In this episode, USU President Elizabeth Cantwell has a conversation with Rachel Louise Snyder and Jill Anderson about what it takes to successfully address sexual and domestic violence in our communities.
Rachel Louise Snyder is the author of "No Visible Bruises: What We Don't Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us" and will provide the keynote address at the Northern Utah Conference to End Violence at USU’s Logan campus on May 29.
Jill Anderson is the CEO and executive director of CAPSA, a non-profit domestic violence, sexual abuse, and rape recovery center serving Cache County and the Bear Lake area.
The Northern Utah Conference to End Violence is a collaboration between Utah State University and CAPSA and offers an opportunity for both practitioners and community leaders to collaborate. Visitnucev.usu.edu for more information.
Full Transcript
Elizabeth Cantwell: Hello, everyone, this is Elizabeth Cantwell, president of USU. I'm the host of this podcast which is called "Future Casting with Utah State." Today I'm talking to Rachel Louise Snyder and Jill Anderson about what it takes to successfully address sexual and domestic violence in our communities. Rachel is the author of "No Visible Bruises: What We Don't Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us," and the keynote speaker for the Northern Utah Conference to end violence at USU is Logan campus on May 29.
Jill Anderson is the CEO and Executive Director of CAPSA, which she will describe for us, which is a nonprofit domestic violence, sexual abuse and rape recovery center serving Cache County and the Bear Lake area. So welcome to both of you. And thank you, Rachel, for joining us today. And especially thank you for joining us at our conference to end violence, which we feel is a really important part of what we do as a regional public service university, is really keep the attention on things that are important to our community.
So I might start with a question and ask each of you has worked around and with and looking at domestic violence. And I might ask you each to do just sort of an introduction to who you are with that context with that domestic violence context. How did you get here? And what have you done? And we'll start with Rachel.
Rachel Snyder: Thank you for having me, it's really a pleasure. And I have come recently to the joys of Utah just in the last couple of years visited and I just am super excited to come back to return. And it's just a beautiful state, and you have people doing incredible work, and you talk me down issues.
So that's really exciting. To me, one of the great benefits I get in my life is that I get to be able to go around and see all the exciting new work that people are doing in this area. So I mean, I came to domestic violence sort of late in my career, I'd been doing stories of you know, human rights abuses, and you know, violence, yes, around the world. And so I really hadn't thought much about domestic violence, which is ironic, because I did have some violence. In my background. As a kid I wrote a memoir that came out fairly recently called women really buried women, we burned in which I talk a little bit about this. But even as someone who has spoken to so many other people are about the violence in their lives, I really I didn't make the connections in my own life until I was really starting to write about my early years.
So I was lucky enough to to meet a woman who her name is Suzann. She works in Massachusetts, who has been working in the domestic violence sphere for four decades now almost four decades, and really walked me through all of the myths around domestic violence, right? Like why we shouldn't be asking, you know, why don't why doesn't that person just leave the ways in which we criminalize victims, the ways in which we children bear the brunt of that abuse, but also like that, there are things that we can do to change it, and there are things that we can do to address it. So I I've kind of made it my the sort of fulcrum upon which my journalistic career spins, trying to bring this message to our communities that we don't actually have to live with this type of violence. We don't.
Elizabeth Cantwell: And Jill, you're like the perfect segue because you focus on your community and our community. I'd like to think that most people in this area — Rachel, we call it Cache Valley, and it is in fact, a pretty long skinny valley, with maybe five or six major towns in it — that everyone knows about CAPSA, but I'm not sure that all of our listeners would.
Jill Anderson: When you dedicate your life to an organization, essentially, you're always surprised to find how many folks don't understand or know about CAPSA. But thank you for asking me to join today. When I was attending Utah State University as a student I had decided to dedicate, you know, was really interested in how do I help at risk youth and started working at the local youth detention center.
I didn't really feel like we were able to make a difference in that system for those at risk youth and often sending them back to situations where it was difficult to see how they would have a chance of breaking out of that. And I started volunteering at CAPSA and I could see that the work that we were doing there if I could help women and moms create safe and stable homes for their children, that ultimately we would be reaching those at rescue that we I wanted to reach. And so I've spent the last 30 years of my career working with women primarily and children and youth who are victims of domestic and sexual violence.
