse is, is taking away your rights

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and subjecting you to something
that you don\'t agree with

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or you don\'t want to participate in.

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I realized that I had a problem that I couldn\'t
deal with myself. I tried to deal with it before

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in various ways and they were never… never effective and I
get discouraged and figured, well, there\'s nothing I can do.

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And then realizing that I…
I really needed some help.

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But with help, I didn\'t have any
idea where to go to get the help.

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And where do you get entry level help

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that you can go from there to
find out what you need further.

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And my wife is going to
women\'s crisis center

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that\'s right next door. And she
said, \"Hey, they recommended,

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favored very, very much.\" And another umm…

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women center had also
recommended me, so I came here.

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I say, welcome to the Batterers
Intervention program. Umm…

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I always like to read this as a preamble to our purpose.
Understand the purpose of the Batterers Intervention program

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is to end my use of all forms
of physical and verbal violence

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as a way of expressing myself. To end my need,
to exert power and control over others,

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to learn non-violent, non angry
ways of expressing disagreement.

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Most of the people who come here
stop the physical violence.

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The other part that I think
is the more difficult

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is the emotional abuse and
the controlling behaviors,

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because as some folk say, it\'s subtle\" but
in some ways it\'s not very subtle at all,

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and that requires a change of belief in

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how I view the world, how I view myself.

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And that\'s what I spend a lot of time on is,
how do I get to those beliefs that say that

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I can\'t control my partner.
And umm… make this shift from

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what I call the power over to

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a partnership of equality side by side.

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We would have our disagreements and
a… I\'ll give her a silent treatment,

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you know, wouldn\'t say
anything and blah, blah, blah.

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And she would keep conversation, the longer
it keep going, then I might well turn verbal,

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you know, abusive and you want show up.

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Do you think it was a progression of abusive
behavior that led to the physical aggression,

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was there other behaviors
that preceded that?

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We\'ll start out with umm… could be
from what we\'re having to dinner to

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umm… me physically hitting her on,
her upon seriously hurting yourself.

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Oh, me hurting her, not hurting yourself.
Umm… it was totally my fault.

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And as we began to open up and understand the
effects of the, of the abusive behavior,

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then they begin to own that.

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And I also say, you know, provocation
is no justification for violence.

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I mean, it is our beliefs. A lot of these
stuffs are our core… A lot of stuff there I\'m…

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that we look at here were core beliefs,
you know. I go to work, I pay the bills,

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you clean the house, you do my laundry, you cook my dinner,
you clean my, you know… You got a job, I got a job.

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You got a job, I got a job.
That\'s your job, this is my job.

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I felt like that a lot, you know. I\'ve
been… And who is your supervisor? Me.

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[sil.]

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And who appointed you to that position? Oh, well, of course, I did. No one
appointed you, is it? Who else can appoint me, you know, I\'m in-charge.

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It makes me insecure, they can\'t… I mean,
if you move faster for lunch, you know.

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And, if, maybe that\'s what Tina told me, I\'m writing
seventh leave letter I wrote that, you know,

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just telling you ruined your self esteem. Umm,
she found it hard to trust anybody, you know,

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she says if anybody moves fast, I jump. You
know, that was just one time. You know,

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so I can imagine after years
of how a person, woman or

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male will be emotionally scarred away.
Interesting after that I just really hurt her,

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like we\'re doing jail time 30 days and the
jailer said, this is a very serious thing.

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This is serious distraction.
They\'re cracking down on her.

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The program Project New
Attitudes is a nine week

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three phase program based on a
modified therapeutic community.

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Every three weeks we have an admission
of new phase, one participants,

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and at the same time we graduate our phase three participants
to what I like to call phase four which is aftercare,

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and then our phase one members move up to phase two
and our phase two members move up to phase three.

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And the phase ups are based on staff

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and, umm… corrections review,
clinical and correction staff review,

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and then also based on the individual\'s
passing their peer review.

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We have two peer review committees that also evaluate them to make sure that
they have learned the material and are ready to move forward with the program.

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I never care. Until I went to a
Batterer Intervention Program,

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I never considered myself a batter per se.

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I knew, I always knew I was
sarcastic and verbally abusive,

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but I didn\'t really mean it in a way
that I felt was harmful at the time,

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but after taking the classes I find that, you
know, they have this little power and control

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wheel and I\'m all over the wheel as far as power and
control. I like to have control, I like to be on in-charge.

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And I had a wife that was very, I guess, you\'d
say gentle and nice and I took advantage of that

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and kind of manipulated
it to where, you know,

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that… that my self-esteem and my
needs, so I was very verbally abusive.

