Gun violence reduction programs are often run by men and targeted to men. Meanwhile, Black women who are victims of domestic violence often are ignored. Abené Clayton is a reporter for the Guardian’s Guns and Lies in America project. She joins host Krys Boyd to discuss why Black women are especially vulnerable to gun violence and community violence, why root causes aren’t being addressed, and why the outreach programs that do exist are ineffective. Her article is “Two women make sense of a lifetime of abuse and gun violence: ‘How did I get here?’”
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Transcript
Krys Boyd [00:00:00] Imagine you had a home with a picket fence out front, and you had planted blackberry bushes on both sides of that fence. Let’s further imagine a local population of raccoons kept going to town on the blackberries. You were growing outside the fence line, and squirrels were polishing off the ones inside. You could create two entirely separate plans to keep critters away from your fruit. But does that really make sense? Don’t the two challenges have enough in common that you’d be better off addressing them together? From KERA in Dallas, this is Think I’m Krys Boyd. Look, people who live near wild animals hungry for their produce are mostly just inconvenienced. But people who live in places where assaults and shootings happen often can be negatively affected for life, even if they are witnesses to the brutality rather than victims of it. But as my guest has discovered, many efforts to keep people safe have historically focused either on domestic violence or community gun violence without considering the many risk factors these terrible occurrences have in common. And now, some advocates say it is time to tear down the fences between those efforts. Abené Clayton is a reporter on the Guns and Lives in America project at the Guardian, where you can read her reporting on the links between community gun violence and domestic violence. Ivan, I welcome to thank.
Abené Clayton [00:01:18] Hi, Krys. Thank you so much for having me.
Krys Boyd [00:01:21] You begin this article by telling us about a woman you call Alisha Thomas. What is her story?
Abené Clayton [00:01:27] So, Alisha, as we have been calling her, she is a native of Sacramento, California. She grew up during the, you know, the the crack era, as she describes it, was unfortunately witness to gun violence outside of the home. She also had two parents who were teenagers when they had her and struggled with drug abuse, substance dependance and would regularly get into physical fights. So as a child and adolescent, she saw violent conflict being, you know, the way that people settled their issues. And as she grew up, she ended up in a relationship with a man who regularly abused her physically, mentally, financially in some cases. But though she was with him for 20 years, throughout that time she just thought, well, this is how relationships go. You know, sometimes hands are put on people. And she thought that was normal, right? She saw it in the community. She saw it in her home. So once she was the direct victim of it, it to her at the time just felt like a continuation of everything else she had experienced.
Krys Boyd [00:02:57] She had been with her husband for 20 years before she realized she really needed to leave for her own safety, her own survival. What led her to finally make that decision?
Abené Clayton [00:03:10] So in December 2023, and I will say she had left a couple of times, gone to shelters with her, with her children, but it never really stuck until December, late December of 2023 when he came home, apparently under the influence of alcohol. And mind you, Alisha was recovering from Covid at the time, so she was home trying to get better from Covid. Her husband, now ex-husband, comes home and loads his shotgun and begins walking around the house making accusations, telling her that he would kill her, and the abuse that she had suffered for two decades really culminated in this moment where she thought she would lose her life due to a shotgun wound to her body. I don’t know if it’s fortunately or unfortunately, one of her daughters heard the commotion in the conflict and came downstairs to see what was going on, at which point Alisha was able to escape the home and run to a local convenience store, where she waited for the police. But after staring her own mortality in the face that way, knowing that her daughter was a witness to it, that proved to be the final straw.
Krys Boyd [00:04:45] How is Alisha trying to put those years of her life in context now?
Abené Clayton [00:04:51] Alisha is very spiritual. You know, she leads Bible studies for other women’s, is a spiritual advisor to women who are in the same situation as her. And through those conversations, it appears to me that she’s been able to see herself right and ask herself some of the questions that the women she counsels are mulling. You know themselves, and she is considering how witnessing violence in her home, outside of the home, living in places where guns, illegal guns in particular, are common, and having very little money. Right. She lived in one of the most underserved communities in Sacramento. And how all of those things could lead her to thinking that being with a man who would regularly put his hands on you and threaten you with a firearm. How she came to think that was normal. I think it’s something she still is trying to sort out. But she’s looking at her past and present to try to figure out where things went wrong. Potentially.