Elizabeth Cantwell: And I've had the experience really of viewing and visiting your facilities and seeing sort of viscerally the work that you do. And we're lucky to have it. But I also am really grateful that the language that we now use in this community, about domestic violence and about sexual violence is in many ways propelled by the work that you do, and the way that you talk about yourselves in everything from your bus wraps, to things like this podcast, I think it's actually transformational for our community to have a resource like that, that creates the right narrative, or the narrative that you create.
Jill Anderson: You know, I always try to honor the work of our founders that started this in 1976. They started it originally known as the Cache Valley rape crisis team. And when I think about the culture and the times in a very conservative community back in the mid to late 70s, that the courage that it took for them to start saying the words even in our community and start having those conversations and and one of our founders, Jenny box, going home and telling her husband, we are going to shelter victims in our own home, and he was a dean at the College of Natural Resources at the time, just saying, Well, okay, I guess I any thought three or four families a year, we can handle that. But they had three families show up the first week, and from their living room, to what you see today has really been built over, you know, for decades now. And I tried to honor those founders that had the courage to start those conversations in our community and continue to have those conversations.
Elizabeth Cantwell: And create that service model. Because I'm not sure what my spouse would say, if I said I was going to bring home three families to shelter them.
Jill Anderson: Yeah, in our home.
Yeah, he talks about not thinking through the liability and the safety and all of that. And they realized, you know, if you look at our organization, today, almost all of our programs have a founding story like that, where we recognized that we weren't meeting the needs of survivors that there was a barrier they were facing. And we needed to start that. And one of the early things that they noticed was we can't provide the safety they need, we can't provide the confidentiality. One of the families, they were friends with her son, and so she realized we can't provide this and they started to develop more more programs over time. Well,
Elizabeth Cantwell: Rachel, let me I'm really honestly quite interested in having you talk about your book, because it represents an enormous amount of work to actually, you know, to gather at this, you know, with with the subtitle, no visible bruises, a narrative and facts and stories that come together in this way that emphasizes but at least in my mind, in a very coherently written form, what's at stake in cases of domestic violence. So I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about either, you know, sort of, what have you learned along the way of gathering all that? And, I mean, you're obviously incredibly capable at putting lots of information into into a coherent, readable, understandable package. But what did you learn during the process?
Rachel Snyder: Thank you for that. I have a background in creative writing. I have an MFA in fiction. My second book, no visible bruises is my third book. I've published four books. My second book was a novel. So I think in story, my my brain sort of story, in fact, one of the quirky little factoids about me is that my great uncle created the Addams Family. So I come from a family lineage, freaky people, he created the hand, you know, the thing is, so name is anyway.
So I do think in story, and I do really feel like statistics don't move the dial. And when it comes to social change, they can be alarming. But those aren't the things that stay with you. You know that the story it's the story that stays with you.
And when I mentioned my now very dear friends designed to abuse meeting her and her sort of dismantling all these myths for me, I realized that in the in the arena of journalism, where I operate and creative writing, we weren't telling a story, the story in the way that was sticky, I think, is we were there's lots of great stats out there and there's great data, but if you didn't stand at the receiving end of a punch, you felt like it had nothing to do with you.
For me, that was the big impetus like, okay, we have 400 years of not caring about domestic violence in this country. There's lots of books written about domestic violence, but they tend to be academic or maybe self helpy. Or like, they're not feel like they're rising to the level of like, someone who isn't intimately involved in a domestic violence situation would read or be interested in. And I really had that. It was like, very calculated for me really, almost as an artist to be like, Okay, how can I write it so that people who have no interest in domestic violence, because I have 400 years of proving that we have no interest in this country will read it and get to the end, because they're so compelled to turn each page, right. And they'll get to the end and be like, Wow, I What a great book. I know so much about domestic violence now unwittingly. And that was, that was sort of my charge. That was how I felt like I needed to come to this book. And there is a lot of data in there. But the hardest part for me was how to tell the story how to tell the story that it would feel not, you know, the journalists in me is, you know, we have we we are asking people to share their worst moments. And so I wanted to be respectful of that and honor that. But I also wanted to write something that felt like a page turner, and not in a gratuitous way. But in a like, deep social justice kind of way. Like, in that sense. I don't know if that answers your question.
