Yesterday was the one year anniversary of the abduction and murder of Michelle Gardner Quinn, a UVM student. The Unitarian Church in Burlington devoted both of its services yesterday to the memory of this young woman and to address the issue of violence against women. The pastor there, Gary Kowalski, asked me to speak at the service. He knows that Spectrum does domestic violence prevention work and that I have written several op-ed columns in the Burlington Free Press about this. It was an honor to be there and what follows are my comments at the service:
Thanks for inviting me here this morning. As Gary said, I am the director of Spectrum Youth and Family Services, and when people think of Spectrum they think of our work right across the street, where we help homeless teenagers by providing them with shelter, food, education and job assistance. And when I tell people we also have staff in White River Junction, Bratteleboro, Bennington and Middlebury, and that they work in prisons and probation offices with men who have been convicted of battering, people are surprised. In fact I remember telling this to one person who replied, “And why is Spectrum involved in that?” And the answer is that the vast majority of those young people who come to us off the street seeking help grew up in families where there was domestic violence, where there was a man battering his wife and partner, and very likely battering his children as well. An estimated 50-70% of men who physically abuse their partner or wife and also doing the same to their children. So it is our belief that if we can get to these men, and help change their belief system, their way of thinking about women, we are in effect reducing the number of young people who will end up in the foster care system or homeless.
It was one of our domestic violence prevention workers, a female, who came to me after the terrible death of Michelle Gardner Quinn last year, and said, “You know what is disturbing about all the articles written on this? Everything is about how women need to make themselves safer. ‘If only Michelle Gardner Quinn had kept her phone charged. Women should always remember to charge their phone. A woman should not get separated from her friends. She should not walk back to UVM at night alone, and if she does, she should not talk to any man she does not already know.’ That kind of thing, which is fine, we do want to be safe, but what is missing is anyone saying or writing, ‘Why are so many men doing this? Why are so many men hurting and killing women in our state and in our country?’ That is the elephant in the room, and a man needs to write this and it should be you.”
My immediate reaction was, “I already write enough things in the paper, you should write it,” but I had lunch with my wife Marybeth an hour later, she is a journalism professor at St. Michael’s College, and I told her, “One of the women at Spectrum thinks I should write this op-ed asking why so many men and killing women in this country, but I don’t think I should, I think she should write it,” and Marybeth immediately said, “No, that woman is right, it has to be written by a man and it should be you.”
So I did and when I was thinking about what I wanted to say, I was heavily influenced by a Bob Herbert column in the New York Times about violence toward women. He is a regular op-ed columnist on the Times, the only African-American, and he is really great, we should all read him as much as possible. This particular column is dated Oct 16, 2006, entitled, “Why Aren’t We Shocked?” and he doesn’t reference the terrible incidents in Vermont but does start with the Amish incident Gary talked about and one in a CO high school. I just want to read you a little of what he wrote.
“In the recent shootings at an Amish schoolhouse in rural PA and in a large public h.s. in CO, the killers went out of their way to separate the girls from the boys, and then deliberately attacked only the girls. In the widespread coverage that followed these crimes, very little was made of the fact that only the girls were targeted. Imagine if a gunman had gone into a school, separated the kids up on the basis of race or religion, and then shot only the black kids. Or only the white kids. Or only the Jews.
“There would have been thunderous outrage. And the attack would have been seen for what it really was: a hate crime. None of that occurred because these were just girls, and we have become so accustomed to living in a society saturated with misogyny that violence against females is more or less to be expected. Stories about the rape, murder and mutilation of women and girls are staples of the news, as familiar to us as weather forecasts.”
That is a difficult message to hear. He goes on to speculate about some of the cultural forces that play a role in this:
“There’s gangsta rap, and the video games where the players themselves get to maul and molest women, and on and on. You’re deluded if you think this is all about fun and games. It’s all part of a devastating continuum of misogyny that at its farthest extremes touches down in places like the one-room Amish schoolhouse in normally quiet Nickel Mines, PA.”
And to that I would add the normally quiet streets of Burlington and Essex.
I think he is right, and I think he is on target with the music and the video games, and I would add one thing that has particular relevance to our city, and that is professional wrestling.
Every year the WWE, the World Wrestling Entertainment, comes into town, and they rent Memorial Auditorium, which is a public facility, it is a facility owned by the people of Burlington, and they put on their show. Now I watched professional wrestling on tv as a kid in the 70’s, I remember Bruno Sammartino and Chief Jay Strongbow, and it probably wasn’t the greatest thing in the world for a kid to be watching but it was pretty harmless. The pro wrestling they have now is very, very different from what we watched back then, and it is not harmless. In fact, one of the training films our domestic violence staff use for new staff is “Wrestling with Manhood: Boys, Bullying and Battering.” And it shows you what goes on in these performances. For one thing, there is frequently a male wrestler posing as gay, and a female as a lesbian, and they are just mocked, belittled for that. But sticking with the domestic violence theme, there are male wrestlers and female wrestlers in each performance, and some of the male wrestlers will have with them their girlfriend or partner or wife, and during the course of the performance the male believes this woman has betrayed him in some way or is flirting with another male, and he proceeds to beat her, right there in the ring, to pummel here. And you know what you hear from the male wrestler, and from the male fans in the audience? “She deserved it. She had it coming to her. She deserved it.”
And you watch this on this film, over and over and over again, and what is striking is that this is the same thing our Spectrum staff here from the men they work with in jails and probation offices: “Why did you batter your wife or your partner?” And they answer, “She deserved it. She pushed me to it.” It’s the same mentality, the same belief system that says, “Men have the right to control their women, if force by necessary.”
I know there are people who disagree with me, good people, people I have a lot of respect for. I’ve talked to people on the city council about this and they tell me this is an issue of free speech. And they might be right. But sometimes I wonder, when does something cross over the line from free speech into the promotion of a hate crime? Into the promotion of prejudice? In light of all that has happened in this county during the last two years, with Michelle Gardner Quinn, the two women in Essex, and with Laura Winterborrom before that, I just do not think there is any place for anything in this city that thinks domestic violence is funny, or part of entertainment or makes light of it. And particularly in a facility that we the people own. In fact, I often think that if an outside group came into town and announced, “We’re going to have a dogfight competition in Memorial Auditorium,” I think that there would be a hue and cry from the people of this city, and rightly so, in fact I would be right out there with them. Or if a group came into town and said it wanted to rent Memorial to recreate the UVM Cake Walk, in which Caucasians smear black paint over their face and belittle African Americans, people in this city would be outraged, they’d be out in the streets and not allow it. But somehow, the WWE comes here year after year, there are a few people who dutifully stand outside with signs protesting it, but no one else seems to get upset. I just don’t get that.
Even if pro wrestling were to never return to Chitt County, would that stop men’s violence against women to any degree? I don’t know. Ron Redmond is going to speak to you in one minute, I applaud what he has done to start the White Ribbon Campaign, in fact I was one of the first to sign up to join it, but he and I have talked, is that going to stop violence against women in this county? We don’t know either. But I do know we have to start somewhere. We have to take a stand somewhere. We, and in particular men, cannot stand idly by any longer, waiting to pick up the morning paper and read about the next killing of a woman. We have to say, “Enough.”
Thank you Gary for inviting me here today.