Krys Boyd [00:06:08] Yeah. One thing Alisha has realized is that there was no support available to her as a child, as a teenager, exposed to violence. And one huge effect she’s come to realize was that it made her kind of angry and cold. How did those emotions shape her life?
Abené Clayton [00:06:25] Absolutely. She. I should add that when she was a teenager, she was sitting in a car with some friends and someone tried to rob them. And unfortunately, the assailants shot into the car and she thought she was going to die. And a friend in the car with her did end up passing away. And I think that was one of the major moments in her life that sort of turned her off to the world, right? Led to a lot of anti-social behaviors. She drank heavily and had a lot of bad boyfriends. She just did not, she told me. You know, she did not want to live. So the actions in her life were so destructive at that time because there was no one there to help her rehabilitate. You know, she was a student. She was maybe in or just out of high school when her friend was murdered, you know, feet maybe inches away from her. And she had to testify as a part of that case. You know, she went through the legal process. There was no victim services department to support her through all of this. She was showing up the court, seeing the people, making eye contact with the folks who killed her friend and threatened to murder her as well. Her parents were not in a position to show up and support their daughter as she went through these proceedings. So everything in her life, just unfortunately to her, reaffirmed that her worth was low. And she believed that, you know, in herself and there was no one there to tell her anything different and to show her that she was valuable and that the things that had happened to her were not her fault, and that she didn’t have to repeat those same cycles. But unfortunately, she didn’t get that sort of support until she was much older.
Krys Boyd [00:08:23] She got into some trouble with the law when she was young, was placed in a juvenile detention facility. Did she get any help there, or was she just further exposed to violence?
Abené Clayton [00:08:36] Her time in incarceration, she told me, was the beginning of her starting to change. I don’t think she got any actual help. You know, formerly from a program or anything like that. But she did tell me that she was having suicidal ideations at the time. She didn’t know what her future was going to look like, but something in her said that she didn’t want to live like that anymore. You know, she had, it sounds like some sort of epiphany that led her to start to change her life, you know, in her early 20s. But I think hitting that sort of rock bottom incarceration, not wanting to live, not knowing what your future looked like, having these complex, long running traumas somehow culminated in her picking her head up and saying, I gotta do something different, or I’m just not going to be alive, or I’m going to live a life that is, you know, kind of destitute, right? Going through the same cycles. Not having money. Drinking too much. Just not a life that she wanted for herself that was distinct from the life that she saw people around her living. And she made a decision to change to go to school, to raise her daughter, to get an education. And she took her life into her own hands in that moment. Unfortunately, some of those, despite the, you know, professional and educational things that she was able to do, she still ended up in this relationship. But, you know, that incarceration period as a young person seems to have really shifted her mindset.
Krys Boyd [00:10:35] In 2025, her mindset. I mean, she she believes that community violence and domestic violence are not fully separate problems. What are some of the root causes they seem to share?
Abené Clayton [00:10:49] Well, one of the well, I’ll say two of the major ones are just really living with very little money. Right. Like just having insufficient funds, housing instability. That is something that people who have, you know, unfortunately been involved in community gun violence have pointed to as a reason for their involvement. And I’ve talked to researchers who say that, you know, living in these environments can cause a level of economic stress that people end up taking out on each other. So that’s one and the other, maybe even more prevalent then being low income. That’s obviously all folks who don’t. Excuse me, who are, you know, near or below the poverty line, do not commit domestic abuse against one another. But another factor is exposure to violence, right? Like seeing your parents settle conflicts with throwing things, with putting hands on each other. Seeing people out in the community settle their beefs by pulling a gun out. You see, these things occur around you in the spaces that mold you. And it’s no surprise when young men end up picking up firearms when they’re in their teens, and that young women stay in these situations because they just find it not normal, but normalized.
Krys Boyd [00:12:24] How has the city of Sacramento, California, where Alisha Thomas lives, tried to address family violence and community gun violence?
