Public Denial of Violence Against Women

Guest post for Choices by Dr. Leona Stucky.

The Fog of Faith: Surviving My Impotent God is an historical personal account of a young Mennonite woman who finds herself on the front lines of the Invisible American War.
 
I remember the breathless reaction I had when, years after my war experience, I read in Jeff Wolf Wilson’s book, Children of Battered Women, that during the same years that the US lost 39,000 soldiers in the Vietnam War, 17,500 American women and children were killed by members of their families. 
 
I was shocked.  I had almost become one of those 17,500 women, but if I had to guess, at the moment I read those statistics, I might have thought 500 to 1000 women had been killed in that period.  It would still be devastating that so many women and children had died needlessly - suffered unknown traumas, had often been tormented and tortured perhaps for years before their deaths.  I had been.  My son’s life had been altered by the horrors.
 
It started to soak into my resistant brain.  It wasn’t 500 or a 1000, it was 17,500.  These were the women and children who had been murdered by family members.  Why didn’t I know?

A veritable massacre of 17,500 women and children had happened right under our noses, right here in the USA, in our own homes, right during the same years that we sent young men to fight in Vietnam. Who knew? 
 
Why were these 17,500 American women and children seemingly invisible, fighting and dying in an invisible war, when the war in Vietnam was highly visible – ubiquitous on our screens and in our minds? 
 
Ready-made justifications jumped into my mind as whole sentences, even paragraphs.  The nation attended to a real war. Men were suffering and dying.  Decisions that had national and international importance needed to be made and remade. Our national honor was at stake.  It was a galvanizing time for the whole country! 
 
Yes, it was a galvanizing time and that war should have mattered to the whole country.
 
Should it also have mattered that 17,500 women and children were being murdered right here in our country, right where we could have done something about it if we had paid attention? Was it a national tragedy that our American homes were war zones?  That women and children huddled in fear of the moment Dad would come home and all hell would break loose?  That women could be taken down and brutalized when they were hanging out laundry, singing on the porch, or nursing a baby?  That cleaning the dishes or vacuuming or putting on makeup were not safe activities? Those activities were not safe for me. 
 
Going to Canada was not an option – how could women and children get out of the Invisible War? People didn’t seem to realize that escape might be important, and few structures were in place to help people caught in this Invisible War.
 
Furthermore, 17,500 were only the most unlucky few – those who paid the ultimate price for being an American woman. Those 17,500 could be at the top of a huge pyramid graph showing the deaths. The next level of the graph would be an expanded area for the many who were tormented, beaten, kicked, punched, thrown up against the wall, strangled, stabbed, clobbered with household items, and maybe raped however many times. Those who lived in fear or terror many days of their everyday lives, and who somehow sneaked by to live another day – they would be in the second level.
 
My son and I would have been placed on that level if there had been a graph - if our nation had noticed.
 
The third, more expansive level, would be those who were periodically pressured into everything they didn’t want to do, who were controlled and verbally abused, who were demeaned and shamed into submission. Their lives too were a living hell, just without so much violence, and without clarity about their relational struggles. They too were unknown people in an Invisible War.
 
While our nation choreographed our movements in another world, the rising death toll in our own territory was not deemed significant enough to stop women and children from being scattered asunder like refugees, or ripped out of their own homes and murdered in cold blood.
 
Would it have been different if the numbers had been different? If the deaths abroad had been 17,500 and the deaths at home 8,000?  Or what if the deaths in the Invisible War out-numbered those soldiers who died abroad?
 
We know the answer to that question. In an AP interview on October 1, 2014, Gloria Steinem reported that more women were killed by their male intimate partners than all the Americans killed in the Afghanistan and Iraq war and the 9/11 terrorist attack, combined. The Invisible War had remained invisible.
 
I couldn’t speak about the war I endured and no one spoke to me about it. It was not a subject for polite conversation. No one bothered to spit on me for being in that war. Nor did I or any of my female compatriots, who I didn’t know existed, get veteran benefits. We were not among the candidates studied for PTSD considerations. No lofty speeches addressed our bravery. No one created holidays to honor us or constructed a wall to memorialize those of us who died.
 
An 18 hour public television series cataloguing our experiences and peoples’ reactions to the Invisible War has not yet been conceived, though the war itself was fought right here on our home soil, indeed, in every community, town, city, and state across our entire nation. 
 
It’s as if people have no idea that bullets actually do penetrate invisible people and they actually do bleed out just like visible people do. They also suffer unimaginable pain, writhing in anguish when they are thrashed, tortured and beaten. These invisibles say prayers, suffer battle fatigue, exhibit super-human strength sometimes, go in to save others sometimes (of course no bronze stars or purple hearts) and they sometimes come out of war addicted to substances. 
 
These invisibles were supposed to shut up and survive or shut up and die and few people cared which way it went. 
 
After shutting up for 50 years, about the Invisible War that invaded my younger years, I finally opened my mouth and out came a book, The Fog of Faith: Surviving My Impotent God.  It covers my war experience which included some startling discoveries about which aspects of my faith were or were not trustworthy. 
 
Facts to consider about the current US Invisible War (https://ncadv.org/statistics.)

• On average, nearly 20 people per minute are physically abused by an intimate partner in the United States. During one year, this equates to more than 10 million women and men.
• 1 in 4 women and 1 in 7 men have been victims of severe physical violence by an intimate partner in their lifetime.
• The presence of a gun in a domestic violence situation increases the risk of homicide by 500%.
• 1 in 5 women and 1 in 71 men in the United States have been raped in their lifetime.
• 72% of all murder-suicides involve an intimate partner, 94% of the victims of these murder suicides are female.