TulsaPeople / September 2009 / A domestic disturbance

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A domestic disturbance

Domestic violence has become a reality for a quarter of women in America, and the statistics are even worse in Oklahoma.

Sue Ann Ryan tells her story with her office door open.

She has that open-door policy even if she’s sharing her family’s darkest tale. She starts at the beginning, when she was a poor child raised in Broken Bow, a town in southeast Oklahoma, the daughter of a family who allowed her to drop out of school and marry young.

Her father drank too much and committed domestic violence against Ryan’s mother, although, at the time, it was simply called “kicking your wife in line,” Ryan says.

“I grew up thinking that being yelled at and being hit was what came of life,” she says.

She married at 16, had her first baby at 17 and the second at 18. From the very beginning of her dating relationship with her husband-to-be, Marcus, he was controlling. That control quickly escalated into hits, slaps, punches and threats with knives and guns.

“Deep inside, there is still that wound, and when I talk about it, it bleeds all over,” Ryan says. “It will always be there.”

The year 1979 was a turning point for the family. That summer, Ryan’s husband almost drowned at a lake. Ryan saved his life but says that he was in a drunken rage and struggled with her in the water, trying to pull her under with him.

Shortly after the near-drowning, her husband attacked her, and their son, age 15 at the time, told his father he would shoot him if he ever hit his mother again.

“I knew I could never let that happen,” Ryan says. “I knew it could ruin our lives to the point our little family could never recover.” 

That year, Ryan left and subsequently divorced her husband. However, even after their divorce, he continued to harass and stalk her. Many times he slashed her tires and stopped her in the middle of the road to try to pull her out of the car, although she managed to get away each time. 

Despite his violence, Ryan’s husband never spent a day behind bars for his crimes. Once, when Ryan tried to file a protective order, the sheriff was a football buddy of her husband’s and delayed acting on her request until Ryan’s father threatened to take the situation into his own hands. Even so, Ryan’s husband relocated to Texas long enough to “let the smoke clear,” Ryan says, and returned, just to begin the harassment again.

After they had been divorced six months, one night her two children left for activities and Ryan was home alone. Her husband had been watching the house, and when Ryan was by herself, he broke down the door and nearly killed her.

He broke her left wrist, pulled out her hair and bent her esophagus as he tried to strangle her. Both her eyes were bloody and swollen shut. Although she should have gone for medical care many times before, she never did. But the severity of this beating left her no choice but to go to the hospital for her injuries. She was there for three days.

“I can’t tell you exactly how I lived through it,” she says.

The man she had started dating helped her move to Tulsa to escape the violence of Broken Bow. 

“I thought he was going to be everything Marcus wasn’t,” she says.

He was a professional and seemed to be just the type of person Ryan needed for a better life free from the abuse and challenges of her first marriage. They married in 1981.

“When he met me, I was poor and ragged,” she remembers.

Soon the abuse started again — this time not physical, but emotional.

“He would belittle me daily,” she says. “He had formal schooling. He would tell me I was illiterate. He presented himself as being so much better than me.”

Just as in her first 16-year marriage, she endured the second abuser for another 16 years.

“I can’t tell you which is the worst,” Ryan says. “I carried the marks of the first one outside, and I carried the marks of the second one inside.”

As gruesome as Ryan’s horror story may be, it won’t come as a shock to one out of four women reading this article or to their children. 

A quarter of all women in America have been physically assaulted or raped by an intimate partner, according to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence.

Among those women who are assaulted or raped, one in three is injured and about half a million of those women will require medical treatment for their injuries, the coalition reported.

In Oklahoma, the statistics are even worse.

According to the Oklahoma Domestic Violence Fatality Review Board, every year an average of 78 people die because of domestic violence.

A child witnesses a third of those homicides.

In November 2008, Oklahoma jumped from 10th to fourth in the nation for the number of domestic violence homicides of women, says Sherry Clark, the founding president of f.a.c.e.s. — Families and Communities Empowered for Safety. As of the first week of August, there had been 39 domestic violence homicides in the state, Clark says. She also started Court Watch, a collaboration between Domestic Violence Intervention Services and the Retired Senior Volunteer Program (RSVP), where she works. Court Watch volunteers observe cases relating to family safety and provide feedback to the system and the community about the process of keeping victims and their children safe from violence. 

The statistics are startling proof that the community needs to learn how to help women and children live safely, Clark says.

The f.a.c.e.s. organization started because of a single phone call from Clark’s daughter on Feb. 10, 2005: “Mom, Mom, Carrie’s dead.”

The Oklahoma problem

The victim was a friend of the family, Carrie Tudor. That morning, Tudor had filed a protective order against her ex-husband.

The evening before, his parents called to warn Tudor that their son had stolen a car and his dad’s shotgun and they feared for her safety. That morning, Tudor went to file a protective order against her ex-husband. Tudor went to work, and that afternoon, before the protective order had been served, Cory Dean Baker stormed into his ex-wife’s office at Lowrance Electronics and killed her and himself with the shotgun.