Elizabeth Cantwell: It does. So, absolutely honor that. You know, so I've lived in Utah for less than a year, but eight months? And it feels like and I think statistically, probably is, I'm looking at Jill, but a relatively safe state, and our little valley, maybe even more so. But I also know from looking at the data, that the prevalence of sexual violence in this state is relatively high. So our reality is frightening. From that perspective.
Jill Anderson: You know, Utah leads in a number of ways, and this is one of the areas where we are far worse off than a lot of other states in the country, we still have one of the highest rates of sexual violence in the nation. And I think a lot of it is we, we don't talk about it here. We don't discuss it as a community and, and tackle the issue. And unless we're willing to talk about it, and address it and come together collectively, we won't make much progress moving forward. And I think we, we, because we don't see a lot of street violence, a lot of gang violence, because crime in Utah is actually down overall, we forget that maybe one of the most dangerous places for folks is their very own home.
Elizabeth Cantwell: To me that, Rachel that that like almost exemplifies the, you know, the idea of no visible bruises that there's this thing in our in our community. That makes it less obvious here. If I think and I am like total neophyte here, but if I just think about what could that be? It's gotta be that piece about not talking about it was stronger in this place?
Rachel Snyder: Well, I'm not from Utah, but my sense is that it's not talking about it, it's the shame associated with it, victims will still think that they have some brought it on themselves to some extent. And I think we, we still have a narrative of this as a private matter, you know, and, to me, one of the one of the things I'm starting to realize, just, you know, in the last year or two, just as I'm writing, I'm working on my next book right now, which does, does, again, address domestic violence, but from a very different angle. All violence is are really connected types of violence. Right? Jill mentioned gang violence, you know, there's there's data that says, well, gang violence is domestic violence, right? Like, you take some someone who knows, you know, they're dating and she breaks up with them to date somebody who's in a different gang. And then there's a, you know, shooting whatever. I'm sort of bastardizing the research, but like, that is a form of domestic violence, or I've just finished a survey that's not not even published yet.
I'm reading a big piece from the New York Times about the survey I did was with Stanford Law School with criminalized survivors and one of the big discoveries that we've made in this report is that the vast majority and it's some I can't remember the exact number, about 80% of women who are incarcerated, about 80% of the women who are incarcerated for murder or manslaughter. Who did our survey in the state of California, were in the highest risk for extreme domestic violence, the highest risk that that doesn't mean they had childhood abuse, they may have had childhood abuse. But that means in the year leading up to their crime, they were literally at risk of being killed. And that when you look at things like there were a lot of women who had DUIs. And initially, we were like, Oh, well, that that doesn't quite fit what we're trying to study, but they're in for murder or manslaughter. DUI is murder or manslaughter, in this case, so we'll have them fill out the report. And what we discovered was that something like 80% of them, you know, who were in for murder or manslaughter, were self medicating, they use that term self medicating because of the violence in their backgrounds. So to the ways in which we've been thinking about domestic violence, as a spillover in our communities, I think has been limited. And that's a conversation that I really interested in, you know, talking about more.
Elizabeth Cantwell: So one of the things that occurs to me, because I'm the mother of five children, and three of them are boys. And I think about my boys all the time. I mean, they're men. Now they're not boys anymore. And they're lovely people. But I think about the I'm often in my mind, thinking about, well, what about the boys who end up as perpetrators one way or another, who end up whose stories are even quieter and less, I think, for the shame, reason, less part of the narrative, although, and I do get where the numbers are really, really, really well. So I always feel obligated to speak up and in honor of the boys and men who just have no recourse either.
Jill Anderson: You know, one of the things we recognized early on, when we realized that our focus was totally on the moms in the shelter was that the vast majority of the people in our shelter are children. Yes. And that we needed to build programs and address the children as well. And thinking about some of the shelters across the country wouldn't shelter boys over the age of 12. We never had that rule, we would shelter even sometimes 17 and 18 year old boys coming in with their mom, eventually sheltering men as well.
