Education, prevention keys to fighting domestic abuse

Women can stop the cycle of violence by taking responsibility for the situation they and their children are in, says Becky Callaham, center, with Safe Harbor. Staff/Aalan DeVorsey e-mail this story More details RESOURCES Safe Harbor — safeharborsc.org — 467-3636 or 1-800-291-2139 Compass of Carolina — compassofcarolina.org — 467-3434 S.C. Coalition Against Domestic Violence and Sexual Abuse — sccadvasa.org — National Hotline 1-800-799-SAFE or in Spanish 1-800-787-3224 Legal services, 467-3256 Child abuse, 467-7750 Other resources, page 3D. SAFETY TIPSAvoid being a victim: Watch out for a jealous, possessive partner, especially one who uses force during arguments. Be mindful if you're isolated from friends and family. Develop a plan in case you need to leave suddenly; decide early where to stay, set aside money, pack bags ahead of time. Talk to a professional counselor about this. Tell neighbors about the potential for problems, so they feel comfortable intervening. Establish a code so that your children understand when to call police. Change your locks. Keep from being alone, particularly if you've broken off a relationship. Don't blame yourself. SOURCE: Safe Harbor

Now, tragically, the 24-year-old grocery deli worker — killed Sept. 3 while working inside the East North Street Bi-Lo store — is a statistic, too.

Accused of her murder is Charles Christopher Williams, a man authorities say Maranda had dated, and who had been released on bond after being charged with assaulting her earlier this summer.

Year after year, South Carolina ranks near the top nationally in women killed by men, more often than not by someone they know.

Breaking the stranglehold domestic violence has on South Carolina's women is a daunting challenge, say those who champion the fight against domestic abuse.

To lift the shroud of such violence, they say, the state must emerge from a dark, long-held tradition, devote more resources to the battle and empower women who know little else but abuse and know less about how to escape it.

Above all, advocates say, more attention — and money — is needed for prevention and education.

Most resources for domestic violence go to help victims after the fact, says Jane Daniel, director of Compass of Carolina's family violence service, which provides intervention and counseling for victims and abusers.

Services to help women who have been battered are needed, Daniel says, but money for prevention — including counseling to help abusers change — is almost non-existent.

Intervention programs like the one she directs at Compass have proven effective in teaching abusers another way, and most often, she says, those who go through a 26-week batterers' program don't repeat the behavior.

If domestic abuse were cancer, Daniel says, our current situation would be akin to funneling all money into treatment and next to nothing to finding a cure.

"You can't disregard the cure," she says. "We can't not pay attention to the other side, the bad guy, as hard as that might be."

Abuse is a tradition handed down from generation to generation, perpetuated by apathy and ignorance, says Marilyn Perry-McKinney, who counsels offenders in the Compass program.

"When I see a perpetrator," she says, "I see a child victim. When they see violence as a child, they become violent."

Nationally, 70 percent of domestic violence cases involve child abuse, too.

The nature of violence in the home, McKinney says, is that children are often abused and suffer later in life ... or they may never get a chance to live through it.

Rodrekus King is an example of the latter. His mother, Earnetta Marie King, and her boyfriend, Patrick Bertran Walker, were sentenced last week to life in prison for beating the 13-year-old boy to death.

McKinney says the tragedy of such a case is that if Rodrekus had lived, he would have been a prime candidate to be an abuser himself when he grew up.

But not all the culpability rests on the abusers and their inner demons.

Women can stop the unremitting cycle of violence by taking responsibility for the situation they and their children are in, says Becky Callaham, a counselor at Greenville's Safe Harbor shelter for battered women.

"A woman should use the resources available, but she should also take responsibility for herself and be extra, extra vigilant," Callaham says.

Breaking off a relationship is the most volatile time for a woman who has an abusive partner.

"That's the highest risk of a woman being killed is when she leaves her partner," Callaham says. "She needs to realize this is a dangerous time, and she never needs to be alone."

In the case of Maranda Williams — who was at work in a semi-public setting — it didn't matter. But while sometimes little can be done to stop someone bent on violence, a restraining order is still worth getting, Callaham says.

"A lot of people have said that an order of protection is not worth the paper that it's written on, but it's another tool that women can use," she says.

