Full transcript of “A Mile in Her Shoes: Changing perspective on domestic violence | Ryan Calvert | TEDxFrisco”. Click a timestamp to open the video at that moment. Need another video? Use the YouTube transcript generator.
0:00 [Music] let me ask you a question if a stranger someone you did not know punched you and then strangled you nearly unconscious and then walked away what would you do next how would you react I asked that question to jury panels during jury selection of trials some times and one time I asked it and an older woman said right here in the front row looked at me and said well I would cry and I thought we'll shoot that's maybe the best answer I've ever heard to that question but
0:47 after you cry what would you do next and I think most of us would take out our phones and we would call 911 and report the attack to police and we would do so with the hope and the expectation that the police would go find that person that attacked us arrest them and prosecute them I doubt that any of us would call the police and then when they get there lie to them about what happened or try to conceal evidence of what happened in an attempt to protect the stranger that attacked us because that would be irrational that would be unreasonable but let me ask you a couple of different questions what if the person that attacked you was not a stranger what if it was a member of your
1:32 family someone you loved would that change how you react or how eager you are to report that to authorities what if you believed that if anything bad happened to your attacker you might not be able to pay your mortgage or provide for your children what if you believed that if you cooperated with authorities you might be killed or your children could be harmed if any of you think about those circumstances and you think that you would react differently or you would hesitate to cooperate with authorities if they came or even call them in the first place I doubt that you consider yourselves unintelligent or
2:19 irrational but if you put all of those factors together you glimpse at the world in which victims of domestic violence live every single day and it is precisely that unintelligent and irrational that victims of domestic violence are often dismissed as in our culture let me give you an example how many times have we heard the question of victims of domestic violence why didn't she just leave what's wrong with her that she would stay with a man that abuses her we hear that all the time don't we and it's an easy judgment to make because from most of our perspectives the act of staying with someone who abuses us who is dangerous to us who
3:06 tortures us who physically harms us and even trying to protect them makes no sense it's irrational for most of our perspectives and so we fall into the trap of judging victims I've been guilty of it myself I remember fairly early in my career I had a case where a guy set his wife on fire and I was prosecuting that case and I met with the victim months after the attack she was horribly permanently injured over nothing because she spent money without his permission and he got mad and when I met with this victim still scarred and bandaged she begged me to drop charges to not prosecute her husband who had almost
3:53 killed her and she explained to me that throughout their marriage he had been violent he had been abusive but then she explained it had never been this bad obviously and now that he had hurt her this bad she explained that now he gets it now he understands and he has apologized and he assures me that this will never happen again and so she would like me to go ahead and let him go and drop charges and as I met with this woman I found myself getting angry is really the only word that applies but not angry at the guy that said his wife on fire anger at the victim because from where I set her choices and
4:39 her behavior were irrational it seemed crazy to me frankly it seemed stupid to me now an important point is I didn't need her cooperation to go forward on that case as a prosecutor I can go wherever the facts and evidence allow me to go I don't need a victim's cooperation to prosecute a domestic violence case anymore most of the time than I need a victim's cooperation to prosecute a murder I've been doing this job 17 years I still have never had the murder case where the victim of murder came into court and testified for me about what happened I don't need it on those cases and most of the time I don't need it on a domestic violence case there's lots of ways to do it that's just a choice that I have to make but in this case I made the wrong choice because I judged the victim I was so
5:28 frustrated with her behavior and you know what I did with that guy that said his wife on fire I gave him probation I had the ability to fight with everything I had to put that man in prison to physically incapacitate him to separate him from that victim and to change her circumstances and give her a shot to get away and get safe but instead what I did was I sent him right back into that home and right back into that relationship because I was frustrated with her and it was the wrong decision and I knew it immediately and I started thinking really about what led me to make that wrong decision and I realized very quickly that the mistake I made was substituting my own