Elizabeth Cantwell: And I've seen men in your shelter. So I do know you.
Jill Anderson: We do, we do shelter men as well. A transgender, anybody who's being abused is welcome. You know, in our shelter, and in our programs, we started to develop programs that help children understand healthy relationships and interactions and managing emotions and behaviors, what's appropriate, what's not. And it's those boys investing in those boys early at that young age, when they're in our shelter, when they're in our transitional housing program. We provide therapy.
I remember a woman that I'd been working with, they had money. And she I knew she had left an abusive relationship a number of years ago. And she said, You know, I just My son just keeps acting out. He's starting to act more and more like his father. And I said, Bring him in. And she said, Well, we have money, we don't need said, we have experts, and therapists who do this all the time, bring him in. And it was months later, that she said, I've tried therapist after therapist and not been able to get the help. And he recently started to lash out and stopped and said, I'm sorry, mom, I didn't mean that. And she knew then that she's changed that getting the help that he needed had changed the trajectory of his life. And so we do need to focus on the prevention of this. So go ahead, Rachel.
Rachel Snyder: Sorry for interrupting. But I, I'm so glad that you said that, Jill, because you know, one of the scary things to me is the fact that something like 21 states in this country right now have either no sex ed for high schoolers or opt in only. And when it's opt in, it's their parents who have to opt in for them, which means in some cases that you're asking an abuser to opt in for their children. Right. And I just think how are we empowering kids when they don't? They don't come in knowing what consent is.
I mean, I'm a professor at American University, and I am seeing on our campuses, the result of kids who have zero sex ed or abstinence only, which is also a form of zero sex ed. I would argue I know that's probably controversial in some parts of Utah, but I really believe that we we need to be teaching girls boys trans kid, we need to be teaching all of them. Sex ed in every state, I just think it should be part of the curriculum. And you know, it is a big part of a piece of prevention.
Elizabeth Cantwell: Indeed. So let me switch gears, back to my questions, because I wonder I don't want to lose the opportunity to talk a little bit about the upcoming conference and kind of some of the things that are going to happen there. And at least one of them is a session that covers the lethality assessment protocol that we use here in Utah. And I wonder if we could start maybe with you, Jill, and then to Rachel, to just talk about why something like a protocol can help us like how important it is to actually create procedures and guardrails.
Jill Anderson: The lethality assessment protocol came out of started in Maryland, and a number of shelters here in Utah recognized or shelter based programs, I should say, call us shelters, but we have a lot of other, you know, transitional housing therapy and a lot of wraparound support. But we recognize that this was coming out as an effective tool. And so in 2015, four of us piloted it here in Utah, and we often talk about will Utah's a unique culture or a different area, will it really work here in Utah the way it did, and it was working in Maryland, and we started piloting with our local law enforcement. And we really recognized that it was it was getting survivors connected to community based services, I thought Cache Valley's a small area, everybody probably knows CAPSA, we're probably already working with the people that law enforcement are going to identify through this protocol as high risk.
When we started, we found the same thing Maryland did only 4% of those who law enforcement were identifying high risk had we seen or interacted with. And we started seeing 70% of those that law enforcement referring coming in for help. It was a huge increase in those services. And to this day, I still 100% believe that we saved in our saving lives through that protocol. In 2022, the Lieutenant Governor's cousin was murdered by an ex husband. And she started to tour the state to see what were the gaps were what was working. And she identified the lethality assessment protocol as something that was working, that could help. And so in July of 2023, she worked with the Utah legislature. And in July of 2023, they mandated that every law enforcement agency in the state of Utah implement this protocol. And when you think about law enforcement work, everything is about protocol process. And we have a lieutenant on our board, and I hope he's okay with me sharing this when he talks about this protocol he tears up, because it gives them a tool yes to use, and it helps them connect people to services.
