Activism Story Archives - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Domestic Violence Nonprofits Seek New Funds Before Session Ends

Representatives from 14 groups fighting to curb domestic violence in West Virginia gathered at the State Capitol Tuesday morning to request new funding and spread awareness about domestic violence.

As this year’s window for proposing new legislation draws to a close, nonprofits that support victims of domestic violence are calling for more state funding.

Fourteen groups working to curb domestic violence gathered in the State Capitol on a busy Tuesday morning.

The West Virginia Coalition Against Domestic Violence (WVCADV) helps connect victims of domestic violence with the 14 nonprofit groups that tabled at the Capitol, which together serve all 55 counties in West Virginia.

With the end of this year’s legislative session in sight, Joyce Yedlosky, team coordinator with the coalition, said the groups are still in dire need of state funding.

“We’re all private nonprofit organizations who haven’t had a raise in the state budget for over 10 years,” she said. “We’re asking for a line item increase in the budget to be able just to keep up with the cost of living.”

Dwindling funds mark a particular issue for rural communities, according to Amaya Williams, outreach and volunteer coordinator with the Rape and Domestic Violence Information Center.

The group, based in north central West Virginia, often works with victims who can’t reach a resource center due to a lack of public transit.

Many victims “don’t have access to transportation – that’s our biggest barrier,” she said. “It’s a big barrier in seeking services, just because people, if they can’t get to us, then they’re kind of isolated.”

Victims of domestic violence also face challenges in the housing, legal and medical sectors.

These challenges can be particularly acute for Black West Virginians, according to Sarina Tuell, domestic violence outreach specialist with Charleston’s YWCA Resolve Family Abuse Program.

“With [the] systemic oppression and racism that our country alone has a huge history of, they may not trust the legal system,” she said. “They’re not going to go to the court system because there’s already that distrust there, underlying the situation.”

A 2009 study found that Black and Hispanic women are two to three times more likely to be victims of police-reported domestic violence than white women in the United States.

Tuell said racial disparities in domestic violence are something that the nonprofits “really need to hit home on,” and something that lawmakers should make a concerted effort to address.

The groups hoped their presence at the Capitol helped remind legislators of the importance of domestic violence policy. Yedlosky said lawmakers have been receptive to her group’s requests for more funding, but that time is quickly running out this year.

“They are considering our request,” she said. “But, so far, we’re starting to get a little antsy because we haven’t seen any movement.”

Crossover Day, the deadline for a bill to be passed out of its chamber of origin, is Feb. 28 this year — just one day away.

“We hope that we’ll see something as they start to finalize the budget,” Yedlosky said.

Stressful Moments in 1970 WVU Anti-War Protest Documented in Student's Photos

Stirring images of Morgantown police officers marching through West Virginia University’s campus, with gas masks and large sticks, were captured May 7, 1970 by a student with his small black and white camera. Morgantown attorney Dan Ringer was a 21-year-old physics major when on a third day of what had been quiet anti-war demonstrations he decided to go check-out the growing crowd about mid-day.

Songs, speeches and chants were heard throughout the afternoon.

Ringer is sharing some of his photographs on our website, and recently shared his recollections of that day with Senior Producer Suzanne Higgins.

Students protested U.S. involvement in Viet Nam, Cambodia, the draft, and the Kent State shootings which occured just days before the demonstration.

With a backdrop of very recognizable buildings to those familiar with the campus, photo after photo captures a really fascinating scene. A couple thousand WVU students largely divided into two groups, aligned along University Avenue.

Students, faculty, and local residents voiced either their support or opposition to U.S. involvement in the Viet Nam War, May 7, 1970.

A few students are seen perched in trees, others are leaning over balconies. Policemen are armed with large guns and tear gas. Faces are serious, pensive, clearly wondering what might happen next.

Police use tear gas to clear University Ave. of demonstrators, May 7, 1970.

This warm spring day occurred less than a week after the U.S. commenced bombing of Cambodia, days after the Kent State shootings where 4 students were killed and 11 injured, and less than 6 months after the reinstatement of the military draft.

Several university demonstrations across the country that week erupted into violence.

Police watched with their gas masks on, and holding long, wooden axe handles.

Eventually Gov. Arch Moore sent in a detachment of state police to break up the crowd at WVU.

