Two deaths at Christmas time this year have planted themselves in my heart. Two deaths that I hope will awaken me and others from our complacency about the work yet to be done in San Diego County to stop family violence.
Christina Jones should have celebrated Christmas with her kids last Friday in the City of San Diego. She should have talked to her sisters and her Mom and Dad and visited with friends. But she didn’t enjoy Christmas Day with her family. She was dead. She was strangled to death in front of her two small children. Read more »
Crystal Walters was not at the planning meeting last week to create a new Family Justice Center in Cleveland to help stop domestic violence. Though over 100 professionals attended from 51 different agencies, Crystal did not speak at the event or share her story with the dedicated, determined men and women gathered to plan a series of locations where victims will soon be able to receive services for themselves and their children under one roof. She would have enjoyed the meeting, the dreaming, the laughter, and the sharing. Read more »
Three weeks ago, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (R-Los Angeles) eliminated, by line item veto, the Department of Public Health’s Domestic Violence Program, which was scheduled to provide $16.3 million (a 20 percent cut from last year) for 94 domestic violence shelters and centers throughout California. Read more »
On April 17, 2009, Rev. William D. Gwinn died at Desert Regional Medical Center in Palm Springs. He was 79. He was my dad.
You are never really ready for a parent to die. You know it is going to happen. You know that we are all going to die but still you are not prepared. And their death changes things. With the death of my Dad, I became fatherless for the first time in my life. It is a deep and lonely realization. It is wound that I will never fully recover from in this lifetime.
Read more »
This week I have been reflecting on those that would choose to ignore the importance of dealing with domestic violence in America. After over 30 years of the modern domestic violence movement, we still struggle for funding, we face budget cuts and reductions when the economy goes bad (though domestic violence rises) and we rarely are the primary focus of public policy makers in America. This week the news is consumed with coverage of the swine flu, an important public health issue in America. As of May 2, there have been 167 confirmed cases of the swine flu in the United States and one death. But there has been little news about the mass killings of 68 people across America in the last 52 days, with men doing all the killing and virtually all related to men with a history of violence against women.
Read more »