Elizabeth Cantwell: But to me, it also a protocol becomes an active voice, if you will, in the world. Meaning it's now it has to get reported. It's trained against it becomes part of an a more vocal narrative. It might be weirdly, you know, prescribed and things, but it changes the volume of a those aspects, whatever is dealt with with that protocol, it changes its volume and upset in the community.
Jill Anderson: It absolutely does, in addition to identifying high risk absent Yes, the the number one most effective thing about it to me is that it brings community based advocates and law enforcement around the table, it creates a common language, it creates collaboration, it creates discussion, the two community based advocates and law enforcement come from two very different cultures, within their organizations, they come at the issue of domestic violence from different lenses, different approaches. And by bringing us together around the table, we can start to together bringing our various expertise and resources, bringing us to hopefully prevent survivors falling through the cracks.
Elizabeth Cantwell: Rachel, and I want to kind of give you a chance, because I think it's important for our listeners to perhaps hear a little bit more about what is in your book, and maybe this context of where and how are their solutions, you know, among other things in this kind of collaboration model that we can actually start drawing up out of the stories themselves, and have, you know, build action plans, if you will. I'm an engineer. So that's all we do. But build action plans, build the next steps, the things that come out of higher volume on the narrative and the experiences and less hidden stories, because seems logical to me.
Rachel Snyder: I think, you know, one of the things I tried to do in my book is include sort of every side of the conversation. So I have, you know, have victim stories, but I also have the perpetrators who are, you know, many of them in prison today, trying to reckon with, you know, not always, but sometimes trying to reckon with the things that they've done. I talk to, you know, restorative justice practitioners, I talk to police officers, detectives, you know, prosecutors, DBAs judges, and everybody has, I think their role in the solution.
I think what Jill said about bringing law enforcement and advocates together is a huge step. And that's one of the big boundaries that I see are the walls that I see in communities that haven't made the kind of progress that that I think CAPSA and organizations like CAPSA have made across the country. I think that anytime you have collaboration between what I would say are different cultural identities, groups with different cultural identities, I think there's going to be renewed understanding or maybe new understanding around, you know, some of the things they face.
I mean, I've had law enforcement tell me, you know, one of the best things about using something like the lethality assessment is that they feel like they can actually help people now, whereas before, they would go, they would get called back to the same house again, and again, and again, and just feel like I was going to move the dial. So it's a powerful thing.
I think there are a lot of small things that can be done. You know, in Montana, I don't know if you have it in Utah or not. But in Montana, they now have restraining orders written on like a dry laminated driver's license size card, and victims can get a whole bunch of those and pass them out at their kids school or at their workplace or whatever. But it's one of the things that it's it's such a small change, it costs almost nothing. But it allows a victim to say, look, if you see this, you know, this perpetrator looking around my kids school, or you see this perpetrator look, lino stalking me in the parking lot of my, you know, employer, people know that that person is not supposed to be there. It's another layer of protection.
You also have a program in Utah that just started in November, which I'm hoping to write about a little bit later, where you're housing perpetrators of violence in a home, instead of taking victims out of their home and out of their community, potentially. And it's asking, it's asking perpetrators to live in a community, they learn to do housework, they learn to do grocery shopping, and cooking, and all those kinds of things that they may expect someone else to do. But they also have group therapy, and they have individual therapy. And so I think that's a really exciting and creative new way to think about addressing, you know, some of the violence.
I think, you know, putting more programs in prisons is really important. If you're going to live in communities that are not broken, and we want to bring people back together, we cannot just throw people in prison and leave them there to rot forever. I think we have to think about how we can rebuild our programs.
And there's a million you know, there's I just interviewed a police chief in Iceland, who they've had massive, a massive shift in how they do policing, and that one of the things they do is they make their officers go take humanities classes, so interesting. So I just think there's a lot of like, really creative, fascinating solutions out there. I spoke in Hawaii a couple of years ago, and they have a mother daughter lunch every year at the local domestic violence agency. And they they connect daughters with like other mothers at the table the questions around sex and consent and sexual identity, because you know, not very many kids are gonna go talk talk to others. I mean, mine does, but you know, other brothers who haven't written no visible versus, you know, I just did great. And it's like, they, you know, they laugh at the uncomfortableness, they sort of lean into the, the weirdness of it. And it sounds like it really works.
