Last summer, I met with four women at Victim Services in Manhattan. All four women were survivors of domestic of violence. One was still living with her abuser.

We spent several weeks talking over instant coffee to the hum of the fluorescent lights overhead. Each woman talked about her experiences with domestic violence, how she made it through, and the problems she still had to face.

Originally, we'd planned to meet once a week for six weeks, but no one stayed for more than two meetings. One woman found a job which kept her from coming in on Monday mornings. Another woman had to go to court over custody of her son.

One woman never made it in. I'd contacted her through Coalition for the Homeless. She was a graduate of the Coalition's First Step program and seemed to be doing well. She hadn't found a job yet, but she'd had a few promising interviews. When I asked if she'd ever experienced domestic violence, she'd told me, "That's the story of my life."

When she didn't make it to our first meeting, I called her a second time. I could hear kids running and yelling in the background. I could hear pots and dishes clattering. She told me she was still waiting to hear back from the place where she'd interviewed. She said it wasn't a good time. Her voice was gruff.

Another woman in the group had recurring migraines and would phone halfway through our meetings to say she could not get out of bed. The woman who lived with her abuser took off for a week. She was traveling out of state to play keyboards for an all women's music festival. That week, she was kicked out of her apartment by her abuser. He must have either changed the locks or the threat of violence was so great she couldn't go back. I don't know if she made it to the festival. She didn't come back to our meetings, and she stopped going to see her counselor at Victim Services.

This was the woman who warned me in our first meeting, "I don't mean to be rude, but you gotta know what you're getting yourself into."

Most of these women had left their abusers, but the stories they told about abuse and violence were still part of their present, immediate reality. It was like a waking dream, a recurring nightmare. As one woman put it, "You have your book. I have mine. [We need to] know what chapter to open up. Otherwise, we're just going to sit here and talk and talk. We can go on forever. Because we have stories to tell. We have the whole ocean here."

Their stories flowed. We began with the question, "What brought you to Victim Services?" One response could easily last an hour. The volume and pitch of their voices swelled with narrative tension. In some cases, there was a faint hint of performance. These stories had been told many times before: to the police, to hospital staff, to family, to judges and public defenders, to social workers and counselors. Their attention to detail, the way they laid out violent incidents one after the other, reminded me of a court deposition. These women were building a case, defending themselves aloud, proving to whomever was listening that this did happen. This was real.

Telling stories is an important catharsis for crime victims. They will often tell their stories over and over, regardless of whether someone is listening. If no one is there to listen, they will often tell the story aloud to themselves.

Social scientist and folklorist Marjorie Bard interviewed one women who said since she could not tell anyone what her husband was doing, she would go into her closet and talk into her pillow.

"When the sound of his voice fills my head and I can taste the blood, I'll just take a pillow into the closet, cover myself with coats, and scream into the pillow that I hate him and want him to die an awful death. I'll scream until I don't feel like it will happen again, but I can remember each time that he's pretended that it would be a normal evening and it won't end up with me on the floor. I've never even told the paramedics; I've had to lie. He'd have killed me for sure if I'd told anyone what he does to me. But I know. I can't get it out of my mind. My head gets filled with what happened and I start to think about it like a book. A script really. I'll go over every bit of what happened as if it were a movie script and I was the actress. I know all the lines, and if just one little thing isn't quite right, I'll start over again and do it just the way it happened...I know so many scripts by heart. I've memorized them and I go over and over them. Then I need to scream to make up for not telling anyone. I can only tell me and the pillow. I once had the feeling that the pillow could really hear me. It was filled more with my spirit and life than it was with feathers. I'd go mad without that closet. It's my lifeline." (2)

One of the women who participated in the "4 Stories" project, found a similar relief in logging on to the Internet at the New York Public Library. "It saved my life at one point...I was feeling very, very bad...I was getting beat up, and I couldn't think straight. I said, 'I've been down this road before, why am I here again?' So I went [online] and I looked around."

As she explained, the reason she went to the Internet was safety. While online, she was anonymous, and she could say whatever she wanted to say. She could also look for help and information. For her, the Internet was a first step before going to Victim Services.

At the time of our meetings, this woman was still living with her abuser. Another women who had left and was in the process of rebuilding her life had a very different response. She wanted to tell everyone about her experiences. "I want a camera in every room here [at Victim Services]. I want it broadcast to the world. I am tired of being ashamed."

Whether their stories were told anonymously or publicly, these women both had a strong desire, maybe even a need, to talk about their experiences. Breaking the silence, ridding themselves of secrecy was the first step and potentially a catalyst for action.

Footnotes:
1. Bard, Marjorie. "Organizational and Community Responses to Domestic Abuse and Homelessness." New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1994.
2. Ibid
3. Myerhoff, Barbara. "Number Our Days." New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978.