GREENFIELD — Community members gathered on Thursday night to celebrate the progress that The New England Learning Center for Women in Transition has made in the organization’s 40 years operating in Franklin County and the North Quabbin Region, providing shelter and counseling to survivors of domestic abuse and sexual assault.
“Each of us knows someone who is a survivor or we are survivors ourselves,” President of the Friends of NELCWIT Anne Wiley said to the audience at the organization’s annual fundraiser, the Power of Women celebration at Greenfield Community College.
After decades working to end domestic violence and sexual assault, representatives from NELCWIT say while progress has been made, violence against women is still a pervasive problem throughout the area.
In Franklin County the rate of women who seek a restraining order is 36 percent higher than the rest of Massachusetts.
Rural communities are especially susceptible to widespread domestic abuse, Wiley said, explaining that rural communities are prone to have low-wage jobs and an environment that breeds isolation.
“It’s the geographic size and the level of poverty and feeling like there is just not anywhere else to go,” Wiley said. “If you can see your escape, if you can walk to your escape, that is different than if you live down a dirt road.”
Wiley told the audience that there is still work that needs to be done.
“There are some pretty staggering statistics,” said Aracelis Sànchez, an event coordinator for NELCWIT. “There are huge disparities in our state.”
Ten years ago, Sànchez walked into a courthouse and advocates from NELCWIT helped her fill out the paperwork to get a restraining order against her abusive husband.
The advocate at the courthouse helped her navigate talking to the judge and helped her carry on with life when she had limited resources and no money.
“It was about putting together a resume and building up my confidence again,” said Sànchez. Now, a decade later she returned to work at the organization that is still helping so many women escape abuse.
Puerto Rican author and 2014 Poet Laureate Maria Luisa Arroyo of Springfield was the keynote speaker. Arroyo is co-editor (with Magdalena Gomez) of the new book “Bullying: Replies, Rebuttals, Confessions, and Catharsis.”
She spoke to the audience about her experiences with domestic abuse by her father and then by her lover. Her poems were like flashbacks to moments of violence by men that claimed to love her.
“Lay another hand on me or my mother and I will kill you,” she said, reflecting on her father’s alcohol-fueled beatings.
“At 19, I thought that was love,” she said, recalling the abusive relationship she later fled as an adult.
She told the audience about standing on the steps of a battered women’s shelter filled with fear.
Her poems negotiate the realities of childhood abuse and domestic violence.
After the keynote speaker finished her poetry reading, the men in the audience took a pledge promising never to commit, condone or remain silent about violence against women.
District Attorney David Sullivan and Greenfield Community College President Robert Pura led the pledge.
You can reach Lisa Spear at
lspear@recorder.com
or 413-772-0261, ext. 280