By Erin Randolph

Kathy Ward was forced to sit down in the home she shared with her boyfriend of three years, her hands tied behind her back and her feet tied to the legs of the chair. Her boyfriend Thomas, someone she considered the love of her life, and his friends brandished a knife, slit off her clothes and soaked her in alcohol.

They gang raped her and beat her so badly the neighbors heard.

She was rushed to the hospital, where she sat for a week recovering.

"I was in a lot of pain," Ward says. "I didn't know what I was going to do. I was scared. Stupid me, I went back. He told me he wasn't going to do it again. He told me he loved me. He told me he cared about me. I gave in. Two weeks later, I got beat up again. He dragged me down a flight of stairs."

Thomas was arrested and sent to jail. Ward went to the Family Violence Center, where she sat in a chair for four hours and cried.

"I was so scared," Ward says. "The only thing that crossed my mind was, How did I get here? Why did I get here? Why did I let somebody straight up take control of my whole entire life and abuse the body that was not even given to him? It wasn't even his to take."

Ward didn't know how she was going to get herself out, but she made the decision to do just that. She needed to regain control. She's now 30, in a stable relationship and working toward a college degree.

And though her experiences with Thomas were her last with domestic violence, they weren't her first. No. Domestic violence became an unwanted houseguest in Ward's life at the age of 4; needless to say, it overstayed its welcome.

According to statistics from the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, one in four women will experience domestic violence during her lifetime. And though men can also become victims of this type of violence, statistics from 2001 revealed that 85 percent of all victims were women.

However, domestic violence doesn't discriminate by income level, race, ability, ethnic background or social standing. And it can take on criminal - including physical assault, sexual abuse and stalking - or emotional - including psychological and financial abuse - forms. Name-calling, intimidation, withholding money or keeping a partner from contacting family or friends, these can all be examples of domestic violence.

It's the kind of work that, once you get involved as an advocate for battered women, can be hard to leave. Laurie Schipper knows from experience. As a college student, she volunteered to work for a domestic violence program in Ames. Afterward, she was hired and worked there for 10 years.

"It was a dramatic volunteer opportunity," Schipper says. "It changes young women's lives when they enter work like this. It's hard to walk away from."

So she didn't. She's now the executive director of the Iowa Coalition Against Domestic Violence (ICADV), a position she's held since 1993. The ICADV is a state-level non-profit agency that provides training and technical assistance to service providers, the criminal justice system and the healthcare system on issues of domestic violence. The coalition also has a legal clinic and works with the rapidly growing population of Spanish-speaking people in Iowa who need cultural-specific information. Because batterers too often use a victim's questionable immigration status against her, this is a sector that's need for aid and awareness increases with its fast-growing population.

Though there's no clear reason as to why, instance of domestic abuse don't seem to be increasing or decreasing.

"Public awareness probably increases reporting to programs," Schipper says. "More effective service delivery probably gets women out and more self-sufficient quicker. However, very few battered women report to anyone, including domestic violence programs or law enforcement. Even though we talk about this a lot, the barriers and the stigma are still so harsh that many women remain in the home."

Beyond that, there are aspects that can complicate a woman's willingness to leave the home.

"They think immediately of what is most important to them in their lives - their kids, their faith, their home," Schipper says. "They need to determine whether leaving is worth giving up those things. At each stage, if you dissect what she's dealing with, it's a pretty sane and rational decision. Especially when you realize that it's a myth that leaving the relationship ends the violence, that most deaths occur after she leaves. She's actually deciding, am I willing to lose everything if I leave?"

Ward was put in an orphanage at birth. She doesn't remember much from the time she spent there, but she does know there was a lot of turmoil, cuts, bruises and stitches.
Between the ages of 4 and 17, Ward was a product of a foster care system that failed her, having lived in 17 different homes. During that time, she was physically and emotionally abused in such a horrific way that she's not surprised when people break down when she retells her story today, one she speaks of so matter-of-factly that it makes a listener a bit unnerved.

When she was adopted at the age of 4, Ward still could not speak. Her adopted dad raped her for the first time when she was 5 years old. She also lived with her adopted dad's mom for a while, who molested her and used to tie her to beds so she couldn't get up during the night, prompting her to wet it.

When she was 8, her adopted dad's sister noticed a discharge in Ward's panties, went to the doctor and procured birth control pills. Because Ward was too young to have gotten her first period, the birth controls started it for her. Later in life, doctors would tell Ward she would not be able to have children because of the damage done to her body at the hands of the birth control.

