VOICES FOR CHOICE: Alaskans rally statewide to shine light on domestic violence

PALMER — In the course of about 10 minutes, at the stroke of noon, the parking lot of the MTA Events Center filled with hundreds of people carrying signs with messages like, “We are a New Generation,” “Hope” and “Choose Respect, don’t Neglect.”

Now in its third year, the local Choose Respect rally against domestic violence and sexual abuse drew its biggest crowd so far — 300 or more. Organizers wondered where it ranked among the 122 other such rallies staged Thursday, four of them in the Valley.

“This is awesome,” said Becky Stoppa, communications director for Alaska Family Services, which organized the march from the events center to the Palmer Depot.

The idea, Stoppa said, is to shine a light on the problem, but are there signs it’s working?

“We’ve certainly gotten more calls for our shelter,” Stoppa said. “But it’s not so much about filling the shelter.”

It’s also about changing people’s attitudes and connecting victims with other available services.

The goal for AFS, she said, is “for the victims to know that there’s help available and for the perpetrators to know that it’s just not acceptable.”

At the depot, the rally continued in the parking lot. It took four students to hold aloft one of the banners, which read, “I dream of a day when no child watches her mother being beaten by her father, when no child needs to cover her ears to block out the screams.”

Palmer Mayor DeLena Johnson said the speech she prepared was a tough one to write, but the problem is one that needs attention. In the past, she said, abuse was treated as a private matter. Victims were sent home from the hospital, back to the same destructive situation.

“Abuse could go on for years, and in many cases this cycle only ended with the death of a woman or a child,” Johnson said.

A survivor of domestic violence, identified onstage only as Libby, said she was pleased to see the size of the crowd.

“I can’t tell you what this means to a person in my shoes,” she said.

She said she never thought she would end up in an abusive relationship and didn’t know what to do with her emotions when it happened to her.

“One of the things that made the most difference to me was hearing another survivor tell me that I was having natural feelings in an unnatural situation,” she said, before urging anyone who knows of abuse or is suffering it to “stand up, speak for yourself in that situation. Don’t wait. It doesn’t make sense to wait.”

Joe Schmidt, commissioner of the state’s Department of Corrections, shared stories of working in Mat-Su Pre-Trial. As a Valley resident who attended the same Palmer Junior Middle School attended by many of the kids in the audience, a lot of the people he booked into jail were people he knew. Some were people in middle school with him.

He said he was shocked reading their case files. In middle school, you don’t know what home life is like for your classmates, he said. But some of them had it rough. Very rough. Schmidt said it was shocking to see those patterns of abuse repeat themselves in his former classmates’ adult lives.

“Every single one of these people made a conscious decision and the decision ended with them in jail,” Schmidt said.

But he said he couldn’t help but wonder how they might have turned out if someone had put a stop to the violence when they were young. He urged the kids attending to speak up.

“Our young people may lack experience, but most know wrong when they experience it,” he said.

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