Abené Clayton [00:12:33] Well, there are several groups. You know, there’s county domestic violence services. There are, you know, people are mandated reporters. They have abuser rehabilitation programs, things of that nature. One of the newer things that the, you know, advocates that I talked to are trying to get off the ground are more culturally focused programs, right? So things like the things that someone like Alisha, who grew up in one of these woods may face, is not necessarily going to be the same thing as like someone who is, you know, immigrant family from whether it’s Central America, South Asia or something. It’s just everything is not a 1 to 1. What works on a white family in suburbia may not work for an Ecuadorian immigrant who lives in low income housing like those. It’s just not going to be the same. The concerns aren’t the same, the needs aren’t the same, and the approaches can’t be the same. And I think for so long, you know, people have just been kind of copying and pasting their solutions onto every situation. And it is not super successful. To, to put it plainly.
Krys Boyd [00:13:56] Abene, you note in the article that Black and Native American women are at a higher risk of being murdered than women of many other racial and ethnic groups. How do the rates for Black and Native American women differ, for example, from the risk experienced by white women in this country?
Abené Clayton [00:14:13] I mean, it’s pretty stark. I mean, I’ll give an example for Black women in particular, I did a story maybe 2021 or 2 about how the increase in homicides that was seen across the nation acutely impacted black women, and we found that their risk of being killed was perhaps double that of white women. We found that, you know, through some CDC data and research, found that Black and Native American women, they’ve long had the highest risk of being killed. And women in general who are killed are more than likely killed by someone they know and intimate partner, etc.. And for the year that we have the most recent available data, which is 2022, the homicide rate for black women was about 8 in 8 out of 100,000. So for every 100,000 black women, eight of them were killed. And if you compare that to white women, that number is two, right. So out of every hundred thousand white women, two of them are murdered. Right. And I think that that really speaks to the racial injustice that is often central in these conversations about crime and homicide, but is also often left out or minimized or reduced to. Sorry, this is an anecdote that I often like to share. I was doing. I’ve done many stories like this and I often ask police officers, detectives like, well, why are black women facing this high of a risk? And I actually had one tell me that it’s because they live in proximity and are in relationships with the people who do the most murder, you know, with the people who do the most crime. So as a natural byproduct of their proximity to black men, that is why they are being killed. And that answer didn’t pass the smell test for me. So but that’s a very commonly held idea, right? We have a lot of victim blaming in these conversations. If I read this stat to someone who may be more conservative, who may see crime in Black and Latino communities as cultural failings. Right. The kind of that’s why you need fathers in the home sect of people. If I read those dads to them, they’re going to say, oh, well, these black women are living. Either they’re incredibly violent or they’re living, choosing to live in these incredibly violent places. And that is just a really flat and reductive way to look at an extremely complex problem.
Krys Boyd [00:17:08] What have you learned about how patterns of community, gun violence, and domestic violence are correlated with problems like structural racism?
Abené Clayton [00:17:15] I mean, you have redlining, which is something that I always will refer to in conversations about, you know, concentrated homicides and gun violence. And while domestic violence absolutely impacts people of every race, sexual Orientation, gender and income level. We do see an increased risk among folks who have also been exposed to community violence. And if we’re talking structural racism, you have, you know, underserved schools, right, that don’t have enough money to let alone have extracurriculars, take kids to places, right. Have little trips to national parks. Just these enrichment opportunities that some children get are extremely lacking in a lot of these communities. And this isn’t news. We know that the haves and have nots of education, we know that that is unfortunately very alive, a very alive and well dynamic, if you will. So in addition to schools, you have housing instability. I already mentioned, you know, extreme economic stress. And a lot of these things are rooted in racism, right? And everything from them, you know, from neighborhoods being decimated to build freeways to having schools funded based on tax bracket. All of these things contribute to adverse health, you know, excuse me, adverse health outcomes. And just and one of those happens to be gun violence. But there are so many others, you know, and they all are sort of fruit of the same tree.
Krys Boyd [00:19:09] How does the overpolicing that happens in many communities of color play into the problems with domestic violence that may exist with those communities, like our people, who are harmed or in danger, more reluctant to call on law enforcement for help?
