Robert Brennan
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October Is Domestic Violence Awareness Month |
Supporters Come Together to Remember Lives Lost to Domestic Violence |
October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month, a time when communities across the country bring greater attention to domestic violence, support survivors, and remember those whose lives have been lost. Here in Long Beach, WomenShelter of Long Beach brought that message home with the support of community members, local organizations, law enforcement, and sponsors including the Port of Long Beach and Beverly Hills MD. The October 2 vigil at the Expo Arts Center offered the community a chance to stand against domestic violence, but more importantly, it gave survivors an opportunity to tell their own stories.
As people arrived, purple could be seen throughout the gathering. Some wore purple shirts, others carried candles, and around the parking lot stood purple silhouettes representing people whose lives had been taken by domestic violence.
WomenShelter’s message that evening was clear. Domestic violence is not something that happens somewhere else, to someone else.
Natalie Wilson spoke about the importance of recognizing domestic violence in our own community and creating a place where survivors know they can ask for help. That message became much more personal when survivors began speaking.
When It Becomes Your Story
Bianca Vasquez was 18 when she entered the relationship that would become a cycle of abuse. For years, she went back. That may be difficult for someone who has never experienced domestic violence to understand. From the outside, the answer can seem simple: why not just leave? But Bianca’s story showed why that question doesn’t have a simple answer.
There were good moments mixed with the bad. There were explanations and reasons to believe things could get better. Over time, behavior that should never have been acceptable became something she found herself explaining away. It took years for Bianca to understand what was happening to her for what it was.
Then the abuse began affecting her daughter, and that changed everything.
Eventually, Bianca found her way to WomenShelter of Long Beach, where she began to understand that the things she had spent years minimizing or accepting were domestic violence. Now she was standing in front of a group of strangers telling them about it. There was something important about that moment. Bianca wasn’t being spoken about as a statistic. She was standing there as a survivor telling her own story.
Then another survivor stood up whose story was very different.
Domestic Violence Can Happen to Men Too
He did not want his name used, but he wanted his story heard. For eight years, he remained in an abusive relationship, and part of what kept him there was his desire to keep his family together.
In 2024, the violence escalated to the point that he was stabbed. Even that didn’t immediately bring him to WomenShelter. He waited about three months before making the call. One of the reasons was embarrassment.
He was a man being abused by a woman, and asking for help meant confronting something he had struggled to accept himself. He worried that admitting he was being abused somehow made him weak or less of a man. His message that evening was the opposite. Being a victim of domestic violence did not make him less of a man, and asking for help did not make him weak.
His story broadened the conversation taking place that night. Domestic violence does not have one face. It does not belong to one gender, one age group, or one type of family. Sometimes the person who needs help may not look anything like the person we imagine when we hear the words “domestic violence survivor.”
A Place to Turn in Long Beach
WomenShelter of Long Beach has been helping people facing domestic violence since 1977, when a donated home and a small group of women, many survivors themselves, created a safe place for people trying to escape abuse. Today, that work has expanded far beyond emergency shelter.
WomenShelter provides a 24-hour hotline, emergency supportive housing, support groups, legal advocacy, health advocacy, transitional housing referrals, and parenting classes. Its programs also include counseling and services for children and teens, along with domestic violence education and prevention programs in the community. The organization’s mission is not only to help someone escape an immediate crisis. It is to help survivors begin rebuilding their lives. That can start with something as simple, and sometimes as difficult, as making a phone call.
As the Evening Grew Darker, the Candles Grew Brighter
Near the end of the evening, the focus shifted from those who survived to those who did not. People throughout the gathering held candles as Long Beach Police Lieutenant Pat Daughtry stepped to the microphone and began reading the names of Southern California residents who had lost their lives to domestic violence. One name followed another, each one carried by the quiet of the crowd.
Around him were purple silhouettes bearing the names and stories of victims. In front of him sat survivors, families, community members, and supporters holding candles. Then came a moment of silence. For that moment, there wasn’t much that needed to be said. The candles were enough.
October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month, but for the people gathered in Long Beach that evening, awareness wasn’t an abstract idea or a purple ribbon. It had names. It had faces. It had survivors willing to stand in front of others and tell them what happened. And as the candles burned in the growing darkness, they carried another message for anyone who may still be living through domestic violence: there is help, and there can be a life on the other side of it.
To Support the WomenShelter
Website: https://www.womenshelterlb.org/ |
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