When Emma* found herself gasping for breath one evening in July, she shrugged it off. As a 38-year-old with no prior health issues, she assumed it would resolve on its own. But as the night went on, she continued to find it difficult to breathe, as though there were a heavy weight on her chest.

The Salisbury resident, who lives alone, phoned 911 around dawn and was taken to the ER by ambulance. There, she was wheeled on a gurney to a nursing station, where she waited for what felt like 45 minutes before finally, somewhat desperately, telling the staff she really needed to be seen now. She couldn’t breathe. In retrospect, she wishes she had called 911 immediately that evening, rather than waiting until dawn, as she realizes that was just more time her brain was not getting enough oxygen. She was put on a nasal cannula, which delivered oxygen through her nose.

Despite a negative COVID-19 test, Emma was told she likely had COVID—or another virus. Her white blood cell count was high, but all other tests came back normal. After two days, she was released.

“I came home to a whole new world,” she says. Her brain was not functioning as it used to, and seven months later, her symptoms persist. She struggles with short-term memory, in particular, and, like so many others suffering from brain injuries, she’s had difficulty finding the care that she needs.

“I don’t really know what the lessened oxygen has done to my brain, but I’m aware that lack of oxygen can cause memory problems,” she says. “I keep returning to: There must be damage to some areas of my brain that otherwise functioned before the lack of oxygen…Now I’ve come to terms with the fact that this kind of experience does lead to a brain injury.”

While people are becoming more aware of traumatic brain injuries, such as the kind you receive from a blow to the head, non-traumatic brain injuries—anoxic and hypoxic injuries caused by oxygen deprivation—have similar chronic effects, and can be just as detrimental and tricky to treat.

The pandemic, meanwhile, has become a perfect storm for these types of brain injuries. COVID itself can result in lack of oxygen and strokes. (That loss of taste and smell that continues for several weeks or months after a COVID infection? Experts say it can be due to brain damage.) The pandemic has also exacerbated domestic violence and drug abuse, both of which often lead to brain injury—through overdoses and, in the case of domestic violence, strangulation.

“One of the great challenges of an anoxic or hypoxic brain injury is that you really don’t know where the oxygen stopped going,” says Bryan Pugh, executive director of the Brain Injury Association of Maryland, which is based in Baltimore. “If I’m in a car crash and my airbag goes off, it’s really likely I’ve got a frontal brain injury. Then you have the ‘coup-contrecoup’ [injury], which sends your head back, and it’s very likely you have an occipital injury because the brain hits the back of your skull. If I get T-boned, the part of the brain that’s going to be impacted the most is the side, so you know what to look for.”

It’s much more difficult, however, to diagnose a brain injury due to loss of oxygen. “The reality is, with overdoses and strangulation and COVID, or any time you’re cutting oxygen off from the brain, you really don’t know what’s damaged,” explains Pugh. “It’s incredibly frustrating when you’re trying to tell a family member how long the recovery is gonna be, are they gonna recover, what are they gonna recover…You’re talking about the organ in the body that is both your personality and you. There’s a lot wrapped up in it.”

Patients out of acute danger are still left confused and frustrated. They say things like, “‘I used to be a mountain biker, and now I can’t balance to ride a bike,’” says Pugh. “Or ‘I used to be a reader, and now I forget everything I read.’ Or ‘I used to like to go to the movies, and now the flashing lights and the noise drive me insane.’ You just have to find your new normal.”

Which is not to say improvement and recovery is impossible. “The brain is an amazing organ and can rewire itself,” says Pugh. “We’ll see recovery from brain injuries 20 years out, 30 years out—all of a sudden they can do something they couldn’t do before.”

There’s a saying: If you know one person with a brain injury, you know one brain injury. Some commonalities are memory loss, slower processing time, sensitivity to light and sound, irrational anger outbursts, mental and physical fatigue, depression and anxiety, brain fog, impaired ability to make decisions or plans, poor impulse control, weakness, balance issues, smell and taste disorders, and headaches.

Dr. Anna Agranovich, a rehabilitation neuropsychologist at Johns Hopkins Medicine, performs a cognitive assessment to identify strengths and weaknesses of brain injury patients. Some tests, including MRIs and CT scans, can sometimes show injury. Treatment consists primarily of mitigating symptoms.

“We work together with our rehabilitation team in designing strategies to build on their strengths and get around their weaknesses,” Agranovich says. “We teach coping skills. There’s no one-size-fits-all. It’s very targeted and specific to each individual.”

They teach mindfulness to help with poor impulse control and emotional regulation, as well as compensatory memory strategies, like writing down important things to remember. “It’s a combination of different approaches based on a person’s presentation and their needs and level of functioning,” Agranovich says.

 

“THE BRAIN IS AN AMAZING ORGAN AND CAN REWIRE ITSELF…”

 

DOVE, a program at Northwest Hospital in Randallstown, provides services to victims of domestic violence, many of whom suffer brain injuries. A 2017-2019 study by Brain Injury Alliance Nebraska found that 58 percent of women screened for a possible brain injury in domestic violence shelters tested positive. Estimates of individuals with brain injury in the public range anywhere from five to 24 percent. And in some cases, the person doesn’t even know it.

“We think of head injury as being one really bad injury to the head, but it could be that they’ve been strangled repeatedly and maybe thrown to the ground and hit their head a bunch of times,” says DOVE founder Audrey Bergin. “Maybe no one time caused loss of consciousness or any obvious injury, but the cumulative effect can impact the brain.”

Bergin has spent decades helping domestic violence victims, and says even diagnosing brain trauma is an uphill battle.

“One time I was in the hospital with someone who had been strangled really badly, and no one was offering to do any sort of radio-logical exam,” she says. “I thought, I’ve broken bones before and it’s not obvious on the outside that something’s wrong, but when they X-ray it, they see there’s a problem…In the emergency room, they’re just treating the emergency. With head trauma, there can be long-term, lingering effects.”

Because so many people come to DOVE with brain injuries, the staff is sensitive to their needs. They use lamps rather than fluorescent lights in the facility because fluorescents often bother people with brain injuries and can cause headaches. They supply everyone with a notepad and pen to help with short-term memory issues. They give clients information in small pieces, because they often have a litany of things to do and it’s hard for them to plan and be organized.

“It can be so complicated with these clients, when you see that they’re missing appointments and not able to prioritize, and realizing that it could be from emotional trauma or mental health issues or a brain injury,” Bergin says. “It could be very easy to label someone and say, ‘Oh, they’re not cooperating,’ or ‘They don’t want help.’ We try to understand what’s going on and not make assumptions.”

DOVE is staffed with counselors, case managers, an attorney, even a therapy dog, and a part-time nurse at LifeBridge follows up with client care. Since the pandemic began, Bergin has seen a huge increase in requests for therapy services, as well as an uptick in lethal domestic violence by an estimated 35 percent increase, and a 700 percent increase in the number of clients DOVE is sheltering.