Abené Clayton [00:19:26] That is a complicated question. There’s no one answer. I think for so long there’s been this stereotype about black women in particular being willing to, like, kind of protect their men, even to their detriment. And that’s not always true. In the case of Alisha Thomas, she has gone to get restraining orders. She’s been to shelters. She has gone through these, she’s gone through these systems, you know. But I do think that when you see homicides not being solved, when you see how police interact with your community and family members, there can be a cooling effect, right? And saying, well, if they only come to these communities to arrest and to harass, why would they come to help me, right? If I’m considered a part of the problem just by virtue of living here. So I think that being overpoliced can lead to some hesitance. I feel like having an overpoliced community isn’t a full explanation for why people do and don’t seek out these sort of services, right? There are people who live in nice gated communities who the only interactions they have with the police are to help them, right, who don’t want to deal with the, perhaps embarrassment and shame of having the police called to their home for some sort of conflict. And that also happens in these communities, right, where people don’t always want to be. People don’t want their neighbors in their business, you know? So I think the dynamics are are more complicated than just these neighborhoods being overpoliced and that sort of dissuading women from, from not wanting to to call for help, but I think the overpolicing speaks more to the structural racism, right? Like how I said, there are so many fruits of the same tree of structural racism. The overpolicing is one of those. It’s one of the hallmarks of a community that is underserved, that is potentially in crisis. And it certainly doesn’t help people feel more safe. Right? Like it’s not like we are overpoliced. So why do we? The police are always here doing things. So I know that if I need them, they’re here because they’re always in the community. Like, that’s just not the calculus that a lot of people, especially women, are making. But it is one that I think deserves further exploration, for sure.
Krys Boyd [00:22:13] You have observed that in some marginalized overpoliced communities of color, there can be more advocacy around gun violence and around police abuse than around black women being killed in their homes or, you know, by their own partners what’s going on there?
Abené Clayton [00:22:31] Yeah. I mean, one of the things that drew me to this story was just seeing so many stories of black women in particular, being shot and killed in the same communities, the same neighborhoods and areas that I knew certain community based violence intervention groups were working right where they were meeting. Usually they work with like teenage and young men in their early 20s, you know, to get them out of this sort of cycle of violence. So I just asked one of the leaders of a pretty well known group in Sacramento, I was like, yo, what’s what is going on with all of these homicides? Like, I’m seeing a lot of black women being shot. Killed. Is there any mobilization? Right. Violence is violence. Is anyone doing anything about that. And the answer was kinda, we’re trying. We need more training, which is, you know, to give some grace is understandable, given that training somebody to deal with interrupting retaliatory gun violence is certainly different than intervening in a family conflict. Right? However, I also found that a lot of these groups are founded and primarily staffed by, like, heterosexual men. You know, and I do think there is some discomfort around speaking on domestic situations, regardless of the potential for them to turn into fatal gun violence. There’s hesitancy. There’s like, well, I don’t know what to say exactly. Is it my place to step in and tell this young man that you need to stop putting your hands on your girlfriend at the same time that I’m trying to mentor him and give him, you know, place him in these job opportunities so he’ll put his own firearm down and not shoot and kill someone who looks like him in the community. I think that it’s a really nascent conversation. Right. And similar to its to the sort of lack of conversation around domestic violence in these community based violence intervention spaces. You have sort of the same thing in like mainstream domestic violence spaces, right? Like there’s not a lot of conversation about how to specifically get at and support people who live in communities that deal with like a concentrated level of gun violence. So both of these movements certainly need each other. But I think with community based violence in particular, for me personally, the burden is a little higher because like, y’all work in these communities, you know, and you are supposed to care for everyone in them, even if the situation doesn’t match what you’re used to, which is usually two young men or two groups of young men who have maybe shot back and forth at each other. Things are escalating. Things are happening on social media. And then that’s where their excuse me, that’s where they will intervene. But it is at least worth having a conversation about the, frankly, like misogyny that can be present in a lot of these situations. And more groups are hiring women, and not just to be like, you know, sort of case managers and administrative assistants and things of that nature, but hiring them to go out into the streets and to try to support people. And while I don’t think it’s prudent for these groups to suddenly like, switch to or add in a lot of like violent, excuse me, a lot of like domestic violence procedures. There at least needs to be some education here. Right. And some connection between the groups that are working to stop gun violence and the people who are specifically trained in domestic violence. We’re just seeing the word I kept hearing while I was reporting this story was silos. Everything is very siloed, right? You have community based violence intervention that’s funded one way that’s discussed one way you have domestic violence that is traditionally discussed another way, and seldom do the twain meet honestly. And while they’re not meeting, a lot of women are dying and being displaced and their kids are being traumatized, while while these groups kind of get it together, if you will.