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And if I didn\'t get my way, I would get
angry and pretty much she always gave in,

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so I just fed my power and control even more. I was
excited as all could be to come into the program,

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so I came in pretty positive. And since I\'ve been here, I\'ve
learned a lot through the class and the counselors that

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they work with me and some
things I kind of knew about

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but didn\'t know the depth of my problems and
other ones that I had no idea how to fix.

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I never knew I was an emotional wreck
until a couple of encounters, actually

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just kept packing at me until
I just fell apart, and…

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it kind of helped, believe me, very sad as that
sounds too but, you know, I started crying one day

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and I haven\'t cried and probably in ten
years I actually cry about something and…

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For whatever it\'s worth, it made me
feel better and since then, you know,

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I, I kind of been very thankful, but I got to honestly
say the biggest part I guess is the support and…

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They have an aftercare thing
and… I think that will be good.

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To put it simply, our goal is to help these
guys help themselves not to come back here.

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I can share with you statistics that

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we\'ve tracked for the Department of Education as far as how many
times someone goes to church within six months of release and

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the length of time between re-arrest and
coming back here. Our goal is real simple.

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Try to help these guys help themselves not to come back. I
always use the analogy, we\'re sort of coaches on a sideline.

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In the nine weeks we give them so much
education, so much knowledge, so much resources,

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but when they leave the decisions
they make are on them.

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We can be here to support them. As part of the program we do
provide at least a minimum of a year of case management aftercare.

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We have some guys who\'ve been in our
aftercare program for two or three years

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and we certainly allow that.

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What tools that we gave on this program?

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Umm… I would have to say coping skills. The need for other
people in my life, the ability to ask for help when it\'s there

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because I believe there was help out there
before but I was too proud to ask for.

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So my pride, I\'ve learned
to deal with that.

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I… I learned to figure out that I\'m not alone. I\'m
not the only person with this kind of problem.

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My role is to provide intervention
with domestic violence families

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and to provide that intervention on any level that\'s necessary.
I\'m very like a victim advocate in a police department

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that totally specialize in domestic
violence. So one of the things that I do

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is I go out on calls with officers and provide intervention
in people\'s homes while they\'re doing an investigation.

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But I think it starts when you\'re a kid, and I don\'t think any kid would
know it unless they were over some functional people\'s families out

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and you don\'t realize your family screwed
up until you can compare to somebody else

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and, but looking back on what I\'ve learned
in the program, I cannot honestly say

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my house was a disaster, and I
definitely learned the way I am from

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my family as the protective mechanism
to protect my own self-esteem.

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Children are… are silent victims often with domestic
violence. People have ignored them for years.

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They just kind of came along with the
package. We\'ll serve… We\'ll serve adults and

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we\'ll meet the needs of adults and there were the children and, oh… oh, yeah, okay,
you could bring them along to a group or you could bring them along to a shelter or,

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well, you know, we acknowledge
that they\'re present.

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Umm… We finally have started in
our society to recognize that

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children are very affected by violence and
particularly by domestic violence in their homes.

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So what I see in working with
children as I walk into homes

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and I see their eyes. I see their
eyes that are sometimes blank

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because they\'ve seen way too much or they\'re frightened, you
know, they\'ve got that deer in the headlights kind of look,

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it\'s that… What just
happened here in my house?

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I grew up in an Italian family where you just didn\'t cry. I mean,
you weren\'t allowed to do, and it\'s a very, it was a loud family

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it was, they didn\'t mean to be abusive
as I look back but they were, and

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I just stuffed everything. If I had emotion
I felt weak, so I wouldn\'t show them.

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And so, because of that I would stuff everything inside
me and then I would go and release it somewhere else

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by getting in a fight with my friends or, you
know, whatever I had to do to get it out of me,

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and I didn\'t recognize back then, but to me it was normal in
our family but no, you weren\'t allowed to cry in our family.

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I don\'t care how bad it was.
In fact if you did cry,

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they told you they\'ll give
something to cry about so.

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What we will be doing is really looking at

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behaviors and attitudes in belief systems

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because that\'s really where you… Those were
the underlying issues of domestic violence.

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Domestic violence is a
learned… Is a learned behavior

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I believe, and most of us in this field believe that
it\'s a learned behavior. That means that children,

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as they\'re growing up witnessing violence
in their homes or in their communities

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as they\'re growing up, being the recipient of
violence. If they\'re a victim of child abuse,

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then they are learning also to be violent.

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It\'s just really interesting because trauma
does affect the children so differently.

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Some kids, we see them just
repeating what they\'ve seen.

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They are the kids that are screaming at you, that are swearing at you,
you say, you know, come here and do this. No, I\'m not listening to you.

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I mean, they\'re just absolutely modeling off the behaviors that they demonstrated. They
are the kids in preschool that are throwing the chalks, that are smacking the teacher,

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that are hitting other kids. Their,

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you know, their behavior is very apparent, I mean you couldn\'t
miss it. And even if they\'re not, if it\'s not in their home,

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they\'re seeing it in the community.
They\'re seeing it on television.