“These women might say, ‘No, he never punched me in the face, but he choked me unconscious all the time’—which can lead to cognitive and executive functioning issues and the inability to initiate,” says Pugh. “Why do these women stay with these men? Maybe they have a brain injury and they’re not capable of thinking through how to [leave]. This was only made worse with COVID, because now you had to hunker down in place with your abuser, and there’s a greater likelihood that they lost their job or started using drugs or you started using drugs.”

After leveling off for three years, likely due to the overdose treatment Narcan, opioid overdose deaths increased by 23 percent in 2020. And those who survive drug overdoses are far from out of the woods.

“Now with fentanyl being sprayed on marijuana and mixed with Xanax and other drugs, people think they’re getting one thing and they’re not prepared to handle the high intensity,” Pugh says. “First responders are amazing at bringing these people back with Narcan, but it’s taking six, seven, eight hits [to revive them], and that takes five minutes each time, so some of these folks are coming back and they’ve basically been at the bottom of a pool for 30 minutes.

“We’re training people on using Narcan, but we’re bringing people back without really letting them know that, okay, you have a substance abuse disorder now, but you’ve woken up with a brain injury, and we have to treat that accordingly.”

Leslee Cramer, a longtime educator with Frederick County Public Schools, was in an abusive relationship when she was 18. Only years later, when working with a therapist, did she realize it had caused a brain injury.

“I was nearly strangled to death,” she remembers. “It took me four years in therapy to admit that was a brain injury. I never had a proper diagnosis, but I’m just as disabled as the person down the street who had a stroke and can’t speak.”

She has also suffered concussions since then, and notes that brain injuries have a cumulative effect. Now 57, she continues to have problems with energy, memory, processing information, headaches and neck pain, hormonal issues, and her seasonal depressive disorder was exacerbated “by a million,” as she put it—to the point where she moved to Florida about two years ago for the sunshine and warmer weather, knowing if she stayed in Maryland, she couldn’t function.

“I’m an educated person, and the first thing you think is you can research your way out of a brain injury,” she says. She’s tried various doctors, neurologists, psychiatrists, supplements, and biofeedback. Nothing has helped but coping strategies, adjusting her lifestyle as best she can. “A lot of us are struggling, and we’re falling through the cracks,” she says. “Thank God for art and music and sunshine.”

*Not her real name.

[Editor’s Note: October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month. At any time, if you or anyone you know needs help, call: National Domestic Violence Hotline: 800-799-SAFE (7233) Maryland’s 24-hour Hotline, House of Ruth: 410-889-RUTH (7884)

Bill Mitchell will be the keynote speaker for “Voices: When Relationships Hurt,” a free virtual event on October 13 organized by CHANA—The Associated’s Jewish community response to the needs of people who have experienced abuse or trauma. For help, call 410-234-0030.]

 

As a graphic design student at Maryland Institute College of Art, Bill Mitchell had always admired the work of eminent illustrator Norman Rockwell.

Mitchell was such a fan, in fact, that, in 1972, the summer before his senior year, he and his then girlfriend (now wife), Michele, drove to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, specifically to meet the artist whose depictions of everyday life made him the consummate capturer of Americana.

Now, sitting in the family room of their well-kept brick Colonial on a quiet cul-de-sac in Ellicott City, with Norman Rockwell’s biography and a coffee table tome of the artist’s works high on a bookshelf, the Mitchells share their own life story, which, at least until late spring of 2005, could have been the subject of a Rockwell painting.

The couple, who were high-school sweethearts, had a daughter and a son, what Bill says is often referred to as “the million-dollar family.” Their older child, Kristin, and son, David, both blond and blue-eyed, were four years apart. Kristin and David played with Barbie and Ken dolls together, enjoyed road trips and family vacations to Hilton Head, and played school, with Kristin teaching David algebra in the basement. They adored each other. “It was one of the greatest joys of our life how well they got along,” says Bill.

In the spring of 2005, life was humming along according to plan. Bill had a fulfilling career as the creative director at an advertising agency in Columbia; Michele was a reading specialist at Glenelg Country School; David was a senior at Loyola Blakefield and would soon be off to college; Kristin was graduating from Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia and had a promising position lined up at General Mills.

“Our lives were pretty nice,” says Michele wistfully.

And then, on June 3, 2005—20 days after watching Kristin turn her tassel at graduation—the bubble burst. On that rainy night, after dinner with his parents at a restaurant near BWI airport, Bill was contacted by a Howard County detective who said that she needed to speak with him in person. They met at a Giant market near the family home, where she informed him that Kristin had been murdered—stabbed 55 times they later found out—in her suburban Philadelphia apartment by her boyfriend. The authorities later learned she was trying to break up with him at the time.

The one and only time the Mitchells had met the killer, whom Bill describes as “28, six-feet, and gym-rat solid,” was at Kristin’s graduation. He and Bill had shaken hands. A fleeting thought entered his mind, “I’d never want to tangle with this guy,” he recalls thinking.

At the crime scene, in the kitchen, where the stabbing started, there was a pad of Post-its, a list reminding Kristin of the thank-you notes she needed to write for graduation gifts. Also sitting on the kitchen counter was a pan of brownies and muffins she’d baked—all emblems of the quotidian life she’d been living just hours before.

 

THE ONE AND ONLY TIME THE MITCHELLS MET THE KILLER . . . WAS AT KRISTIN’S GRADUATION.

 

That night, after learning the news, Bill stood in the corner of the same room where he sits now, to break the news to Michele, David, and his parents. Even as he was sharing the unimaginable, through his fog of shock and pain, bereft and broken, he was trying to find a path forward. He knew then that he had to turn this tragic event into something good.

“That first night, I remember thinking that this is a responsibility and somehow it will become an opportunity,” says Bill. “That’s just some teletype that ran through my mind. Pretty quickly I realized that you could go into a cave and just do as little as possible and ride it out, or you could use your grief as energy.”

It’s been 16 years since that night, and each of the family members have metabolized their grief—so vast and unyielding—in different ways.

“We’ve handled our grief very differently,” says Bill. “If I’ve learned anything about grief, it’s that people have to allow other people to find their own way to deal with it, because you are handed something that you don’t really want, and you can’t get rid of it and you can’t fix it—no one can fix it.”

Michele speaks out sparingly, instead letting Bill serve as the family spokesperson. She chooses to cherish the memories.

“My way of grieving is just keeping aware,” says Michele, who believes that she’s gotten “signs” from Kristin since her death, from unexplainable electrical occurrences in the house to a cat, Kristin’s favorite animal, suddenly appearing under a bush a few weeks after Kristin’s murder. (“In a religion class she had once written that if she died, she’d want to come back as a cat,” explains Bill.)  The Mitchells adopted the cat and named it Bear—Kristin’s nickname.