Krys Boyd [00:27:13] And it’s so interesting to think about taking these problems together or trying to address them together. And I think it’s important also because we certainly don’t want to give the impression that, like responsibility for keeping women safe should rest mostly or entirely with women. What do we know about what works to help men recognize abusive behavior and then, you know, choose not to engage in it?
Abené Clayton [00:27:40] That’s an excellent question. I mean, I think the from what I have seen in conversations with folks who cause some of the violence interrupters who I met are actively working with and mentoring young men who have a history of not just carrying firearms, but of, you know, getting their hands on their girlfriends, on their babies, mothers, etc., etc. and I, from what I’ve heard, including from them and from a former police officer who now worked as a social worker, is that it’s really about long term 1 on 1 relationships with, frankly, another a healthier man. You feel me like having someone who will check on you, who will call you on your stuff, but also has access to mental health resources, can also set you up with a culturally competent marriage and family therapist. If y’all do choose to stay together. Individual therapy. Just having an intensive one on one mentoring relationship. Sounds like it makes all the difference. And it’s similar for community gun violence, right? Like having someone who will show up and be like, hey, you good? I heard that, you know, your homie got shot. What’s going on? Let me take you out of town for a couple days while things cool down. Like having someone there is important. Unfortunately, that takes money and time to have someone’s full time job Supporting someone out of abuse is not really something you can do while also working a 9 to 5, which is the unfortunate situation for a lot of people who work in community violence intervention. It’s not super well funded, so people are doing this on top of their day jobs, which can really dilute the level of impact. But, you know, people are working on that as well, trying to figure out funding streams, trying to figure out ways, you know, for I talked to a domestic violence group in Sacramento County, and they talked about how they’re trying to find ways to you to make their funds more flexible. Right. So if they have a family who is dealing with domestic violence, who lives in a community where gun violence is prevalent, and there might already be the presence of a violence intervention group, they want to use some of their grant or county funding to go towards that group so that they can build a relationship with the person, right? Like recognizing when you can do a warm handoff and making sure you have money to fund that handoff and make it a sustainable relationship. That is the goal that I understand a lot of people are working towards. But I mean to say again, it really is just one on one relationships with someone who has access to resources and can set you up right, not just be like, hey, call this number, but can send that note and be like, hey, I have someone here ready for you right now. It’s a really specific and intense role, but it is possible.
Krys Boyd [00:30:59] I believe what you were just saying about, you know, the importance of role models. It strikes me that anyone who has grown up in a family that is free of domestic violence, in a community that feels relatively safe from gun violence, May have some resources available when they hit hard times. These folks may not even realize that they have those things going for them that don’t exist in these other communities, where it appears that violence is just this endemic problem that can’t be stopped.
Abené Clayton [00:31:28] This is obviously not a funny conversation, but you’re just saying that made me think of how many white people were like, white privilege. What? What do you mean? You know what I’m saying? Yeah. Like, you never know how good you have it until you engage meaningfully, either with journalism like mine or with the people who live in these communities. And I’ll say again, right. Being middle class, upper middle class does not necessarily shield you from abuse, but the options that you have are far greater. Right? You can perhaps even stay at a hotel instead of a shelter. You may have family who have a home that you can go and stay at, right, For a lot of people who like Alisha and so many other folks, it’s like, yeah, you’re in this. You may be in a family where you’re being abused and across town your cousin is struggling financially and their son is on their way down the wrong path. Right. You may have parents who struggled with drug abuse and don’t have a home, who rely on you like the options that you have to deal with your own stuff are just far more limited when you don’t have those financial resources, right? The things you can find out about the legal advocacy, which is huge, that you have access to, are all impacted by income. So while you can still end up in a situation that’s abusive mentally, physically, emotionally, financially, the breadth of options you have are far greater than so many of the women that I talked to. Right. And even the sort of knowledge base around how to get out. I mean, you think about think about lifetime movies, right? You kind of see the same, maybe docile, meek, usually white woman, and you have that sort of model to look at like, oh my, even if, you know, lifetime movies are obviously not the same as like active care, but it’s a level of representation that black women do not have in most cases black women, Latina women, poor women, native women. You just never people already to struggle to see us as victims. Right. So when these things do happen, you’re up against so many more barriers that don’t even include finances, right? So just having money can take off so much stress, right? And I think for people who don’t think about those privileges, it’s worth thinking about it. Right? Maybe that can, like galvanize you into donating to some of these groups. Maybe that can inspire you to think differently about, like a ballot measure or something that is offering money for victim services. Maybe you’ll think differently when you consider how everyone’s experiences are just not the same. Everyone does not have access to information. Some people may not even have a car right to get them to the victim services place, right? Maybe, like if I don’t go to work today, my kids aren’t going to have anything, so they don’t have the sort of privilege of dedicating all of their time and attention to getting themselves out of this situation because they have responsibilities and challenges. They may be responsible for multiple people in their family. And that really can make a difference in whether or not someone stays alive. Honestly.
