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Debbie met her husband, Glen, after her brother “saved” him in a 7-Eleven convenience store by showing him “the way of the lord.”
“I was just a Christian girl looking for a husband,” the Cheboygan resident said.
Even though Glen was headed for jail at the time for credit card fraud, Debbie believed he could change and was willing to do what it took to stay by his side. She visited him in jail until he was released after serving four months of a two-year sentence. They married a month later.
Debbie, who asked that her real name not be used to protect her children’s identities, became pregnant immediately. But it wasn’t until she was seven months pregnant that the problems began. After a night of drinking, Glen came in and started to hit Debbie.
Terrified and confused, Debbie ran barefoot to her mother’s nearby apartment.
The abuse multiplied from that night onward. Glen sold all of Debbie’s belongings, threw food at her, pulled a gun on his parents and held a knife to her throat after she refused him sexual favors.
But after years of abuse, Debbie found what more and more women in violent households are discovering – the courage to leave.
In 1992, there were 93 reported cases of domestic violence disputes in Cheboygan County, not including an additional 118 civil disputes that may have included domestic violence reported by the Cheboygan County Sheriff Department.
Last year, assault and battery complaints in the Cheboygan County District Court accounted for 20 percent of the overall caseload. And statistics indicate a startling increase over the past few years.
In 1990, 50 cases of assault and battery were filed in the 89 th Cheboygan District Court. In 1991, 63 cases were filed, followed by 85 cases in 1992. January and February of 1993 already show 16 cases filed.
Figures provided by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) indicate that a woman is physically assaulted within her home every 15 seconds in the United States.
Battery is the single major cause of injury to women, exceeding street rape, muggings or auto accidents.
It is estimated that 4,000 women are beaten to death annually; six million American women are beaten each year by their husbands or boyfriends.
This indicates that women are more likely to be physically assaulted, beaten or killed in their own home by someone they love than any place else in society.
No community, race or economic group is free of domestic violence; several factors that contribute to it exist throughout the nation, including Cheboygan County.
High rates of unemployment and alcoholism are not direct causes of family disputes, just grim excuses for a violence that can’t distinguish between socio-economic or educational barriers.
“Domestic violence in a relationship is not a one-time incident; it’s a lifetime, a lifestyle of fear and control,” said Chris Krajewski, director of the Women’s Resource Center Safehouse – a battered women’s shelter that services five counties in Northern Michigan.
I think we all want an excuse. We all want an easy out for why domestic violence happens,” Krajewski said. “We want this crime, this horrible injustice, to stop. But there is not easy answer because domestic violence is a complicated societal problem.”
There are several reasons why victims of domestic abuse stay in a violent situation, Krajewski said.
Some women would rather stay in a bad relationship than lose financial security. Leaving often means starting from ground zero, which includes giving up a home, car or steady income in return for safety.
In the first year after a divorce, a woman’s standard of living drops by 73 percent, while a man’s improves by an average of 42 percent, according to information compiled by the National Woman Abuse Prevention Project.
Other victims of abuse falsely believe they can change their batterer, that they can rehabilitate him into a healthy relationship.
“The sad thing about the alcohol myth is that many women think that when their partners beat them, that it’s not him, it’s the alcohol,” Krajewski said. “Alcohol does not cause abuse. Sober people beat their partners. Recovering alcoholics beat their partners.”
Many victims attempt to minimize the abuse they endure or learn to tolerate it, she said. Others blame themselves for the abuse and feel they deserve it or think they did something to incite the violence.
Women leave their abusive husbands an average of seven times before they leave for good, Krajewski said.
“We see so much violence today that women are trained to keep the relationship or marriage together,” she said. “Society tells women to go back and try again.”
Marie, who lives in Indian River with her son, understands this too well. She left her abusive husband three times before she filed for divorce.
She started dating Bob when they were both in sixth grade and after graduating from high school they married.
“The problems started right away,” said Marie, who asked that her real name not be used. “The night we got married, he went out golfing and never came home.”
In the next three years of their marriage, Marie started to blame herself for the explosive mood swings Bob directed her way. He kept making promises to stop hitting her and to give up drugs, but those promises were too hard for him to keep.
“The hitting would stop for about a week, but the drugs never did,” she said. “After a while I thought maybe it was my fault for harping on him for coming home so late all the time.
But the promises of change haunted Marie, preventing her from taking steps to escape the turbulent relationship.
“I was worried that I would leave him and he’d finally change and start a great family with someone else,” she remembered. “I thought I would miss out.”
Marie tried to press assault and battery charges on Bob once, but he talked her out of it two months later. Later he beat her so severely – by bashing her head into a wall and the floor – that Marie was convinced that she was going to die.
But still she didn’t prosecute, or even go to the hospital, because she was afraid her parents would find out.
The next time Bob attacked Marie, she changed her mind about everything. She was alone watching television when Bob arrived intoxicated. After she asked him to leave, he started to choke her.
“I thought he was going to kill me,” she said. “I thought to myself, I’ve got to do something because it’s never going to get better.”
So she filed for divorce and pressed assault and battery charges against him. Marie and Bob have been divorced for two years now and he is currently awaiting a court date on separate assault charges against her.
Picking up the pieces after leaving a violent relationship involves a slow healing process for many women.
Almost 10 years after Debbie divorced Glen, she finally feels safe. Glen can’t harm her anymore, as he is serving time in a Carson City prison for armed robbery.
“I left him 12 times in a year, “ the Cheboygan woman remembers, adding she finally left him for good after “he promised me a bullet” if she didn’t obey his orders.
Debbie now avidly attends church – always thanking God for giving her the will to survive.
“Prayer is the only thing that kept my sanity,” Debbie said. “Glen didn’t let me go to church down state, but he did when we moved up here. That was his biggest mistake because that’s how I got all my strength.”
Editor’s Note: This is the first story in a four part series on domestic violence in Cheboygan County. Due to the seriousness of the topic names have been changed to protect the innocent.
The Dart Center would like to give special thanks to Joyce Krawczak, librarian at the Cheboygan Public Library, whose commitment to recovering this series of articles is second to none, and to Hrefna Milner for doing the impossible, retyping the entire series of articles from deteriorated micro-film copies of the original tearsheets.
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