“Talking to Kristin in my own way and knowing with our beliefs that we will see her again brings comfort,” says Michele, welling up as she speaks. “I just can’t keep reliving it. It’s just too heartbreaking. You just keep thinking, ‘Kristin would be 38 on her birthday. She most likely would have been married with children and we would be grandparents.’ You think about the ‘what ifs.’”

David, now 34, a management consultant at Deloitte and once a board member of the now-defunct Kristin Mitchell Foundation, which was started by her college friends, has moved on with his life, marrying a young woman in 2019 whom Bill says, “has many aspects of Kristin’s outgoing personality.”

On occasion, he also speaks to young people about his sister’s story. And true to the “teletype” in his head, Bill has turned his daughter’s death into a near messianic mission. He shares the story of Kristin’s brief but beautiful life—and horrific death—anywhere he can, in school auditoriums, at domestic violence awareness events, on his podcast, in a book he self-published, to keep others from suffering the same fate.

On this spring day, neither Bill or Michele wants to talk about the details of Kristin’s murder or relive the tragedy of that night, though Bill writes about it with brutal honesty in his book, When Dating Hurts.

Though few details are spared, neither of them will refer to the killer by name (the book uses a pseudonym). They do not want to risk retraumatization or bring notoriety to the man who, thus far, has served 16 years of a 15-to-30-year sentence for second-degree murder.

Instead, they prefer to call him “the killer” or “the monster.” Says Bill, “I barely think about him—he was the author of the worst chapter of our lives.”

What does interest them, especially Bill, however, is speaking about the subject of domestic violence, of which dating violence or intimate partner violence is a less-discussed facet. He’s quick to reel off facts and figures, which he recites by heart. “One in three women experience physical violence from an intimate partner during their lifetimes, and typically it happens between the ages of 16 to 24,” he says. Then he sighs. “How many times have I said this?”

Through the years, Bill has given countless speeches at high schools, on college campuses, and with community organizations, including 2,100 teens at area high schools in St. Mary’s County in 2018 and a single audience of nearly 1,000 at a House of Ruth event at M&T Bank Stadium in 2007.

Five years ago, for the first time, he sat down to write about his effervescent daughter—a devoted equestrian, a talented flutist, and caring friend.

“In the summer of 2015, I wrote articles on LinkedIn,” he says. “I was curious to see what the reaction might be. Even though it’s for business, a lot of people have kids. I had 500 connections at that time, which is nothing. But I got all positive comments and ‘likes,’ and some of the comments were that I had taken a difficult subject and written about it beautifully.”

 

“IF I’VE LEARNED ANYTHING ABOUT GRIEF, IT’S THAT PEOPLE HAVE TO ALLOW OTHER PEOPLE TO FIND THEIR OWN WAY TO DEAL WITH IT.” —BILL MITCHELL

 

Although he didn’t know that his articles would become the springboard for the book, he kept learning about domestic violence by speaking with experts at a national and state level, meeting survivors and their families, and trying to figure out clues that may have been missed.

“Early on, I kept notes when I was on the phone with the prosecutor,” he says. “I would be on the phone writing feverishly to keep up. I didn’t see a book coming for the longest time, but I knew that I wanted to keep all this information and that someday it would be valuable. We had accumulated so many experiences and so much knowledge, and I thought what a crying waste it would be to not share it.”

In May of 2020, after four-and-a-half years of writing, he finally published When Dating Hurts. The book details every aspect of the days leading up to Kristin’s death, her funeral, the years that have followed, and the warning signs.

Today, Bill can recite those warning signs with authority (red flags include emotional and psychological abuse such as isolating the victim from family and friends, extreme jealousy and possessiveness, and physical and/or sexual abuse). As he ticks off the list, he double checks the notes scrawled across a legal pad to ensure that not a single sign has been left out.

“My key message is that when you pull the camera back, it’s about power and control,” sums up Bill. “These are insidious ways of manipulating someone into a position where you are directing their lives the way you want it.”

In Kristin’s case, the Mitchells later found out that the killer was, in Bill’s words, “a master manipulator,” who had relied on isolating Kristin from family and friends and was jealous of anyone she spent time with, even family. He had huge mood swings, though that was not immediately apparent. He texted and called her incessantly. “He was a real charmer,” says Bill, “but it was a practiced act.”

The message is loud and clear. If it could happen to them, it could happen to anyone. Before Kristin’s murder, like many people, the couple knew nothing about domestic violence.

“We both had the most stereotypical, clichéd version of what domestic violence was,” says Bill. “We didn’t think it happened in nice neighborhoods,” says Michele. “We didn’t know anything about it.”

Now they are authorities. “I realized that we were taught the hard way,” says Bill, who also created a When Dating Hurts website as a resource. “We didn’t have to imagine any of this. You become a subject-matter expert just by definition.”

Beth Sturman, executive director of Laurel House, a domestic violence agency in Norristown, Pennsylvania, says the Mitchells have helped broaden the perception of who can fall prey to domestic violence.

“There’s a lot of stereotypes and public perception on who domestic violence happens to and a perception that it doesn’t happen to people like Kristin, but it does,” says Sturman, who met first met the Mitchells at an awareness run/walk in 2007 called Kristin’s Krusade, and who has since become a close family friend. “A lot of domestic homicides we see are in higher-income, higher-education families. Because Bill is intent on helping to raise awareness, it’s helpful to have a spokesperson who can say, ‘This happened to us’ and audience members can say, ‘Oh, if it can happen to them, this can happen to my kid, too.’”

In addition to the book, this past January, Bill decided to use another platform to continue to spread the word with his When Dating Hurts podcast. For the podcast, he interviews everyone from survivors of domestic violence and their family members to people who run women’s shelters to homicide detectives and other law-enforcement professionals, including Pennsylvania Montgomery County detective Jim McGowan, who was assigned to interview the killer on the day of Kristin’s death. Bill stays in touch with all his guests, he says, because “each and every one of these people become a connection to Kristin.”

On a mid-June day, that connection is Maria Macaluso, executive director of the Women’s Center of Montgomery County. The week before marked the 16th anniversary of Kristin’s death. The day was spent in quiet reflection. At night, the family ate Pasta for the Angels—shrimp with angel hair pasta—Kristin’s favorite dish.

“June 3 is always a test,” writes Bill via email on that day. “I will be glad to see the sun rise tomorrow.”

Sitting at the dining room table with nothing more than his laptop, a mic, a glass of water, and a script, Bill welcomes Macaluso to the podcast, in which he covers topics such as domestic violence statistics, how people get stuck in toxic relationships, and what happens when they can finally get away.

Before Macaluso answers his first question, she says she has something to share. “You are one of the kinds of people who inspire me to do this work,” she says. “To see you transform your pain into something positive is really inspirational.”

“Now I have to speak with a lump in my throat,” says Bill, looking up from his script. “I always feel like I don’t have a choice, but of course I do.”