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They\'re seeing it in video games. Violence is,
is just a part of our everyday life anymore.

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And so, any prevention

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methods or any prevention
techniques really need to involve

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understanding what some of the underlying
issues are with domestic violence.

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There\'s two aspects to that Peacemaker program. There\'s
a miniscule part and there\'s also a preschool part.

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I\'m personally a middle school peacemaker. So
I go in and provide a nine week curriculum

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or shorter depending on what the
teacher would like, and we talk about

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all sorts of subjects with the middle schoolers.
We talk about kind of like anger and violence,

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we talk about that feelings and behaviors. In the
beginning few weeks are mostly geared towards

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conflict resolution and what do we
do with our feelings, you know.

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There\'s no such thing as a bad feeling. It\'s okay
to be angry, it\'s what we do it that matters.

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As a child my, my father
abused my mother quite a lot.

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In fact it was, I didn\'t realize
until I became an adult

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that we had a dysfunctional family.

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As an African-American, I always thought that
being abused when you, you know, physically

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seeing your mother being abused
was part of our culture.

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And I didn\'t realize that, that
was not until I got older.

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And it was very, very hard
for me as a child because

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our neighbors would sit
out in the front yard

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on a Friday night or Saturday night, and, because
they knew my dad was going to jump on my mom,

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and they will wait for the fight
tonight, Saturday night fight.

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And we would always call them, so
we would always call the cops,

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and my dad would end up going to jail and
he would be released few hours later,

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come back and this went on for
several, several years as a child.

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In relationships that are violent,
there\'s a ton of emotional abuse,

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there\'s tons of control
issues, there\'s isolation,

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umm… there\'s umm…feelings being perpetrated that, you know, you can\'t make
it without me, so you better stay with me, no matter what I do to you.

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I mean it was interesting. I\'d say, \"Oh,

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my friends want us to go out to dinner
with them.\" \"Oh, you\'re bored with me?\"

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\"I don\'t… I don\'t want to go out with
somebody else, I just want us to be together,

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just the two of us. I love you. I just
need the two of us to be together.\"

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So we hardly ever went out with any other
people, because it was, well, I thought,

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oh, he loves me so much, he doesn\'t want to share me
with anybody, but he won\'t share me with my family.

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I really was

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away from my family a lot. He
kept me away from my family.

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One thing can lead into the whole ball of wax,
to everything, it can lead into the physical and

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the emotional, the mental,
financial, the verbal, the sexual.

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The Clothesline project
started originally in 1990

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by the Cape Cod women\'s agenda
up in Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

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They realized that during the Vietnam era,

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there were 58,000 military
personnel that were killed.

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And during that same timeframe,
there were 51,000 women

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in the United States alone that were killed by
the husbands and men that supposedly love them.

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And when they found out about
that staggering figure,

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they decided we need to do
something to honor and memorialize

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all these women that were killed.

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So thus the Clothesline project evolved and it
started with 31 shirts on the line up there.

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We have workshops that we hold for women,

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and they\'re allowed to create shirts and
that\'s where they give voice to their pain by,

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actually, I refer to it as
putting their paint on canvas.

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At that point we take these

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shirts that have been made and we\'ll have a Clothesline
display, and we\'ll hang them out in a public park

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most of the time, and we hang
them shoulder to shoulder

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so that they\'re all joined
symbolizing the unity of women

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speaking up and saying, you know,
we\'ve got to break the silence

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and stop the violence.

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December of 1992, I went into the
spouse abuse shelter with my children

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and they did a group. We would
have groups that we went to

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and they showed up, saying, this is a new
organization, we would like you to do a shirt.

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I found out towards the end of the
night when I was doing my shirt,

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it turned out something totally different
than what I expected it to be,

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and then I started going, I don\'t like
this shirt. And I thought, you know,

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hey, I\'m never going to see it again. About
five years ago I actually came across

00:18:45.000 --> 00:18:49.999
my own shirt.

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And we were supposed to talk about or
do something expressing the violence

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and that we were supposed
to teach other women about

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how we felt when in fact my own shirt taught me
because of the way I had my shirt worked up.

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I was reaching out for a
person that was a treasure

00:19:10.000 --> 00:19:14.999
that I knew I was.

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And by looking at it, I thought, I am a treasure, why am I still
reaching out for it. Why I\'m so afraid to let people see who I am.

00:19:20.000 --> 00:19:24.999
This is very much a healing
process for the women

00:19:25.000 --> 00:19:29.999
umm… and the children.

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This is, and this is not just about domestic
violence, it\'s about all types of violence,

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whether it\'s physical, emotional,
sexual, psychological,

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just, you know, any, any
form of violence whatsoever.

