TAKING A STAND

PALMER — “He put it to the side of my head and pulled the trigger and the gun jammed,” Shannon Nicholls said.

As she told the story of how she just barely survived domestic abuse, Nicholls paused to wipe tears from her eyes.

“My perpetrator was into drugs and alcohol and stealing everything he could get his hands on,” she said.

When she reached the point where she’d had enough, Nicholls left her abuser but went back to their home to pack up her things. He wasn’t supposed to be there that day. But he was. He jumped at her, bound her with duct tape and made her watch as he loaded a gun.

Nicholls got out of the house and a car that had been giving her trouble miraculously started on the first try.

Since then, Nicholls has found a way to use her experience in a positive way. She is now a domestic violence advocate working with Alaska Family Services and helping women and children get out of abusive relationships. She was also one of about 150 people who spent the lunch hour Wednesday marching to bring attention to Alaska’s problem with domestic violence and sexual abuse.

Carrying signs saying “Choose Respect” and “Stop Violence,” they walked from the Fred Meyer in Palmer to the Mat-Su Borough gymnasium. It was part of a slate of events happening statewide, at the direction of Gov. Sean Parnell

“We were just saying how happy we are at the cross-section of people that came out,” Judy Gette, director of domestic violence and sexual abuse programs with Alaska Family Services in the Valley. She pointed out that the march included troopers, prosecutors, advocates and family service workers. “But most importantly we have members of the community.”

Donn Bennice, president and chief executive officer of Alaska Family Services, threw out a couple of statistics that make the job of preventing abuse harder for people like him.

“Two thirds of all victims and perpetrators have substance abuse — alcohol abuse or drug abuse — as a contributing factor,” he said. “Forty-five percent of all victims go back to the original perpetrators.”

He said his organization is the only one in the state that has substance abuse counseling offered under the same roof as family services.

Bennice hopes to get a grant from the United Way to set up a substance abuse program tied directly to the organization’s domestic violence program.

As for victims returning to their abusers, he said it’s a matter of getting the person help; setting him or her up with resources in order to find work and housing and set up a life apart from his or her abuser.

Otherwise, he said, “What choice do they have at that point?”

Bennice also shared a handful of trends he said are changing the nature of responding to domestic violence. First, he said, more people are spending time in battered women’s shelters. Secondly, more clients are presenting with behavioral health issues. The third trend, he said, isn’t the most popular to bring up.

“But I’m going to talk about it anyway,” Bennice said. “Males are becoming more and more the victims.”

On the other end of things, Joe Schmidt, commissioner of the state’s Department of Corrections, spoke about high crime rates in rural Alaska brought on by joblessness and alcoholism.

Schmidt said Alaska is one of only eight states that is increasing its prison population.

But when he looked at states with shrinking prison populations, he found a lot of that is simply due to programs releasing prisoners early rather than preventing crime from happening in the first place.

“Is that the right way to address it? No. I’d like to see Alaska stay ahead of that,” he said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.