WVU hosts peace activist Kathy Kelly

Kathy Kelly is an a peace activist, a pacifist, and an author. She’s been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize three times. Her life’s work has been traveling to war zones around the world to be a voice for people who are endangered and trapped by the political games of governments battling over economic bones. She’s visiting Morgantown this week talking with students from West Virginia University, members of the media, and community members.

Path of the Pacifist

Kathy Kelly grew up on the southwest side of Chicago. She says she gleaned a lot about poverty from the members of her community who embraced it:

“One thing about the nuns was that they never showed the slightest interest in acquiring personal wealth. And we were pretty sure that among their numbers there were people who were selflessly helping people in other parts of the world who were much needier than we were. So those were good guidelines.”

Kelly says she was especially affected growing up by what she came to learn about German concentration camps of World War II. She resolved at a young age not to be complacent. That set her on the path of the pacifist.

Since then, she’s toured many war-torn zones of the world, protesting.

Contact

Kelly was in Baghdad during the United State’s initial invasion into Iraq in 2003. She says she had an experience there that changed her:

“The bombs were relentless. If you can imagine mother’s faces and children’s faces with these ear splitting blasts, and sickening thuds, and gut-wrenching explosions. And I didn’t have any medical skills to bring to this situation at all.But we did have living in our peace team living in a small family-owned hotel—just a five-story hotel—a medical doctor, April Hurly.”

Kelly worked with Hurly and was able to get her back and forth to a hospital. It was there where Kelly encountered a woman who’d lost nearly her entire family when a bomb hit their family home.

“She just quivered and wept and I put an arm around her. Then she spoke a little bit of English. She was asking, ‘How I tell him?’ ‘What I say?’ She was trying to figure out what she would tell her nephew that not only had he just lost both of his arms—the surgeon had to cut them both off at the shoulder—but she was now his only surviving relative,” Kelly recounts. “And apparently when he woke up he asked, ‘Will I always be this way?’” “The impact of that question, ‘Will I always be this way?’ just sent me into something like fury and grief that I thought I’d never get out of it. So I didn’t want to leave my room, I didn’t leave my room, I just pounded pillows.” “When I did come out,” Kelly continues, “I was going down the staircase and there was one man who had stayed in the hotel as a chef—a big roly-poly, almost a cross between a polar bear and a teddy bear. He was such a dear man. And he saw me and he started to cry.” “He said, ‘I was so worried about you, I knew there was something wrong,’ and, ‘I’m so glad to see you.’ And I know it’s not normal for a woman and a man to embrace each other on a staircase in that culture but we just shared a tearful embrace.” “That loving kindness, that care, stays with me in many ways.”

Kelly says these moments of human kindness amidst great tragedy and grief ground her.

“I’ve been so fortunate to be surrounded by some of the finest people in the world,” Kelly says. “It seems like just about wherever I’ve landed whether it’s been in a federal prison or in a war zone coming from the country that’s dropping the bombs, (if you can imagine). I’ve still been surrounded by people that you so easily fall in love with. You can’t imagine.”

Pacifist Agenda

Kelly’s agenda is to end war. She works to combat fatalistic attitudes and educate individuals and communities about the possibility of a reality that doesn’t require bloodshed. Kelly believes one important key to a peaceful future is de-funding the military, but she’s equally passionate about derailing other trains, as well.

“We’ve got to stop the pillage, the pollution of our ground, our air, our water, and the depletion of our resources,” Kelly says. “It’s almost as if, when you step back and think of it, you know the train is going over the abyss. And by some irrational Dominance it’s like we’re all on the observation deck looking out and saying, ‘Oh yeah we know we’re going over the abyss, but the view is great! Don’t stop the train!’”

“We have to stop that train,” she concludes.

When it comes to guiding human interaction, Kelly preaches the Golden Rule. “Do unto others…” she says. When deliberating about the future, she says there’s a ready-access moral compass that’s tried and true:

“I think we have to stay with what we know. We know we love our children. We know we want the children to survive. And then [we need to] really think about what distracts us from being able to reasonably and in an adult way fashion a better world for the children; and also, how we might be manipulated into thinking that by putting everything into the baskets of ‘sports’ and ‘entertainment,’ we might somehow give our children a better world.”

Kathy Kelly is giving a lecture tonight at WVU entitled “Courage for Peace, Not for War.”