 

“I DON’T BELIEVE MY WORK WILL EVER BE DONE. . . . WITHOUT KRISTIN IN OUR LIVES, EVERYTHING ELSE FALLS SHORT.” —BILL MITCHELL

 

As a result of his smooth and steady voice, perfect diction, insightful questions, and keen listening skills, one might forget that Bill is not a born broadcaster, but a grieving parent. The conversation is compelling and continues for an hour or so, and Bill thanks her for her time.

“My admiration for you and all those working in the domestic violence field is just limitless,” he says to Macaluso. “Every single day you are handling life and death situations and helping innocent members of our community to become educated and stay safe from the insidious menace we know as domestic violence.”

Later, he will edit the audio, then upload it to Apple and line up more subjects for his weekly podcast, whose audience continues to grow.

Clearly, his work has made a difference. To date, he has 13,261 connections on LinkedIn and has sold close to 1,000 copies of When Dating Hurts. His podcast has been downloaded more than 2,000 times—facts and figures he checks almost daily, not out of ego but because every exposure represents another possible person saved.

And he’s seen the impact of his words in real time. One day, after giving a speech about Kristin and domestic violence to Wawa employees in the Philadelphia area years ago, he was approached by an audience member.

“What did you think [of the speech]?” he asked her. “And the woman said, ‘I know what I think. I’m getting a divorce.’ [Apparently], as I went through the warning signs of an unhealthy relationship, she said, ‘yes’ to every single one. That kind of thing happens all the time.”

Sam Gallen, the lead detective assigned to Kristin’s case, is still in touch with the Mitchells. And despite working on a homicide unit for 18 of his 41 years, this story has always stuck with him.

“Seeing how it impacted their lives has always stayed with me,” says Gallen, who has a daughter of his own. “Families want answers and some type of closure, if that’s possible with a murder victim, but once the case is resolved, that’s kind of it. We have seen others trying to move forward and make some positives out of a horrible situation, but not like Bill—he has taken on such a role to try to educate and inform family members of things to look for and, hopefully, save lives.”

Although he recognizes that he has saved many people from, in his words, “the vicious claws of dating violence,” Bill knows that even after 16 years, there is more work to be done.

“There always seems to be a new crop of bad actors rising out of the ground to challenge good people,” he writes via email. “I don’t believe my work will ever be done. I will never be satisfied no matter how many people say we helped them and no matter how many books sell, or podcast episodes are played. Without Kristin in our lives, everything else falls short.”

When Sharon Love lost her daughter, Yeardley, to relationship violence at the hands of her former ex-boyfriend—then University of Virginia All-American lacrosse player George Huguely V—at the outset, Love was determined to honor her 22-year-old daughter’s memory. Yeardley was also a student at UVA, and weeks away from graduating.

“We wanted to do something to honor Yeardley,” says Sharon, who, along with her daughter, Lexie Hodges, initially planned to work with Baltimore City kids to help them earn lacrosse scholarships. “It gave us purpose, too. It got us up and going. We didn’t know exactly how we were doing it, but we knew we were going to do something—it just kept morphing.”

Once Sharon and Lexie understood that Yeardley had, in fact, been a victim of domestic violence, their plans changed.

“Initially, we were not going to address the issue of domestic violence,” says Sharon, speaking from her Cockeysville home. “People came to us and said they hoped we’d address this issue, but we didn’t want to address it, because we didn’t feel we fell into that category. When we thought about domestic violence, we thought about a housewife with children and no way out—and that was not us.”

But what they discovered surprised them, and convinced them otherwise. “We gradually learned that 16- to 24-year-olds are most vulnerable,” Sharon says.

Just five weeks after Yeardley’s death, Sharon and Lexie co-founded the One Love Foundation, an organization that empowers young people to identify and avoid relationship abuse. But they were largely silent at the time, especially about the topic of relationship violence, for fear their words would be used against them in court.

Once Huguely’s trial was over in 2012—he was sentenced to 23 years in prison—the Love’s mission became crystal clear, and the voices of the usually soft-spoken women got louder.

On May 3, the 10-year anniversary of Yeardley’s death, their voices are still very much being heard. From online workshops to films, blogs, and videos, the foundation, whose materials are free and accessible to anyone, has one guiding light: to get students to learn the difference between healthy and unhealthy relationships.

The One Love Foundation was born in a small office in Towson with a handful of staff in June 2010. Now, it’s headquartered in New York City with six additional regional offices, 40 staff members, and 24,000 trained workshop facilitators across the country.

And what started as an act of love from a grief struck mother and daughter has grown into an internationally known organization that has reached more than one million students, as the One Love Foundation hits the decade mark this June.

“What we wanted to do with the foundation is save lives,” Sharon says. “We said, ‘If we’ve saved one life, it would be worth all of the work.’”

Likely, the Loves have saved thousands of lives, from another young woman at UVA who had an abusive boyfriend who obsessively stalked her, to a woman who broke up with her boyfriend after reading Yeardley’s story in People Magazine shortly after Yeardley was killed.

That said, the statistics remain daunting. More than one in three women will be in an abusive relationship, over one in four men, and over one in two trans or non-binary people, according to The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Education, believes One Love, is the key.

“Understanding later that there were warning signs that no one understood, it became clear that there was a knowledge gap,” says chief executive officer Katie Hood. “That knowledge gap is fillable with the right kind of programming. If every person is understanding the signs, if every person knows how to talk about it, if you normalize the discussion, you make it something every kid talks about, it’s part of their lives. The idea is to empower a whole front line to help.”

Hood stresses that any relationship—even a healthy one—can benefit from the information that One Love is teaching. “In our hearts, we know that our younger selves would have benefited from that even if we were never in an abusive relationship,” she says.

And now, in the times of the COVID-19 crisis, with relationship violence on the rise across the globe, it’s a topic that’s more critical than ever.

“COVID-19 is highlighting the magnitude of this problem that most of us prefer to look away from,” Hood says. “No one wants to think that someone they love can hurt them. It has been gratifying to hear from people who got out of abusive relationships because of our education who are now looking back and saying, ‘Oh my god, if I was sheltering in place with this person I have no idea what my life would be like right now’—but the work remains as important as ever.”

Hood adds that, as stay-at-home orders remain in place, One Love has seen more than 200 people—scattered from Montana to Hong Kong—participate in the organization’s education programs in the past few weeks.

When they get older, Lexie will surely impart the lessons she has learned to her girls, McKenzie, 3, and Charlotte, 1, about the warning signs of potentially deadly relationships—signs that she and Sharon didn’t recognize at the time

“Always have your eyes wide open because sometimes you are seeing things that you don’t notice as in bad of a light as you should,” she says. “Always be more aware and observant about what you are seeing and follow your instincts. If it doesn’t look or sound right, it’s not.”

“When we met [George,] he was laidback,” recalls Sharon. “We were clueless. We had no idea that there was a monster brewing underneath.”

Despite the unimaginable loss of her younger sister and best friend, Lexie, along with Sharon, has tried to stay positive. “From day one, what helped us not cave into everything that was going on and stay strong was staying positive,” she says. “That’s the type of person that Yeardley was—she was selfless, funny, outgoing, enthusiastic, vibrant, and positive. Her spirit has guided everything we’ve done.”