She continued to be raped by her adopted dad until the age of 12, when her adopted brother walked in on it and turned him in. Her adopted dad went to court, was found guilty and served 14 years in jail. His wife, however, did not believe Ward, and the only real mother-daughter relationship Ward knew suffered because of it. They stopped talking. But this wasn't the end of Ward's relationship with her adopted parents, even though their parental rights were terminated.

Jennifer Reynoldson knows a lot about victims' and batterer's attitudes toward domestic violence. She hears them every day as the probation/parole supervisor with the Fifth Judicial District Department of Correctional Services. In this capacity, Reynoldson supervises the Batterers Education Program. She says that until we start asking the right questions about domestic violence, our attempts at quelling it will only be temporary.

"I think until we as a society quit asking, 'Why doesn't she leave?' and instead focus on why we allow him to do this," Reynoldson says. "Why do we expect her to flee her home? We have to change the way we look at domestic violence. Instead of looking at her reaction, we need to look at his violence and force him to stop and determine what the consequences should be if he doesn't. Until we do that, we're just going to continue to put Band-Aids on a gaping wound."

After Ward turned 12, she was put into a foster home with a woman Ward describes as "a doozy." She was really into power and control, and was a severe alcoholic. Ward started drinking at 13. She was enrolled in Callanan Middle School, and she kept getting in fights and getting suspended for drinking in the hallways.

Her new foster mother quit drinking for two months, but then dove back into her self-destructive behavior, telling Ward she would never amount to anything, that she was stupid. At 15, Ward ran away. Her alcoholic foster mother didn't even turn her in as a runaway. She stayed on the streets until she was 16,. when she ended up in Omaha, started seeing this guy and getting into drugs, including weed, speed and crack.

"In about a year I just came back here, turned myself in to Children and Families of Iowa," Ward says. She went to court and told the judge she would rather go into a group home than return to a foster care system that had continually failed her. She ended up in Newton in a group home at 16, where she learned self-respect and a lot about the government and human services. She even played sports, including diving, swimming, softball, basketball and volleyball.

"I figured that if I got into sports it would calm me down a little bit," Ward says. "I figured it would put me into a normal environment where I should have been."

But Ward hadn't even hit rock bottom. That wouldn't happen until her junior year.

Generally speaking, when a man comes to the court-mandated Batterers Education Program, they're not surprisingly upset that they have to be there, Reynoldson says.

"They believe they haven't done anything wrong," she says. "They often blame the victim for the event. They minimize, deny or they blame the victim. It's pretty common, at least when they first get in the program."

Everyone in the state who's convicted of domestic abuse assault is ordered to the 24-week-or-longer program. Currently, more than 270 people are attending the program in which they meet once a week in small groups for two hours and talk about a variety of topics in an attempt to change their core beliefs about women.

"Generally speaking, perpetrators of domestic violence blame everyone and everything but themselves," Reynoldson says. "Victims blame themselves for absolutely everything that happened. They use very different language when they talk about what happened."

Batterers have a criminal beliefs system, Schipper says. They, first of all, believe they are entitled. Secondly, they think they won't get caught. And lastly, they feel that even if they do get caught, the punishment won't hurt that much. They commonly have low self-esteem, are terrified of abandonment, believe other people make them do things, think everyone's against them and have very rigid sex roles. They live to obtain, maintain and regain control over a partner.

"The first thing that happens to battered women is they see the first incident of violence as sort of an aberration, something they didn't think their partner was capable of," Schipper says. "Because he apologizes and says it won't happen again, she believes that. When it happens the second time, she might leave to teach him a lesson. When the violence stops, she thinks she's successful. The third time, she might leave, but she returns because she doesn't think she qualifies for public benefits or because the housing list is too long. Or maybe she goes home because he holds a gun to her head or has custody of her children."

Ward's junior year she got into crack cocaine. This is when she literally went off the deep end.

While diving off a diving board at a pool, her mouth smacked the board. She swam to the edge of the pool and got out before realizing her whole face was gushing with blood.

She went to the emergency room, where she received 18 stitches on the outside and 16 on the inside. Her broken jaw was wired shut, her nose was bruised and had a skid mark of raw skin where it'd slid across the board.

"At that time, I knew I hit rock bottom," Ward says. "I had a concussion. I was having flashbacks from different periods of time in my life. I realized I had hit the end. I thought, 'Oh crap, it could have been worse than what I put myself through.'"
Her group home provided both Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous classes for her, and she saw a counselor every day for two hours.
"I went into what they called a severe compulsion from being off of drugs. My body wasn't normal at that time because I hadn't been sober for a while. I haven't used since 1992."

In 1993, Ward graduated from high school.

