GREENFIELD — Local police officers, emergency medical services personnel and other first responders convened at Greenfield Community College on Thursday to discuss best practices for responding to a series of crimes and learn from mishandled situations.
Through two lectures, Daniel Batiste, deputy commissioner of the Vermont Department of Public Safety, dove into forms of danger that first responders encounter on the job while handling instances of strangulation, intimate partner violence and human trafficking.
After outlining the immediate toll that strangulation takes on the victims’ bodies, attendees listened in on what Batiste described as a “problematic” 911 call from a victim. Besides highlighting signs of strangulation, like the raspy voice that the first responder mistook for whispering, memory lapse and confusion, Batiste pointed out the first responder’s “minimization” of the danger of the situation. On the phone, she urged the strangulation victim to calm down and brushed the medical situation off as asthma.
The former paramedic also described the deep coercion that is often occurring in the background of a 911 call.
“What I want you to understand is when that person says, ‘My boyfriend choked me,’ when that person says, ‘I’ve been strangled,’ it means something profound in the scale of intimate partner violence. Just like with an iceberg, you see a little teeny tip on the top, but what you don’t see is everything underneath. That’s what’s happening with strangulation,” Batiste said, a photo of an iceberg projected behind him.
According to Batiste’s presentation, only 39% of strangulation victims report the incident, with many turning down medical assistance from first responders.
“That means we’ve got to do our due diligence,” he added.
Erin Aiello, chief of the Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault Unit at the Northwestern District Attorney’s Office, said she often hears of strangulation in domestic violence cases, a difficult offense to prove, given that the injuries are not always visible. She echoed Batiste’s point that strangulation is intertwined with homicide risk.
“It’s one of the things that we look for. It’s one of the things that we’re concerned about and that we want to make sure we’re taking seriously,” Aiello said.
“One of the biggest things that we’ve realized is that [EMS providers] are at the forefront sometimes,” added Katie Rosewarne, director of Domestic and Sexual Violence Projects in the Northwestern District Attorney’s Office, who organized Thursday’s training. “If they’re not familiar with the signs and symptoms, [the emergency response is] going to stop there. They’re not going to give [strangulation victims] the knowledge to go get that medical care.”
Rosewarne and Aiello stressed the importance of educating EMS providers and law enforcement officials on the realities of strangulation and intimate partner violence to ensure a “wrap-around” approach to the issue, as Aiello described.
“We want that whole 360 [degrees] to support victims and hold offenders accountable,” Rosewarne said before the second session of the lecture kicked off.
Batiste then detailed the disturbing truths of human trafficking, sharing the story of Rebecca Bender, a survivor of human trafficking whose boyfriend blindsided her after she moved to Las Vegas with him, forcing her into sex work until she escaped six years later.
He stressed that Bender’s story represents only one in a “growing” global industry. According to the Human Trafficking Collaborative, about 40.3 million people are trafficked every year into the $150 billion industry.
Batiste highlighted several signs of human trafficking for first responders to spot on the scene, from excessive security measures to lack of personal possessions, unusual bystanders, repeated identical stories from victims, tattoos that human trafficking rings imprint on victims, and medical clues like malnourishment and multiple abortions.
“Rarely are there going to be any absolutes,” Batiste said. “It’s picking up on the individual red flags.”
Near the end of the lecture, Batiste spoke directly to the EMS providers.
“We get to go to the places nobody else gets to go. … I go to all kinds of places that cops are not welcome to. I go to all kinds of houses, I’m let in, I’m trusted,” Batiste explained. “That’s a unique opportunity that we have to seize upon if we want to find these folks that are there.”