Sharon, a retired teacher, finds it ironic that Yeardley never liked the spotlight.

“Her birthday parties were a nightmare because she didn’t like to be the center of attention,” Sharon shares. “She was like, ‘When will this be over?’ So now I think, ‘Wow.’ I’m not sure what she thinks of the attention she is getting now. On the other hand, I think she is so grateful for keeping her memory alive in such a wonderful way. I’m sure she’s just beside herself, overwhelmed by the kindness and generosity of people and that maybe she spurred this movement.”

As Tyde-Courtney Edwards shifts her feet into first position, she closes her eyes. When she starts to feel familiar emotions creep in—doubt, shame, embarrassment—she glances down at her bare feet on the dance floor and then shuts her eyes again. With practiced precision, she slides her right leg out to the side and slowly peels her heel off the floor until all of the energy in her petite frame is concentrated in her perfectly pointed foot. Her mind is now quiet; there is no room in her thoughts for anything beyond her next movement.

As she eases her foot back into first position to complete her tendu demonstration, she opens her eyes to see 15 women and one man looking back at her expectantly, nervously shuffling into place. She cracks a wide smile and guides her students through their first exercise of the night.

When she calls out her signature line—“Suck in the guts and squeeze the butts!”—and hears laughter echoing around the Mt. Vernon studio, she remembers why it was worth all the work of rebuilding herself. And now, through Ballet After Dark, her ballet-based workshop for sexual and domestic assault survivors, she’s hoping to help others become whole again, too.

“I don’t claim to have all of the answers, but I know some things that worked for me, and they might work for you, too,” she tells the class. “It all started with having to rediscover and re-fall in love with myself.”

“I had to be smart about how I was going to make my dreams happen, but I was getting there.”

Ballet was Edwards’ first love. She started taking classes at the age of 3 and decided to become a professional dancer the day she received her high-school acceptance letter into the dance program at the Baltimore School for the Arts.

At BSA, she worked her way through the rigorous curriculum, finding her strengths in quick, sharp movements at the ballet barre, as well as slow, drawn-out adagio work that always made her feel powerful. She felt captivated by the quiet control she had over her body while mastering a new exercise or combination. During certain sections of class, she often found herself smiling, “because I was so happy,” she says today.

After graduating from the program in 2005, Edwards spent the next several years working temporary jobs around Baltimore to support her frequent trips to Philadelphia and New York City for dance auditions. Between stints as a Baltimore City police cadet, a Comcast salesperson, and a manager at a Westminster doctor’s ofice, Edwards trained with the Peabody Conservatory, the Joffrey Ballet, and the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. She performed in music videos and graced the stage in multiple productions with the Maryland Ballet Theatre in Annapolis.

“Being a freelance dancer was such a hustle and a grind,” she recalls. “I had to be smart about how I was going to make my dreams happen, but I was getting there.”

That hard work would eventually pay off, when by the end of October 2012, Edwards was invited to audition for the renowned Bloc Talent Agency in New York City. She was feeling especially hopeful, as her boyfriend had also just proposed.

But then one night, less than a week before her audition, Edwards was reaching into the trunk of her car outside of her Howard County apartment when an unknown man came up behind her and hit her over the head.

“I went through phases where I wished he would’ve just killed me instead of having to go through this.”

Though she was barely conscious, Edwards felt herself being dragged behind the building and into the woods, where the stranger beat, raped, robbed, urinated on, and spit on her before fleeing the scene. The next time she opened her eyes, there was light peeking through the trees. Her arms were covered in scrapes, and sections of her hair were matted with mud. “The first thing I felt when I came to was shame and embarrassment,” she says.

With Edwards in a state of shock, her mother called an ambulance from that same parking lot to transport her to Howard County General Hospital. She then went to the police department, where she reported the attack and answered hours-worth of questions. She completed a rape kit and submitted all of her belongings—including her coat, tennis shoes, and empty purse—into evidence. But as she moved through each step, she couldn’t shake the grumbling comments she overheard from the officers during her ambulance ride—that they didn’t feel like dealing with all of the paperwork this would mandate, as she recalls.

By the time Edwards learned that her case was being handled as a robbery, the rest of her life had already started to unravel: her family expected her to move on within a matter of days; her fiancé stopped returning her calls. Shortly thereafter, she discovered she was pregnant as a result of the rape and had an abortion, crying to herself on the way home alone. The police department’s robbery detectives didn’t respond to her requests for updates on the case, leaving her overwhelmed with anger—both at them and with herself. She started drinking heavily and using drugs as means of coping with her trauma, and that winter, she hit her breaking point and checked herself into the psychiatric ward of the Howard County General Hospital.

After two weeks, she moved back into her mother’s home and spent the next eight months dealing with depression and agoraphobia, which developed after the attack. Terrified to leave the house, she avoided mirrors, showering, and any form of physical contact. “I went through phases where I wished that he would’ve just killed me instead of having to go through this,” she says. “That was very, very tough.”

Eventually, with a recommendation from a Howard County General nurse, Edwards started visiting TurnAround Inc., a counseling and service provider in Towson for victims of sexual assault and domestic violence. Working with a counselor there, along with weekly one-on-one and group therapy sessions, helped her navigate her emotions in a way she had not yet been able to. But Edwards still felt distant from her own body. She had dedicated her life to learning how to control her form through every leap, turn, and stretch, but the abuse and its aftermath broke the connection.

Finally determined to reclaim her body—and life—she stepped back into the dance studio for the first time since the attack. “I thought getting back into the studio would cure me,” she says. “I needed something to think about and focus on other than what
happened to me.”

Her worries about having to answer questions from classmates about her hiatus faded away once the music started. “When you’re in the studio, it’s okay to be so focused that you don’t talk to anyone,” she says. “Everyone is just there to dance, and I needed to feel that again.”

She gradually increased her studio time to multiple classes per week, slowly but surely relearning how to let people into her personal space, allowing her teachers to correct her hips during a battement kick or adjust her arm in an arabesque.

“Ballet was the only thing I could do outside of traditional therapy that made me feel like I was on the way to becoming myself again,” she says. “Getting stronger through the physical movement of dance therapy is what saved me.”

Years into her healing process, Edwards still found herself frustrated by the lack of recovery resources for trauma survivors. Therapy had helped her mental health, and ballet had improved her physical well-being, but she felt a desire to create a new alternative practice—one that would strengthen survivors through a mix of physical, mental, and spiritual healing.

“I knew I could use ballet as a tool of empowerment when it came to restoring feelings of grace and elegance in women who had suffered horrible traumas,” she says. “There are people who prefer to move rather than talk, and I understood that.”