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What an impact it has on a person. I
mean, when you see 1,100 shirts hanging

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out in the open, in a park

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and you realize there are
that many women and children

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just in our local area and that\'s only a drop in
the bucket to the amount of abuse that goes on.

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This is, these are just the
women that come forward.

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Maybe somebody else will see
and it mean something to them

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Maybe somebody is in abusive relationship and it means
enough to them to help them get out of what they\'re in.

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Maybe a guy will come along and see
that, well, maybe I am an abuser

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and maybe… The magnitude of it will stop.

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Get some help.

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The most gratifying part, seeing someone come up
to and when you start saying, I know how you feel.

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You know, I\'ve been there,

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and they actually are willing to listen and you see
that sigh of relief when they tell their story,

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no matter what age they are or what gender.

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And it\'s like that safetyness,

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and you feel as if, you know, at least we gave
them some sort of type of relief, you know,

00:21:05.000 --> 00:21:09.999
our understanding that they\'re not alone.

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You know that\'s, that\'s the strength of a battered woman. She\'s learned
how to figure out how to make it mentally, physically, emotionally

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how to keep herself together
and through very, through

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a terrorism incident essentially
that it\'s just a curse that

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she lives in domestic terrorism all the time, and
she\'s figured out how to survive that somehow.

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And they want you to see the
world through their eyes.

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They don\'t want you to do anything
that they don\'t want you to do.

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I went through some
physical abuse from her.

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Most of the abuse I believe that I went through
with my mother was on more on an emotional level,

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a psychological level,
umm… the name calling.

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I learned that, well, you know, I
was stupid, and I was not pretty,

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and I was not worthy.

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I was just, you know,
some piece of carbon that

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should have been blessed the fact that I
got married, and he trained me that way.

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To feel like you have the
right to control my money,

00:22:20.000 --> 00:22:24.999
you have the right to control our children, to feel
like that you have the right to control our lives,

00:22:25.000 --> 00:22:29.999
it\'s a shared relationship. We have,
should have equal power here.

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You may be good at some things and I\'m
good at other things, we\'ll work that out,

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but you don\'t have the right to control
me, to criticize me, to call me names,

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to wound the deepest part of who
I am to take that away from me,

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to make me feel like, I\'m unloved by
anybody. You don\'t have that right.

00:22:50.000 --> 00:22:54.999
So verbal abuse is just as
vicious as any other abuse.

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And that\'s very, it\'s been
very difficult for me

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to accept the term. That…
that, okay, I am an abuser

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because I\'ve never hit my wife,

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and I\'ve always assumed an abuser was
someone who was battering someone else

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but… I\'ve come to realize that

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verbal abuse can kill somebody.

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And it\'s serious.

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So what will I say to an abuser? I mean, first thing
I say stop it, knock it off, don\'t do it anymore.

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And if you continue to do it, we\'re going to bring the full
force of the law in every, every bit of force we can do

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to let you know that this
is socially unacceptable.

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To let you know that what you\'ve done is not
just something that you might get caught for

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but it is morally, spiritually wrong.

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If you are a man who has,
who is abusing a woman.

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If you were a child and
you were brought up,

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and you saw your mom being abused, and
you saw the hurt that she went through.

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Why would you do it to another woman?

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Why would you do it to
someone else\'s mother,

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someone else\'s sister? Would you want
someone to do that to your sister,

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or to your, your child
when they become an adult?

00:24:30.000 --> 00:24:34.999
You have to think about what you are doing

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to avoid, would you, what that
have done to your daughter,

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or would you want that done to your sister.
And if you didn\'t see your mom go through it,

00:24:45.000 --> 00:24:49.999
would you want that
happen it to your mother.

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Put your mother, your sister and
your child in that woman\'s place

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and see how it would feel. Just
think about how it would feel

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if that were, if that, if you were actually hitting
them and hit instead of hitting someone else.

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I don\'t think you would do it. I
would pray that you wouldn\'t do it.

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I know I\'m not a bad person,
and I\'m not an evil person

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but I do make mistakes and I have
problems and issues I need to work on.

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But I truly think the public need to understand
and maybe help people in those situations,

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like with programs. I had such a problem finding a
program. I couldn\'t even get one when I was not in jail,

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I mean, and I actually searched, unfortunately
I couldn\'t before I realized I had a problem,

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but until you know you have a problem,
you won\'t fix the problem so.

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I think the public need to know that
people are fixable in my opinion.

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Because I\'ve only been, I\'ve been
in this program five months, and

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if you\'ve seen me from the day I came into
now, I am much nicer person even on the inside

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and I feel like I\'ll be a better person
in any relationship. I\'m more caring

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and I\'m hoping I can continue that.