In 1996, Ward met the man she thought was the love of her life. Thomas gave her everything, treated her like gold. A year later they moved in together. That's when the changes in his behavior started, but she didn't confront them at the time, unintentionally allowing them to escalate beyond control.

He used to give her a grocery list, and if she returned without all of the items marked off, he'd get furious. It wasn't long before the abuse started. In cabinets, vegetables had to be lined up perfectly. The towels in the bathroom had to be hung up a certain way. If the books weren't straightened, if the house wasn't vacuumed, Ward's body would pay the price.

Things got really violent in 1999. He started pulling her hair, dragging her down the flight of stairs, putting a sock in her screaming mouth and taping it shut, gang raping her with his friends.

After an especially bad bout with Thomas' anger, Ward visited the Family Violence Center, where she spent four hours crying in a chair. It was life changing. The center helped her get into public housing and get a good job doing accounting at the Federal Building.

And in 2001, she met a man who took the breath away from her - figuratively this time. They continued to grow, and in 2002, though doctors told her she wouldn't be able to, Ward became pregnant with her daughter. She moved into a Section 8, two-bedroom home. In 2003, she started school at Des Moines Area Community College. She had her second child in April of 2005, and she's now the president of the Student Activity Council at DMACC, where she's planning clothing drives for the Family Violence Center and a weeklong series of events for Domestic Violence Month in October. Ward's changed her major about three times, but she's realized now that she wants to be able to help people, so she's studying human services.

"I love to help people," Ward says. "I love to see people succeed who are expected to fail. I like to help people be independent instead of dependent on other people."

She has also been asked to join the board at the Family Violence Center starting in April. Things are finally in place, and she's even got a few faces from the past playing supporting roles.

The Iowa Coalition Against Domestic Violence's budget is fed by federal funds, violence against women funds, health and human services funds, state dollars and fees-for-service work. And over the past five years, Schipper and the coalition have seen a notable decrease in the money they use to keep doors open for the victims of domestic violence.

"Resources have shrunk dramatically, especially federal resources," Schipper says. "In the '90s, we had the Violence Against Women Act, which allocated additional resources for programs. Over the past five years we've seen those resources shrink dramatically. We closed five programs last year. We will likely have to continue looking at closing additional programs this year."

One of the programs that closed was housed in Shenandoah. Now, a four-county area is underserved, Schipper says. Which is unfortunate, because women in rural areas will have a harder time leaving an unhealthy home situation if they have to leave a rural area for an urban area.

"If she's coming from a rural area, she would be very hesitant to go to a more urban area where services are located," Schipper says. "In many areas of the state there's a dramatic loss of services, and in some areas there are no services. It means for communities that in the past had services in their own county, they're now sharing their services with other areas. It also means for the existing programs that they've had to do triage, decide what they can do and what they can't do."

And what that means to victims of domestic violence?

"It means women die," Schipper says.

There used to be a domestic violence advocate at DMACC's urban campus. Ward has thought about working to get one back to help open the lines of communication.

Communication is important to Ward, who tries to be as honest and open with her 4-year-old daughter as possible. She tries to teach her kids the things she was never taught. She tells her daughter about personal spaces, the invasion of them and what to do when that happens. She's taught her daughter the real names of all of her body parts. What she doesn't plan to tell her kids, however, is what she's been through in the past.

"All they need to know is that there are problems in the world and that they need to overcome them," Ward says.

Ward reunited with her adoptive mother in 2004. She came down for the summer to work at Adventureland Inn, and Ward and she spent the whole summer together. The two talk every day, and her adoptive mother has apologized for what happened when Ward was a child. Ward's adoptive dad is still in the area, and still comes around for birthdays and special occasions, though he's not allowed to be alone with Ward's kids. Still, Ward holds no ill will towards him.

Ward and her boyfriend Jeff have been together for five years now. It took her almost a year and a half to be able to talk to him about what she went through. But he's been extremely supportive.

"When I get down and out and I'm ready to give up, he's a person I can count on," she says. "He talks to me, he gives me a good inspiration."

Ward will graduate in the spring, and she hopes to procure a career in human services that will allow her to make a difference - not only in young men and women's lives, but also in the system itself that she feels is in desperate need of help. She also hopes that more women will find the strength that she did to leave a dangerous situation and regain control of their lives.

"Every 60 seconds in the United States, a woman or man is killed from domestic violence," Ward says. "People don't talk about it. I have seen a lot of people on campus who had been through domestic violence, but they're too afraid of losing too many things, like their children, their education. It's about being strong and gaining those things back and being a woman." CV

For more information on domestic violence and the services provided by the Family Violence Center, visit www.cfiowa.org.

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