So in May 2015, Edwards launched Ballet After Dark, a ballet-based fitness program that includes a self-care workshop for sexual and domestic assault survivors called “Reprocess. Rebuild. Reclaim Your Life.” The three-hour program begins with physical fundamentals, focusing on strength training and gentle ballet movements for any body type, skill level, or gender. (While the workshops are predominantly made up of women, male participants are welcome, too.) Edwards and a licensed mental health professional then lead the class through empowerment exercises such as daily mantras and self-care techniques, and facilitate open discussions about therapy and personal healing journeys. The workshop closes with a guided meditation for attendees to incorporate into their everyday lives.

“As women, we tend to carry the weight of the world on our shoulders, and we often forget to create spaces for ourselves,” Edwards says. “We need more opportunities to escape from reality and have conversations that don’t revolve around pain.”

Since the first class nearly four years ago, Ballet After Dark has gained a loyal following of both trauma survivors and aspiring dancers looking for an intimidation-free way to learn ballet. After an overwhelming number of requests to bring the restorative workshop to other states, Edwards will take her program on the road this spring to one-day events in Atlanta, Charlotte, and Chicago.

The practice has also caught the attention of independent filmmakers Ayana Barber and Brittany Fennell, who have created a documentary about Ballet After Dark that will be shown at the Tribeca Film Festival this April. The film was selected as one of the first projects produced by The Queen Collective, an initiative by Procter & Gamble and actress Queen Latifah’s production company, Flavor Unit.

While she’s humbled by the program’s popularity, Edwards’ motivation comes from her students, like Maria Roxbury, who has been a regular since the inaugural workshop.

Roxbury says she discovered the program while she was caretaking for her mother-in-law and needed an outlet to focus on herself. She left her first class feeling empowered, and over time, she wrote a poem to thank Edwards, who hung it on her refrigerator as a reminder of her purpose.

“She has helped put me back on solid ground,” says Roxbury.

“We need more opportunities to . . . have conversations that don’t revolve around pain

From her place at the front of the dance studio, Edwards leads attendees through an end-of-session discussion on how to push through hardships and setbacks as part of the recovery process.

“It’s important for me to have a family, a sisterhood, and a collective of people that I can heal and grow with,” Edwards tells the class, crediting helping other survivors for keeping her afloat. “And that’s why I’m grateful for you all.”

As the workshop ends and classmates shrug on their coats, give goodbye hugs, and head off to their evening plans, Edwards is still full of energy. Smiling to herself, she pulls a black knit sweater over her sports bra and heads out into the lobby to mingle with her regulars.

Spontaneously, they break out in a rendition of the theme song from Living Single, the ’90s sitcom starring Queen Latifah herself. Edwards grooves to the beat as they sing in unison, “Whenever this life gets tough, you gotta fight/with my homegirls standing to my left and my right. . .”

Although her case is still open, Edwards now feels confident that she can dance through whatever the next chapter of her life brings. As another workshop comes to a close, she’s standing tall and unafraid as she walks out into the night.

“I’m still becoming the woman that I’m supposed to be,” she says. “I don’t know who she is yet, but I know I’m on my way.”

One afternoon in March, in a sun-drenched studio at Station North’s Motor House, a quilt begins to take shape from pieces of eye-catching red fabric. Women scurry to various stations to cut and measure the bright swaths of cloth, then head to whirring sewing machines where spools of unraveling thread transform them into squares. The scene might seem routine, but it doesn’t take long to find the poignancy in the work of this modern-day sewing circle. The red squares contain messages, written any manner of ways—looping script, bold block letters—that describe the experiences and emotions of survivors of sexual and domestic violence.

Some of the messages are empowering—“You are precious,” reads one in black permanent marker. Others more directly reveal what their authors endured. As volunteer Twig George pulls a piece of fabric decorated with butterflies from a cardboard box, she gasps as she reads, “I was so small, he was so big.”

“Sometimes, I forget how significant these squares are, how meaningful,” George, an author of children’s books and a school librarian, says later. “The first time I worked on the quilt, I got really upset. But now, when I work on it, I use it as my way to honor what these survivors went through.”

When George finishes this square, it’s added to others that encompass the creation known as The Monument Quilt. Inside gray plastic tubs lining the studio walls, this work of art waits to unleash its message to a national audience in the fall of 2017. Its creators hope that, like the AIDS Memorial Quilt of the 1980s, The Monument Quilt will force the country to think about an issue that is often hidden from the public eye, and place it on the largest of stages—the grass along the National Mall.

“Re-connecting to and feeling secure in community is a necessary part of healing from trauma,” says Rebecca Nagle, co-director and co-founder of FORCE: Upsetting Rape Culture, the group behind The Monument Quilt. “That’s why we have public monuments and memorials to honor victims of natural disasters and of war. Our culture recognizes that those survivors need to be re-connected, but we don’t have that for survivors of sexual and domestic violence. They are isolated.”

“It was finding a way that art can have an impact.”

From its beginnings, Nagle and fellow FORCE co-founder and co-director Hannah Brancato wanted to use the quilt to make this bold gesture. It deftly fits in with FORCE’s other actions, which have garnered national attention and local commendation by blending art, activism, and community. Similarly, the quilt has multiple missions.

“It’s a combination of wanting it to be very welcoming for survivors and something that interrupts people’s thinking about where we should talk about sexual violence,” Brancato says. And, “it’s a call to action.”

If you’d asked Brancato and Nagle back in 2013 how long it would take to create The Monument Quilt, they would have told you a year.

They laugh about that now. Sitting in their studio, amid the ever-present sewing machine buzz, they talk about how their first Kickstarter campaign for the project told potential donors that the quilt was heading to the National Mall in 2014.

“I guess we could work like [commissioned] artists and get a bunch of money and red fabric and just do it,” Brancato says. “But that’s not really what this is about—it’s about community building and community organizing.”

Although she and Nagle met in the mid-2000s while both were fiber majors at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), they didn’t work together until 2010. By then, Nagle was producing a satirical play she’d also written that drew on her experiences as a survivor of childhood incest. Brancato was a resident artist at the intimate-partner violence center House of Ruth, drawn to work there after returning from a trip to Turkey and seeing gender roles in America in a new light. While working at House of Ruth, she realized that she, too, was a survivor of abuse.

Together, she and Nagle produced an art show at Current Gallery called FORCE: On the Culture of Rape. When they decided to create an arts collective, they used the art show title—retaining the first word but changing the rest—to come up with FORCE: Upsetting Rape Culture for their group’s name. “Sort of like ‘a force for good,’” Nagle says. “And we talked a lot about ‘forcing the issue.’”

Their work stayed on a local level until the end of 2012, when Brancato and Nagle got an idea to spoof the women’s lingerie brand Victoria’s Secret. The pair had been making underwear with written messages that encouraged gaining consent during sexual encounters, and were upset to find Victoria’s Secret underwear emblazoned with phrases like “Sure Thing” and “Stop Staring.”

“They were really problematic, rape culture slogans that were teaching young people trying to find their sexual identity that words like ‘stop’ or ‘no’ are for flirting and not for setting boundaries,” Nagle says.