Tudor hadn’t shared with her friends the truth about her husband’s drug addiction or violent past, Clark says.

Tudor’s death solidified Clark’s desire to help more women in violent homes. Tudor’s face is now emblazoned on pins that Clark distributes to anyone who will listen to her about f.a.c.e.s.

“Oklahoma is a culture of violence,” Clark says. “I really don’t want to say those words, but it’s true. People are not proud to say they live in a state where more children are abused and more women are murdered.”

Power and control are always at the root of domestic violence, Clark says.

Sue Ann Ryan says that in rural areas, where she was raised, many women grow up in alcoholic and abusive homes, drop out of school and get married young, seeing marriage and family as a way of escaping a dreadful past. 

“They fall into that deep well and they’re caught,” Ryan says.

The problem in rural areas is a lack of professional services, says Beth Stanford, director of education for the Oklahoma Coalition Against Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault. There are 32 certified domestic violence programs funded through the state in 77 counties, so the nearest agency or shelter might be two hours away, she says.

Hiding also is harder for a woman who lives in a small town. Finding help may not be as simple as hiding at a friend’s house, where a woman’s car could easily be seen in the driveway, Stanford says. 

It might involve a woman taking her children out of school, leaving friends behind and going to a shelter an hour away.

A man’s control could extend to the bank account or car, Stanford says. In a city with public transportation, a woman might be able to ride a bus to work. In rural areas in most of the state, though, she doesn’t have that luxury. Leaving, then, would mean she would find herself in another town with no money, no transportation, no job and typically two or more children to support. 

In cities, domestic violence is an issue, too, affecting all races and classes of people, Clark says.

Each year in Tulsa, the number of domestic violence 911 calls runs between 18,000 and 21,000.

Clark herself was married to an abusive man for 20 years — all of them spent in urban areas, including Tulsa. Her ex-husband is a professional living in Tulsa, she says.

While services are available in Tulsa, women still have many issues that may delay their leaving an abuser. Clark compares these situations to getting a phone call with the offer of your dream job in California. Would you say,

“Absolutely. I’ll be there tomorrow”? No, a person would have all sorts of issues to work out before packing up and leaving — whether it’s for a better job or to escape abuse, Clark says.

A primary reason a woman might stay is fear: “Fear is a tremendous motivation to keep things going,” Clark says.

Also, the woman might still love her abusive partner, think she can fix the relationship and not want to take the children away from their father.

“They’re hooked on hope,” Clark says. 

The connection between rape and domestic violence

Domestic Violence Intervention Services (DVIS) defines domestic violence as the emotional, physical or sexual abuse of a partner or ex-partner for the purpose of gaining power and control.

Rape is a common form of domestic violence for two reasons, Stanford says. First, women might be forced into sexual practices they don’t want to do because they live with a batterer. Second, when physical violence reaches a point that a woman needs medical attention, the man will be kind, apologize and have sex with the victim because he doesn’t want her to tell, Stanford says. 

When Stanford trains law enforcement officers, she encourages them always to ask a victim of domestic violence whether she had sex after the attack. If she says “yes,” the perpetrator can be charged with first-degree rape, which is a felony, Stanford says.

Oklahoma has a law against marital rape, which is defined as nonconsensual sex between married people.

Many women don’t equate being forced to have sex when they don’t want to, or “survival sex,” with being sexually abused, Stanford says, but it is a very real part of domestic abuse. According to DVIS, rape is more than an unwanted sex act. It is a violent crime and can happen within a marriage. The idea that a man cannot rape his wife suggests married women do not have the same right to safety as do unmarried women. Most battered women have experienced some form of sexual abuse within their marriage.

The economics of domestic violence 

While domestic violence can happen to anyone — male or female, any race, age, sexual orientation, religion and socioeconomic status — there are some traits that define the typical victim served by a certified coalition shelter in Oklahoma, Stanford says.

• Most victims in Oklahoma are Caucasian women, although victims reflect the state’s ethnic diversity. This statistic might be skewed because many Indian tribes have their own intervention programs.
  
• Are 20 to 35 years old.
  
• Have 2.5 children.
  
• While the poor economy won’t cause domestic violence, it can escalate an already violent situation, says Cristi Goettel, community relations coordinator for DVIS/Call Rape.
  
• In fact, a study in the American Journal of Public Health found that unemployment, access to guns and threats of deadly violence are some of the strongest predictors of female homicide in abusive relationships. Carrie Tudor’s ex-husband was unemployed when he killed her, had kidnapped her previously, threatened suicide, had criminal drug charges filed against him and they were separated, all of which can signal lethality. 
  
• Other factors that increase lethal violence are:
  
• Separation. Across the United States, 75 percent of domestic violence-related deaths occur after a victim takes steps to separate from her abuser.
  