So I think there's a lot of really small things like that CAPSA, by the way, Jill, I think, is probably too humble to tout the incredible stuff that they do. But CAPSA was the model for Freedom House in in Park City, which I wrote about in the New York Times recently. And by the way, I did have a sentence or two about CAPSA that ended up being cut by my editor. I want to just tell you, Jill and you in there, but you know, the what they've been able to do with their programming has been hugely impactful.
Jill Anderson: Thank you, Rachel. I remember working with their director at the time and board and one of the things that we did when we built our new facility was we just said we're not going to be a private secret anymore. And part of it was we felt like it was a door Just kept secret in the community. And in part of it was we need our community to be talking about this to know what we do. And to come and see what we do, and and recognize the prevalence and how pervasive it is in our community. And so we just said, we'll create other safety measures around where we are, and in the program in Park City decided to do the same thing. You know,
Elizabeth Cantwell: I mean, the other thing about being more open is, there's no matter what it is, if you have to kind of hide, it feels shameful.
Jill Anderson: That was part of our discussions, too, it's not shameful for you to get help. And we hope we encourage survivors that this community cares about them. One of the things when we were developing our transitional housing program, that conversation among our board is we didn't have a lot of money. So where do we cut corners, I just said, you know, what, we're gonna build this beautiful neighborhood, that when survivors enter that neighborhood, they know this community cares about them.
Elizabeth Cantwell: It is an amazing, amazing neighborhood, really, truly moving to walk through it and see that we have maybe five minutes left, I thought I might give you both, but particularly you joven, both of you this opportunity to look at the Northern Utah Conference to End Violence. And we have some themes in there. One is one is collaborative leadership, which I think we've been talking about. What are some of the other themes for the, for the conference?
Jill Anderson: I think the main theme is, really is that collaboration piece, because each of our areas have an expertise, whether that's educational institutions, honestly, some of the greatest systems change have come out of research have based on research that you can't ignore, and and systems start to look at their response and change. It takes law enforcement, community based advocates, health care, civic leaders, faith leaders, when you think about all of those different communities and systems, and and the fact that we have to come together around the table, we each have to take responsibility. If we're going to end this. It's going to take a lot of coordination and collaboration and discussions. And some of the greatest impact I've seen is not necessarily the workshops that people attend, but the conversations that happen in the hallways in between those workshops, is where some of the greatest work happens.
Elizabeth Cantwell: Well, I want to underscore something you just said, because it's really important to me, and particularly in this moment might be important to you, as well, Rachel that, that the capacity for universities to create an environment where questions are allowed to be asked and research is allowed to be done in order to actually determine whether there's veracity in those questions is really important to our historical moment. And we will always lean on maintaining that particular form of academic freedom that allows social questions to be asked and researched with fidelity. So that we bring something different to the conversation if it's what should be, what should be delivered, because hallway conversation is gonna get you. So it will get you actually pretty far. But building the research platform, that's pretty hard to question. I'm getting even further hit does. I don't know if you teach writing. Right, Rachel? I mean, do you see that?
Rachel Snyder: I have a joint appointment in creative writing and journalism at American University. And I'm gonna think, yes, I think there is a real I think our universities are troubled in a variety of ways these days, right? Like we, we could have a whole other. And I but I do agree. I mean, the thing that is resonating with me, as I listen, as I listened to Jill talk, because I hear the themes of the conference, which is helpful to me as a, as a speaker, I think that we each have a role to play in creating this change.
And, you know, here in the US, I lived in Asia for many years. And so I'm not sure I fully understood what it meant to be American until I took my American, my very American self, and transplanted me into an entirely different culture. I lived in Cambodia, and you don't really think about what your culture means or is or how it plays out in your own attitudes until you remove yourself to to a place that is so foreign. And it was interesting to me to be in a culture of collectivism, a culture not of individualism, and I've brought a lot of those lessons back with me because I think I think we can't we you know, we're not going to arrest our way out of this problem. We're not going to imprison our way out of this problem, we can only find our way out of this problem by by working together and working across these various channels. And universities have a huge part in that universities, I would, I would argue, are in some ways the backbone. You know, I started off by saying statistics don't change, don't don't foment social change.