So, she and Brancato hatched a plan, along with the help of a web designer, to hack Victoria’s Secret’s website and put up a page with their own consent underwear—with phrases like, “Let’s Talk About Sex” and “No Means No.” (They would pull a similar prank on Playboy’s website the next year.) The action attracted attention from the likes of The Huffington Post, and even got them an offer to make consent-themed underwear for Walmart, which they rejected.

It all spurred Brancato and Nagle to think big, and they came up with a list of temporary monuments to place on the National Mall. The first was a survivor’s poem, which they floated in the Reflecting Pool, reading, “I can’t forget what happened, but no one else remembers.” The Monument Quilt was second on the list.

Nagle and Brancato made the first quilt squares. “It was intense,” Nagle says. “It was the first time I put into writing in clear, unambiguous terms what had happened to me. And I really needed to do that.”

They asked other survivors to share their experiences online and, along with volunteers, created 70 quilt squares based on their words. Then, with help from leaders in the community, the duo put together a guide to hosting workshops and making squares. Soon, they were sending the guides out all over the country, and word about FORCE and its mission spread.

Jane Brown, president and executive director of the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation in Towson, first heard about FORCE when Nagle and Brancato asked her philanthropic organization for help obtaining studio space. “There’s just something about their passion and very organic community connection,” Brown says. “Hannah and Rebecca’s devotion to their work pulls you in.” The Deutsch Foundation went on to help FORCE find its first space in a building on Greenmount Avenue, and then eventually in the Motor House in Station North.

For nearly three years, parts of the quilt have been displayed at college campuses in Baltimore and elsewhere on the East Coast, and FORCE was lauded for its work. Brancato and Nagle are finalists for the Janet & Walter Sondheim Artscape Prize, a prestigious $25,000 fellowship awarded in Baltimore, and they were recipients of a $30,000 PNC Transformative Art Prize this year from the Baltimore Office of Promotion & The Arts. A fellowship from the Open Society Institute has allowed FORCE to gather survivors together to work on public projects.

The work has not been without sacrifice. Brancato, who now teaches at MICA, and Nagle paid themselves only by conducting workshops at universities. While raising a combined $44,000 for the quilt from two Kickstarter campaigns, they put their own art practices aside in favor of FORCE’s work. “It was so consuming,” Brancato says, “but exciting, too, because it was finding a new way that art can have a real impact.”

They also recognized the power of creating a community of survivors who could step out of the shadows to tell their stories, some of which they’d never shared, and realize they were not alone. And as the issue of sexual violence became more present in the media (a much-maligned Rolling Stone article about an alleged campus sexual assault and singer Lady Gaga’s emotional performance at the 2016 Oscars are two diametrically opposite examples), FORCE re-affirmed the need to spread the message that those who experience sexual assault aren’t just female college students—they include men; gay, straight, and transgender persons; the young and the old; people of all races and income levels.

This is part of an important shift in the larger sexual violence movement, says Christopher Anderson, executive director of MaleSurvivor, an organization that provides resources and support to male victims of sexual violence. “We can’t just paint with a broad brush,” he says. “We have to ensure we are assisting everyone who is victimized.”

“When you open the quilts up and put them out, it lets this burden go.”

Anderson, a survivor himself, lauds FORCE’s efforts at inclusivity and the quilt’s use as a therapeutic tool. “Art is a vehicle for change, and when all these images come together, they create a powerful political and artistic statement.”

On a brisk but sunny Sunday morning in April, The Monument Quilt begins to blanket North Avenue. Bundled-up volunteers—everyone from MICA students to members of FORCE’s leadership team—tape quilts to the pavement as cones cordon off two blocks of the roadway. The activity attracts the attention of area residents, who stop to look closer. “What’s this?” a woman asks Nagle, who gives her an explanation. “Ohhh,” the woman says, then adds solemnly, “I’ve known some people this happened to.”

Today is a trial display of sorts, a preparation for next fall when the quilt heads to Washington, D.C. It is the largest showing of the quilt to date. Groups of squares have been displayed at colleges and cities across the U.S.—including on a whirlwind, August 2014 tour that added an Indian reservation and cities such as Chicago to the stops. Right now, the quilt has roughly 1,500 squares, though that number is growing. When at the National Mall for a week next fall, it will stretch over a mile and contain a total of 6,000 squares. That number is intentional—each week, approximately 6,000 people are sexually assaulted in the U.S.

Nagle and Brancato are caught up in the bustle of fielding questions and coordinating volunteers that has become routine, but the North Avenue gathering never loses poignancy. “Every time we have a display, I’ll have at least a little moment where I’m like, ‘OK, this is where I really want to be,’” Brancato says. “The whole environment around it, the way that people are interacting, how people are coming together—it’s literally the world I want to live in. That’s why we’re doing this.”

When the display opens at noon, onlookers appear somber as they walk across the quilt squares. A group rests on pillows in a tent while massage therapists and social workers wait to assist. At a table, teenagers draw on red fabric, presumably creating their own squares.

Melani Douglass, an artist and a survivor who volunteers with FORCE, is viewing the quilt for the first time. But instead of sadness, she says she is experiencing joy. “Seeing so many interpretations of people’s experiences is very triumphant, instead of feeling like a mark of shame,” she says.

Though not instantaneous, a sense of community starts to build. In the moments before mayoral candidates arrive and performances begin, a man tells fellow quilt visitors that his mother was a victim of assault. A woman leans on a friend as she cries. As Brancato said before, experiences are “an invisible burden that we’ve been carrying around with us. When you open the quilts up and put them out, it’s letting this burden go.”

Moments later, a procession of dancers and singers moves along North Avenue, accompanied by percussion. Spectators look up as the song carries on the breeze:

“We are here together, gathered together. You are not alone.”

Sitting in an office at House of Ruth Maryland, Christina Laumann* takes a deep breath as she begins her story. It’s the one that started in 1993 when she was 14 and first fell in love with a 16-year-old boy she knew from the neighborhood, and ended in 2008 with an emergency divorce after a middle-of-the-night assault that still haunts her.

“It seemed like he wanted to give me the world, and I fell for it,” says the 32-year-old Hampden native. “But what did I know about love? By the time I was 17 and pregnant with our daughter, things didn’t seem right; I had lost all connection with my friends, and if I said the wrong thing, I would get a shove or a hit.”

One day, Laumann’s ex-husband hit her with such force, she says, “he bent my earring, and I had pain going down the side of my face for months.” Another time, she recalls being kicked and punched as he lay on top of her in the middle of the street. “The cops came, and he was arrested that night,” she says. “I was embarrassed that I had become this person, but I let him come home.”

Of course, Laumann is far from alone as a victim of domestic violence (or DV as it is commonly called). Nationally, DV statistics are staggering: In the United States, one in every four women has been the victim of severe physical violence by an intimate partner, according to a 2010 survey conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. On a local level, facts and figures are equally alarming. A study conducted by the National Census of Domestic Violence Services found that in one 24-hour period on Sept. 15, 2011, 866 victims were served statewide.

