Voices: Until the Violence Stops ...

The opening reception for the "Empty Place at the Table" exhibit at the Everhart Museum last Thursday was anything but empty.

I mean not only that the event was well attended, but also that it was full of emotion, of realization, of compassion and of something an inspirational conviction that more must be done to eradicate our society of the scourge of domestic violence.

A long dining table was set with the personalized place settings of those local women and children who had lost their lives in incidents of domestic violence. Place cards not only held the statistics of these victims' names and ages upon the date of their death, but key details about where their life energy had been spent before it was extinguished. These women had careers, families, hobbies, and passions. One women loved motorcycles. Another loved to take day drips. Another loved animals and often took in strays. These women loved and they were all killed by a person for whom they had once felt love.

One woman's place setting was marked with religious symbols, the place card referring to her strong faith. Could it have been this woman's faith which kept her in an abusive relationship? It wasn't an unlikely proposition. In another gallery, a triumphant photo of author Charlotte Fedders was contextualized with words that read, in part: "A devout Catholic, Charlotte had been convinced that bad things only came as a punishment for some fault in herself."

The profound black and white images of photographer Donna Ferrato also documented "best practices" programs that have proved themselves effective in decreasing the incidence of death and injury from domestic violence. It was a faith not unlike that which kept Fedders in an unhealthy situation, I realized, that led others to devise and implement and test these programs. The policemen who began to stalk the stalkers and those who had initiated manalive, a batterer intervention program, were convinced that there was something they could do at least decrease, if not altogether stop the horrors of domestic violence.

Ferrato's photographs and their accompanying text had also served to inspire faith in those of us who absorbed them - we cannot allow faith to leave us paralyzed, trusting that someone or something else will intervene and readjust the wrongs until all is right again.

In bringing their immense talents and their social activism to Scranton, photographer Donna Ferrato and filmmaker Nina Rosenblum had brought us a new awareness of the issue of domestic violence. But they had not brought domestic violence to Scranton - it had always been here. The empty places at the table testified to that fact as did the presence of the surviving family and friends of the victims memorialized by the exhibit.

"This is the real world," Ferrato had announced to us regarding her work.

The images of the hospitalized woman with tire imprints across her stomach from when her boyfriend had run over her - they were real. And the huge gash in another hospitalized woman's thigh was just as real, even though she clung to the faith that her abuser didn't mean to do it.

"You have to believe that the person you love wouldn't intentionally do this kind of a thing," the caption read.

We prefer to think of it as their reality- theirs not ours. But one of the places at the table was set with dishes exactly the same as those which often sit in my own dining room. And as I walked through the museum's front doors at reception's end and walked down the steps toward my car, the lights of the Community Medical Center caught my eye. How many women in that hospital right now, I wondered, were, like the women in Ferrato's photographs, recovering from the blows of domestic violence?

The galleries of the Everhart Museum were not empty of faith that night, but neither were they full. What will it take before we find the faith it will take to remove to domestic violence from our community, as Ferrato compared, like a doctor would remove the cancer?

--alicia grega-pikul, 16 May 2002