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Introduction G A T H E R I N G S T O R I E S A murder suspect who was the subject of an intense manhunt this weekend surrendered at 1:50 a.m. today in police headquarters. Mark Hammett, 34, has been charged with first-degree murder and armed criminal action in the stabbing death of his exgirlfriend ,ChristinaKinder. . . . Police . . . said Kinder was stabbed at least nine times in the upper torso. [A neighbor of Kinder’s mother] described Hammett as “a control freak.” . . . [Kinder] wrote in a request for an order of protection that Hammett held a shotgun to her head and threatened to kill her that night. He also struck her several times, bruising her jaw, chest and shoulder. . . . . . . Hammett had a history of stalking Kinder. [He] left as many as 29 messages on her answering machine in one day. [Neighbors] said they had seen Hammett around the trailer park, spying on Kinder. . . . [One]pointedtoashelteredarea amid tall weeds where the grass was flattened, saying Hammett lay there concealed to watch Kinder. . . . Columbia Daily Tribune, December 7, 1998 T H E A U T H O R ’ S S T O R Y I WA N T TO T E L L you about the stories in this book, and about the person who is your guide through this tricky terrain. As the author, I want to serve not as an “authority” on domestic violence, but as an educated and spiritually motivated guide. I do not undertake this responsibility lightly. As a researcher and as someone who learns by listening carefully to the voices of women, whether in oral or literary form, I find much in the women’s stories gathered 1 2 W O M E N E S C A P I N G V I O L E N C E for this book to ponder, study, and share with you, the reader. As your guide through this dangerous and frightful landscape, I intend to keep my presence known. I have been altered by the experience of this work, and like anthropologist Ruth Behar, I believe that no work is worthy of our time and attention unless it “breaks our hearts.”1 This means that I agree to be a living human being guiding the reader through the pages of this book that I have crafted out of my work at the shelter, my experiences answering the hot line, my listening to women’s stories in every imaginable space, my community work for justice and safety for women, and my own reconstructing of my mother’s and my grandmother’s stories as I have attempted to acknowledge the way violence has affected my own life. I acknowledge and embrace both the personal and the political in this work; to do otherwise would be to make the work a farce, to render it ineffective and corrupt. I believe we must accept that our lives must have meaning in order to insure that they do have meaning. We cannot merely live; we must work for justice. If we do, then our life will have meaning. This is a work for justice. I will be your guide to help you see what I have seen and, hopefully, to make a difference in how you see and understand the ways violence affects all of our lives. On a more personal note, I believe I was drawn to this work because I, too, survived an abusive marriage. To write that sentence requires almost more strength than I can muster. In fact, I wrote this entire book without writing that sentence. I have come back now, at the end of this book journey, to admit that I have a story, too. In our time, writing about one’s self has become a professional imperative—that is, we are required now to acknowledge our cultural and social “baggage,” our biases and our political leanings, to the extent to which we are able to recognize these and admit to them—but such writing may also lead to a dangerous fall into the trap of selfish indulgence. Thus, I have been more than a little reluctant to place myself into the narrative ofthisbook.Yetasthebookcamefullcircle,Irealizedthatworkingonthebook and with the women’s stories repeatedly invoked my own story, in a kind of narrative imperative that should be honored for the book to become “whole.” The poem entitled “My Birthday” in the front pages is my own poem. I want to claim that moment...

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