And the epidemic is hardly new.

Way back in 1977, a concerned group of Baltimore citizens identified a largely ignored social issue and decided to do something about it.

“In the early 1970s, women were emerging,” explains retired Judge Kathleen O’Ferrall Friedman, a founder of House of Ruth. “The civil rights movement had been a paradigm for equality, and there was a climate of women’s impatience and anger with the inequalities that women experienced in so many spheres of their lives.”

In effect, the feminist movement empowered wives to seek emancipation from their husband’s or partner’s hands as women realized they didn’t have to take the abuse anymore.

Enter House of Ruth (a nod to the biblical reference from the Book of Ruth about women helping women). What began as a grassroots effort soon gained momentum, as groups such as University of Maryland’s School of Social Work and the Task Force of the Commission of the Status of Women, opened a small, ad-hoc shelter out of a row house on the 2300 block of North Calvert Street.

“There was no grand opening,” recalls Marcella Schuyler, House of Ruth’s first president. “We were in a bug-infested townhouse with people sleeping on mattresses on top of each other. It was a mess—we didn’t have the hands to organize, but we had no problem finding victims.”

And although nothing would make its dedicated team of lawyers, social workers, mental-health professionals, and ardent volunteers happier, House of Ruth Maryland is not likely to run out of victims any time soon.

Says Schuyler, “We have cemented generations of violent people into our DNA. It will never go away. Never.”

On any given night, the 84-bed Baltimore City shelter is almost always full, and, in any given week, the 24-hour hotline fields between 160 and 180 calls from victims and victims’ families.

Needs run the gamut. “I was on the hotline last Monday,” says Janice Miller, director of client services. “The calls ranged from a woman who wouldn’t give her name because her husband is in a prominent position, to a woman who needed help figuring out how to leverage funds to move because her abuser said, ‘I hope you don’t think you’re going to be living where you were before,’ which she took to mean, ‘If you go back to where you were living before, I’m going to get you.’”

Although cases such as Yeardley Love, the Baltimore-born University of Virginia student who was beaten to death by her ex-boyfriend, have helped raise public awareness about DV, the issue remains largely in the dark.

“We need to break the silence of an issue that is far too quiet,” says House of Ruth executive director Sandi Timmins. “This issue, even in the success, is silent. In many cases, women want to put what they’ve gone through behind them—to re-live the trauma is hard.”

The emergency shelter—a safe house for women who need an immediate out—is a pleasant, low-lying brick building that resembles a college dorm, albeit one with an unmarked address and the color purple (the “color” of DV) as a decorating motif. Inside it’s a microcosm all its own: a cafeteria serving two hot meals a day, a licensed daycare facility, and a health clinic to help with immunizations and school forms (for which no address is given). “A school bus comes here,” says Cheri Parlaman, director of development. “Even though there are no signs to say we are a shelter, the other kids [on the bus] know—it breaks your heart.”

Nearby, in the basement of House of Ruth’s administrative building, a group of men who have been court-ordered to attend a weekly workshop as part of a landmark abuser prevention program, The Gateway Project, pour in through a side door. The 22-week program has been designed to educate and rehabilitate men (and women) who have committed abuse.

Leading the class is veteran House of Ruth staff member Louise Machen. This is the last place you’d expect to see a sweet-looking 60-year-old woman dressed in a peasant blouse.

“If we don’t do this part of it, what’s the point?” asks Machen. In this predominantly female workplace, Machen is the rare woman who works with the men. “Nobody got here easy,” she says. “Some of them share stories about being horribly abused as children. We think we’re making progress—some of them have never thought about this stuff that we talk about before.”

Machen begins the session with an exercise in which the men are asked to come up with names used to refer to a woman. “Bitch,” shouts one of the men. “That’s always the first one,” says Machen. “You can’t offend me, I’ve been doing this for 26 years.” “Slut,” says another participant. For the following 10 minutes or so the list comes to include “Skank,” and “Dummy,” until Machen makes her point. “In this big old list,” she says, “there are only a few that are remotely respectful. If this is how we talk and think about women, how does this affect how you react to them?”

The idea behind the class is to make the abusers own up to their actions and reflect on the beliefs that led to them. Machen listens to their often graphic stories with respect, but she also puts them in their place.

“I slapped Susan*,” reads one of the participants from his required homework. “I didn’t think that she had the right to ask for money that was mine.”

“You’re blaming the victim,” says Machen. “You need to work on your sentences.”

Another participant writes, “I choked Nancy*. I believe I can choke her when she spits in my face.”

Says Machen, “Choking is what we do on food. Strangling is what we do to people. Again, you’re blaming the victim.”

While the women may move on, the cycle of violence will continue if the men don’t recognize the impact of their actions, explains Machen. “Your girlfriend decides she doesn’t need you anymore, but you’re going to find someone new,” says Machen. “Even if it didn’t work in the current relationship, the hope is that it will help going forward.”

The House of Ruth’s legal clinic, with 17 lawyers in six courthouses across the state, plays an equally important role in keeping women safe. Most recently, Dorothy Lennig, director of the clinic, helped get a law passed that will flag a domestic-violence offense on a defendant’s criminal record.

“Because there is no separate crime of domestic violence, there was no easy way to distinguish between a domestic-violence assault and a barroom brawl,” explains Lennig. “This new law . . . will increase accountability for domestic-violence offenders in the bail review, prosecution, sentencing, and probation phases.”

Ultimately, says Lennig, this law will enhance safety for the victims.

Christina Laumann came to the House of Ruth through the legal clinic. With the help of her family, Laumann was able to take her children and move into an apartment, but her husband stalked her and threatened suicide if she didn’t go back to him. On the same day she was denied a restraining order by the Baltimore City Police, who said they needed “proof” of the abuse, Laumann’s then husband snuck in through a window of her apartment while she was sleeping.

“I jumped out of bed to grab my cell phone,” she recalls, “but he had both of my arms and his body weight on top of me. Eventually, when he was leaning over the top of me, I was able to bite his neck which gave me enough time to run into another room with my 9-year-old daughter, give her the phone, and tell her to call 911.”

Finally, with the “proof” she needed, Laumann headed to the district courthouse on North Avenue to obtain a restraining order when a legal assistant from House of Ruth (which has an office on-site) asked to speak with her. “They took me through the whole process and were amazing,” says Laumann.

On Sept. 11, 2010, Laumann moved forward and married her husband, Joe, yet another boy from the neighborhood. “We liked each other a long time ago,” she says. “Years ago, he told everyone that I was the woman he was going to marry.”

But this time around, the ending is a happy one, and Laumann proudly displays a heart tattoo on her arm. “In my relationship with my ex-husband, I was not allowed to have a tattoo,” she says, “but he could get as many as he wanted. After my divorce, this was the first thing I did. I am a completely different person now.”

*Names changed.