But the, you know, the counterargument to that, is that statistics are stories, right? Those numbers are stories. And so I'm excited because I feel like I maybe at this point, have spoken in all 50 states, I'm not sure I have to sit and think about it. Maybe that's probably not true. But I've done a lot of speaking since this book came out. And I really think there's never been a better time for these solutions that like people are more open, politicians and policymakers are more open. People like Jill are saying, You know what, I'm not sure how we're going to do this. But we know it's the right thing to do. So we're gonna do it like that brave and courageous to me. So that's maybe beyond what your what your question was. But I, feel very excited about the all of these possibilities.
Elizabeth Cantwell: Inevitably, at least in my experience, when talking about collaborations, collaborative leadership, actually doing things with different components of the community, it takes an enormous amount of courage to actually drive action together, it's just much easier to be in your community and kind of do the things you've always done in that piece of you're the place where you have the most you feel the most comfortable have the most Aegis. So there is a huge amount of courage associated. So I hope that we bring that word to the table. During the conference, I am going to give each of you if you have like a last thought for our listeners, we have a couple minutes left, we'll start with Jill.
Jill Anderson: First, I always like to leave a message with survivors that you're not alone, we're here we believe you and we're open anytime you're ready and willing, and we have a lot of supports. If recently I heard a survivor say, I would have left sooner, and she was in a very dangerous situation, she said it would have left sooner if I knew the breadth and depth of services that you provide. And I hope I never hear that from another survivor. So I want survivors to know we can help you with your very complex and dangerous circumstance. And then the other one is, it's going to take all of us, there's no doubt that the complexities around domestic violence are going to be solved without all of us coming together. Businesses, civic leaders, universities, law enforcement, health care, all of us have to work together to address this. are
Rachel Snyder: Jill sort of took mine that's the, you know, if you think you don't have a role in solving this, you're wrong. I you know, as a journalist, I realized, talking to my now friend all those years ago, that the community I was part of the journalism, the media community wasn't getting this right. And in some ways, no visible bruises is an attempt to sort of get it right. Every time I see a headline, that's domestic dispute, bla bla bla, I just want to stab my eyes out, you know, it's like, it's not a dispute. It's a crime. It's a crime, shall we just call it what it is? Right? Like the language matters. And I think that everybody, whether you're, whether you're clergy, whether you're in the human resources of a local business if you're a social worker, or guidance counselor at the high school, whatever your particular little, you know, corner of the world is you can find a way, people through those and I think that you know, Joe's organization and organizations like capsa have to be the leaders on that. But I do think inviting all of these other community members in is what's going to move really move the dial on this right.
I gave a talk in Sacramento a few years ago, and leaders from corporate leaders from Motel Six were there because they wanted to train their front desk people to recognize domestic violence. I gave another talk in I think it was Iowa or maybe Illinois, I forget. I should know because I'm from Illinois, but they were doing they were doing a training for cashiers at their truckstops which was really interesting. So I think anytime you can intersect with any of these other, you know, people who are out in the public hairdressers is another famous one, right, like they, you know, that women in particular who will go and divulge things to their hairdressers is you know, Chicago had a big program training hairdressers. So, I think, you know, the more people we can bring under the umbrella and offer some awareness and training and resources to the more we're going to begin to see real change.
Elizabeth Cantwell: Thank you both, and I hope everybody really thinks about our May 29, northern Utah conference to end violence and perhaps either attending or paying attention to some of the people who are speaking there. It's a really critical resource for our community. It's certainly a way to get sometimes our research out into the world, but even more a place for hallway conversations that will transform the world. So my thanks to Rachel Louise Schneider, and Jill Anderson, for giving us something to think about and kind of a preview of an amazing conference and a place where you will be speaking Rachel, I look forward to to that, and thanks to you both for the work that you do. Thank you. Thank you.
Future Casting with Utah State is a production of Utah Public Radio and Utah State University sponsored by the Office of the President. Thanks to Justin Warnick, the USU Marketing and Communications team and producer Hannah Castro.