Krys Boyd [00:35:18] One thing I’ve really appreciated about your reporting on this is that you don’t only feature people who are kind of if you’ll picture air quotes here. Perfect victims, right? A woman like Latoya Smith, she was a fighter herself. Which is not to say she didn’t need and deserve help when she was attacked.
Abené Clayton [00:35:39] No, absolutely. I’m so glad that you mentioned Latoya and your listeners can’t see, but it brought a bit of a smile to my face because Latoya is absolutely a fighter. You know, she she’s tough. You feel me? And I really wanted to talk to someone who didn’t fit that mold. The kind of aforementioned lifetime movie caricature of, like, a small, docile white lady who is up against a big, brutish man. Latoya grew up in a really religious household. Her mother was a boxer in the Navy and she was honestly like. Her parents are similar to Alisha’s family. They thought physically right. If there was an issue, they were throwing hands, as the kids say, and she said to me that her her mom was never the underdog. If anything, you know, she felt bad for her dad because he would lose the fights. So she grew up and similar to Alisha as well. They grew up in similar neighborhoods. You know, she saw her, her uncle, unfortunately, being murdered across the street from her home when she was 16. So she saw some of these community violence issues not to the same extent as Alisha because of the sort of religious parenting and the sheltering that her mother tried to do in the home. She was absolutely seeing conflicts being settled violently and seeing her mom, this woman, be the the person who was like the overcomer, if you will really get her. And as I say in the story, it just led to her developing her own level of toughness in high school. She said she preferred to fight boys instead of girls because she was like, I don’t want to fight a girl and hurt her so bad. It’s not even a challenge I’d rather fight do than. Funny enough, Lisa and Latoya, like, grew up together and went to the same high school and I asked Alisha about this and she’s like, yeah, she used to fight them boys. Like she was just tough. And so when she got with her now ex-husband and he hit her for the first time, she was like, oh, well, I guess this is well, makes sense, right? Like, I have hit people I’ve seen people get hit. They stay together. And this is just how this goes. And she often fought him back. You know, she often would swing on him as well. And it’s crazy because she is barely five feet tall, but she is just strong. And she’s like, you’re. And she was very resolute in talking to her about how she was just not going to be pummeled for lack of a better term. She just said she wasn’t going to do it. And I think the stories of these sort of women are often left out, or they’re sort of bastardized to say like, oh yeah, those those tough black girls, those girls with those attitudes. See, that’s why they end up in these situations, right? They’re not deserving of of care and empathy and compassion to be featured in a national story about domestic abuse, because they’re they’re hitting they’re hitting back. Well, you know, that’s not an abuse victim. They’re fighting. They’re not. And she’s not in a domestic violence situation. This is a couple who are fighting, and that’s just not the case. That was not the case at all. She is as much of a victim and survivor as any other person who is who has faced this sort of thing. And but unfortunately, these sort of stereotypes we have about black women having these attitudes, being tough, being aggressive, follow us into a lot of different rooms. You know, they can follow us into the the meeting rooms of a social worker and someone who is supposed to help us get out of the situation to where they may even be turned off and be like, oh my gosh, this lady’s aggressive. She’s crazy. Like, I see why she’s in this situation, right? All of these stereotypes and misconceptions we have about black women and where our toughness comes from, how it’s been used as a survival mechanism, are so often turned against us right now. I would argue that that more than overpolicing can dissuade women from going in and seeking help, right? Because if you go in, if you’ve seen so many women think, you know, if you see so many women be told like, oh, no, you’re not a victim, no, you’re not a victim, you’re just another hood rat. And this is what happens to you. Why would you go seek that help? You’re going to do what so many other black women have done for centuries and figure it out on your own, but unfortunately, that can lead to death. You know, sometimes you do need that help. Sometimes you do need that third party or someone to to step in. And, you know, despite her strength, Latoya found herself in a similar situation. Crazy enough, five days after Alisha’s attack, she found herself in a similar situation that she did not, that she chose not to react to in the same ways that she had other violent conflict she had with her ex-husband.