• Excessive jealousy.
  
• Threats or prior attempts of homicide or suicide.
  
• Stalking.
  
• Heavy drug and alcohol use.
  
• Destruction of the victim’s property.
  
• Access to weapons.
  
• Abuse in public.
  
• For each factor present, the lethality risk increases.
  
  

What a friend can do

“The question always wells up and you’re thinking, ‘Why would that person stay?’” Ryan says. “There are so many reasons and it’s so convoluted.”

For Ryan, she stayed with her physically abusive husband for religious reasons because she had been taught that if she divorced, she would go to hell, she says. She stayed because of low self-esteem and low self-worth.

And she stayed because her husband was the father of her children and she did not want to break up her family. 

She stayed with her emotionally abusive second husband until one afternoon when he stood in their living room screaming at her.

“I was 45 and I didn’t know where I was going to go or what I was going to do,” Ryan says. “But I got my purse and left.”

She encourages others to have a better plan than she did — a plan that can be developed through DVIS so that a woman can prepare her escape and ensure her safety once she leaves.

That plan includes a checklist of safety:

• Safety during a violent incident.
  
• Safety when preparing to leave.
  
• Safety in a woman’s own residence.
  
• Safety with a protection order.
  
• Safety on the job and in public.
  
• Safety with drug or alcohol use.
  
• Emotional health needs.
  
• Items to take when leaving.
  

While watching as a woman continues to be abused can be difficult and frustrating for a friend, Clark cannot say enough that a woman knows best when she should leave, and no one should force her to leave prematurely because that could put her in even more danger.

Instead, Clark says these are the appropriate words of support that friends and family should say:

• I am afraid for the safety of your children.
  
• It will only get worse.
  
• I am here for you when you are ready to leave.
  
• You deserve better than this.
  
• It’s not your fault.
  

With the proper support, a woman can successfully escape from an abuser or, in Ryan’s case, two abusers. She went back to school and now works as executive director of Broken Arrow Seniors, a nonprofit activity center that helps seniors foster independence, dignity, community involvement and personal growth.

Ryan also counts as success raising two children and now enjoying eight grandchildren.

Her first husband never served a day behind bars for his abuse and died what Ryan calls a “very sad death” from alcoholism. Her second husband still lives in Tulsa, and Ryan says she has forgiven him. 

“I was a pretty good mother,” she says. “We were able to salvage the three of us. We lost their father, but the three of us came through it together. There’s a very happy ending for me, and I’m not finished yet.” 

Numbers to know

If you need help, know someone in a violent situation or if you just want to talk, call the following numbers. You do not have to be ready to leave an abuser in order to call these numbers.

In the Tulsa area: 

7-HELP-ME (743-5763)

Statewide Safeline: 

(800) 522-SAFE (7233)

About f.a.c.e.s.

Families and Communities Empowered for Safety is a nonprofit, all-volunteer agency, founded in 2006, that was borne of the tragic death of Carrie Tudor, whose ex-husband shot her and then himself to death in 2005 while she was at work.

Tudor didn’t tell anyone about her ex-husband’s violence and she and her family didn’t know she was at risk until she received a warning from her ex-husband’s family.

A family friend and domestic violence survivor, Sherry Clark, started the program to put a face with the statistics and to educate the community because “people don’t know what they don’t know.”

f.a.c.e.s. volunteers serve the organization by:

• Teaching others how to give help.
  
• Teaching those suffering violence how to gain help.
  
• Giving free presentations to school teachers and students, at workplaces and community organizations. 
  
• Making healing shawls and scarves for survivors and victim families.
  
• Crafting Hope Blossoms so that when victims go to court, they have something hopeful to hold onto.
  
• Teaching Oklahoma medical providers how to “Screen to Save” every woman for domestic violence, which can have lifelong emotional and physical health ramifications on victims and children.
  

For more information about f.a.c.e.s., call 519-3698 or visit www.facestulsa.org.

About Domestic Violence Intervention Services

DVIS/Call Rape began in 1976 as a telephone crisis counseling service for victims of abuse. It has grown into an agency addressing the full scope of family violence.

DVIS has a 50-bed shelter opened in July 1986 that houses almost 1,000 women and children each year. In 2001, DVIS purchased a new home for the administrative and outpatient counseling offices, and also renovated an apartment complex to expand its transitional living program. It houses up to 48 women and children.

In addition to helping victims of abuse, DVIS also has one of 19 programs in the state for batterers.

While the mission of DVIS and f.a.c.e.s. is similar, the two organizations do not duplicate services, f.a.c.e.s. founder Sherry Clark says. In fact, DVIS participated in developing the f.a.c.e.s. program called Screen to Save, which trains medical providers to identify women who suffer domestic violence.

For more information about DVIS, call 743-5763 or visit www.dvis.org.