6:15 perspective for that of the domestic violence victim because like I said from my perspective her choices her actions made no sense but when I thought about it from her perspective it changed everything so let's look at that question of why doesn't she just leave but not from our own perspective and the cheap seats is people who are not in abusive relationships but from the perspective of a woman who is in an abusive relationship and I say woman and she and her because statistically the vast majority of domestic violence victims are women and the vast majority of perpetrators are men's we talked about this I'm gonna generalize some why didn't she just leave from her perspective well consider first what would she be walking away from violence maybe but what else love
7:03 her home many times for physical home her family and considered not only what is she walking away from consider what is she walking towards uncertainty poverty potentially how is she gonna pay the mortgage or provide for her children and fear fears a big one the most dangerous thing statistically that a victim of domestic violence can do is leave an abusive relationship women are 70 times more likely to be murdered by an abusive partner immediately after leaving an abusive relationship than at any other time in that relationship because domestic violence is all about control and if she leaves what is the abuser losing control and
7:50 it's dangerous and victims understand that better than the rest of us they understand that by leaving it's dangerous for them and anyone around them 20 percent one in five victims of domestic violence homicide are people other than the abused partner they are children they are other family members they're police officers and victims get it and so from a victim's perspective many times the safest choice she can make is to stay right where she is I heard a victim described it to me this way once she said it's like when you see a shark's fin in the water you know it's dangerous but as long as you can see it
8:35 you feel reasonably safe because at least you know where the danger is but if that fin dips below the water that's the really scary thing because now you don't know when or where the attack is going to come and that's what it feels like to leave an abuser so what do we do about it I think it's naive to suggest that we can eradicate domestic violence and get rid of it it's always been there I think it will always be there but there are three things that each of us have the power and potential to do that on a case-by-case basis can change the circumstances of a domestic violence victim and potentially mean the difference between her life and her death we've already talked about the first one and that is to remember
9:23 consciously choose to remember that the world is a different place through the eyes of a domestic violence victim than it is to the rest of us in the cheap seats when we substitute our own perspective for that of the victim we make the same mistake that I did we fall into the trap of judging the victim and we make the wrong choice of what to do next just like I did and that leads into the second thing that each of us has the power and potential to do which is to judge the conduct of the abuser rather than the abused there is no other type of violent crime where we lay the blame for the violence at the feet of the victim rather than the perpetrator we do
10:08 not blame a bank manager when he gets robbed for saying well if you had not all that money in the bank this wouldn't happen nor should we do that with victims of domestic violence but when we ask that question why doesn't she just leave what's wrong with her that's exactly what we're doing we're laying the blame for domestic violence at the feet of the abused rather than the abuser a better question then why doesn't she just leave might be why is he hitting her an even better question might be how do we stop him from hitting her and maybe the best question of all might be how do we help her how do we
10:55 help her and that leads into the third thing that we all have the power and potential to do which is to make domestic violence our business collectively because it is our business collectively domestic violence does not only affect the individual being abused it's like when you throw a rock into a pond and the ripples go out consider for example children who are not per se victims of domestic violence but they are exposed to it in the home boys young boys who are exposed to domestic violence in the home are 10 times more likely to grow up to become domestic abusers and the cycle repeats girls who are exposed to domestic violence in the
11:42 home growing up are not only far more likely to grow up to become victims of physical abuse they are also far more likely to become victims of sexual abuse during their lifetime and the trajectory of their lives are changed forever but each of us when we encounter domestic violence whether it's in our personal lives with a family member a friend or a co-worker we have the ability to help whether it's by offering a safe place to go offering financial support or simply letting someone know that we're there for them and we care or professionally when we encounter domestic violence we can let the facts and the evidence dictate our actions as law enforcement or as prosecutors rather than allowing the words of the victim in
12:30 that moment to dictate what we do next because hard experience teaches us that when a victim of domestic violence speaks oftentimes the voice that we actually hear is that of the abuser because domestic violence is all about control but if each of us makes a conscious choice to do those things if we make a conscious choice when we encounter domestic violence to not shrug our shoulders and say well it's none of my business and if we remember and choose to do those three things whenever and wherever we encounter domestic violence then each of us has the potential and has the ability to help a domestic violence victim become a domestic violence survivor thank you
13:18 you