Krys Boyd [00:41:11] Okay, I’ve been a to the extent that boys and young men may be in particular communities surrounded by the same phenomena that put many women at risk of being brutalized or potentially fighting back. I mean, is there room for is there a need for compassion for men who engage in violence?
Abené Clayton [00:41:36] There is. You know, I it’s a it can be a hard question, especially after just like telling the stories of two women who were, like, completely brutalized for like, two decades by men. However, there you don’t have abuse victims unless you have abusers. You feel me? So there has to be room for at minimum, interrogation of why this is happening, right? We can’t. To your point earlier, we can’t put the sole burden of safety on the person who’s being victimized. Right. We’ve seen that happen with rape culture. You know, just wear more clothes, don’t get drunk at parties. Put the little, you know, cover. I had a cop once tell me, you ever heard of putting your keys in between your fingers? And I was like, sir. And like, it’s the ridiculous things that we tell women and marginalized folks to to keep them out of harm’s way. But we need to be having the same conversations with the harmers. And I talked to a researcher out of New Mexico who spoke to the need for interventions as young as possible. Right. While those brains and attitudes are still malleable for a level of compassion, right. Because you could be interacting with someone who’s then a big grown man’s body, but is a little scared boy on the inside who just saw his mom get dragged down the stairs. You know what I mean? So there is room for that. I think it’s important that we don’t put the burden on that rehabilitation solely on women unjustly. Right. We can’t expect women to raise men and then put the bar. And then when it doesn’t work or when they go back to abusing, being like, well, I guess that lady just didn’t do what she was supposed to do. So I do think this is something that other men who don’t have these attitudes need to spearhead. This is an effort that they absolutely need to lead. But I mean, we’re not going to address these problems just by talking to women about it, though we do need to talk to to for the purposes of this conversation. I’m saying women. I do know that people, regardless of gender, sexuality, people in the LGBTQIA+ Plus community go through domestic violence as well. But for the purposes of this, for the listeners, I am focusing on heterosexual relationships. But I think that that just goes back to the need for violence interrupters, for people who are already having these conversations about like healing among men, about changing attitudes. Right. Positive masculinity. This is an excellent place for them to intervene because they have a level of compassion that, frankly, a lot of women just might not have. Right? We might find that our time is better spent supporting, uplifting, teaching young girls how to avoid these sort of situations. So as long as the messenger is correct, I think that having compassion, seeing the sort of inner good that someone may have is absolutely necessary or we’re going to remain stagnant on this issue and continue on with the status quo, which, as I mentioned, just puts the burden on women and, frankly, older children in the home to try to protect each other, to protect this man’s feelings, to stop them from being volatile and that’s just not sustainable and won’t lead to meaningful progress and meaningful progress. I mean, a decrease in death and injury.
Krys Boyd [00:45:20] Abene Clayton is a reporter on the Guns and Lives in America project at the Guardian, where you can read her reporting on the links between community gun violence and domestic violence. Abene, thank you for making time for the conversation.
Abené Clayton [00:45:32] Thank you. You asked some really amazing questions. I appreciate it.
Krys Boyd [00:45:36] Think is distributed by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. You can find us on Facebook, Instagram and any place you get podcasts. Or you can find us at our website think.kera.org. Again, I’m Krys Boyd. Thanks for listening. Have a great day.
