Beth Ivey carefully read each card, which moved her through the narrative of a woman experiencing domestic violence. Although the middle-aged fictional character, Nguyen Thi Linh, comes from a vastly different background than 70-year-old Ivey, the abuse and the decisions the character has to make are familiar.
Ivey left an abusive marriage and recently finalized her divorce thanks to help from advocates at YWCA Clark County’s SafeChoice Domestic Violence Program. On Tuesday evening, the agency held a workshop called In Her Shoes as part of Domestic Violence Awareness Month. Participants were assigned a character and given color-coded cards that corresponded with different scenarios.
One of the characters, Linh, is a widowed Vietnamese woman who’s barely making ends meet and supporting her children in Vietnam. She moved to the U.S. to be with a soldier she met during the Vietnam War, John Hammond, who is also the father of her 30-year-old son, An.
“Walking in her shoes, at that point, would be a really scary thing,” Ivey said, holding the blue cards.
Hammond and his lawyer take over the citizenship paperwork. It’s all confusing for Linh, who doesn’t understand English, but she believes Hammond, a wealthy businessman, is making good decisions on her behalf. Linh learns about adult English classes and tells her husband. He says he’ll teach her all the English she needs to know, which isn’t much.
“He pooh-poohs it, controlling her,” Ivey said. “He cuts off her ability to be herself, basically.”
Ivey sighs heavily as she reads a card detailing how Hammond beats Linh for not doing housework the way he wants it done. She can’t cook right, clean right or even fold towels the right way.
“I had to live with that. I couldn’t even hang things on the hanger right,” Ivey said. “You get molded.”
Ivey thought this character needed to reach rock bottom before she’d get out of the relationship. That’s what Ivey had to do in real life, after all. Before Linh can get to that point, her husband beats her to death. The final card said to go to the funeral home.
Not all domestic violence cases have a happy ending, unfortunately, said Margo Priebe, a legal advocacy specialist with SafeChoice. The character cards point out the significant barriers to leaving abusive relationships. Linh was financially dependent on her abuser — a common theme advocates see at the YWCA, especially given increasing housing costs.
Stories varied
In Her Shoes showed the many different paths that lead people to abusive relationships. People often question why victims stay in these relationships, said Ashley Wilson, an advocate with SafeChoice.
“I think the better question is why does the abuser abuse?” said Wilson, who helped facilitate a version of the workshop about teens.
There were characters such as 17-year-old Cara Young, who’s looking forwarding to going to college in another state. She tries to break up with her boyfriend, Brian White, who’s five years older than she is. He tries to convince her that they should stay together. He stalks her to her house, school and job at an ice cream shop, and threatens to kill himself.
Eventually, he decides that if he can’t have her, nobody can, and shoots her in the head.
What can seem like a good or safe decision can have dire consequences, given how deeply abusers try to control their victims.
In the immigrant version of the event, which was provided in both English and Spanish, character Sandra Puente tries to report physical abuse to police. They instead arrest her for hitting her girlfriend Rhonda because they don’t see bruises on Puente’s dark skin. After Sandra secures transitional housing, Rhonda follows her and stays the night — getting Sandra kicked out of the house. Her first support group doesn’t understand her homosexuality and questions whether a woman would abuse another woman.
The steps and missteps document how difficult and how long it can take to leave an abusive relationship.
“You start solving things one small step at a time,” Priebe said.