In taking responsibility, a woman should never blame herself for the abuse. In-between self-blame and apathy, McKinney says, is honesty, a willingness to face the truth.

"There isn't anything weak about getting help," she says.

Each year, police, courts and social workers in South Carolina see 36,000 domestic violence cases, almost all of them involving women as victims.

Three women every month are killed as a result of domestic violence, according to state figures, and in 2001 and 2002, nearly 100 women were killed by men they knew intimately.

In 2000, the Washington-based Violence Policy Council ranked South Carolina third behind Mississippi and Arizona for the rate of men who kill women. In 1998, South Carolina ranked first.

The state will hold its breath when the VPC releases its latest rankings at the end of the month.

In the face of such a stark reality, Vicki Bourus, director of the S.C. Coalition Against Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault, finds little room for anything but understatement.

"South Carolina has a very serious problem with domestic violence," Bourus says.

The question is, why?

South Carolina isn't known as a national trailblazer for change. Tradition rules here much as it does in other rural, Southern states.

But perhaps more so here, Bourus says, old traditions die hard.

At one time, domestic violence — if the concept of it even existed then — was not illegal in South Carolina.

Those who intervened in a man's status as the pater familias were seen socially as intrusive interlopers, whether or not physical abuse against women was frowned upon.

"We have a very traditional state," Bourus says, "and in many ways, some of those ways of thinking still have not changed. We have laws that address it, but it's a way of thinking that pre-dates laws by many, many years."

Even today, Bourus says she talks to women who feel stigmatized by family, churches or other social structures if they stand up to batterers.

The problem of domestic violence is less about anger, psychologists say, and more about control.

"Low education goes hand in hand with domestic violence," says Dr. Fred Medway, dean of psychology at the University of South Carolina.

Most abusers, Medway says, are men ages 25 to 35 who have been in relationships for only a couple years at most and who aren't highly educated.

The control issue plays in, Medway says, because abusers often suffer low self-esteem, even if they appear confident and well-adjusted to others outside the home.

The fact that South Carolina ranks near the bottom in education and near the top in violent crime per capita is no coincidence.

The history of the world's greatest civilizations has shown that those who are less educated are more easily controlled (though affluent, educated women, while in smaller numbers, fall prey to abuse, too, and often find it harder to leave and thus reduce their standard of living).

To combat that, advocates fighting domestic violence work tirelessly to educate victims, but often don't get cooperation from women who are afraid or apathetic.

The cost for Compass intervention program is $650 for abusers.

For free, victims can receive counseling on how to avoid domestic abuse, but, Daniel says, so few are either interested in coming or feel that they are allowed to by their partner.

About 80 percent of victims stay with the partner who abuses them, she says.

"We still struggle to get women in here," Daniel says. "It's about power and control."

A woman depending on an abuser to seek help is an unlikely solution, says David Landholt, director of the Domestic Abuse Center, which oversees intervention programs in 27 South Carolina counties.

The abusive person almost never owns up to the problem until the abuse goes too far, Landholt says, much like other ailments that are psychological in nature.

"It's a behavior that goes unrecognized by the person, much as alcoholism does," he says.

The state has begun to recognize the problem.

In January, the state's Domestic Violence Protection Act, signed into law this past summer, will take effect.

The new law makes the act or attempt of domestic violence of "a high and aggravated nature" a felony, rather than a misdemeanor.

That could mean prison time for offenders who now face a $500 fine or 30 days in jail for the first, second and third offenses.

Under the new law, judges will be granted greater discretion to require intervention programs for first- and second-time abusers. Third-time abusers will be subject to a minimum three-month prison sentence.

Also, State Attorney General Henry McMaster has started a pilot program designed to recruit pro bono legal representation for domestic abuse victims, who often don't have representation before a magistrate.

Those working to fight domestic abuse laud the steps that government has taken, but they are quick to point out that much more needs to be done.

On the judicial end, Bourus believes that special domestic violence courts must be established statewide so that individual magistrates aren't handed cases on which they aren't qualified to render judgments.

Three such courts operate now in Columbia.

Without stricter laws and more education, little will change, Medway says.

"They don't see themselves as solely responsible, even when they are caught," he says of abusers. "The real bottom line is, this is how these guys think it is."