ELIZABETH MCINTYRE

"You Can't Make People Free"

Before I worked with foreign-born victims of domestic violence and human trafficking at IIB, I had all these inchoate thoughts about privilege and power, but nothing I could articulate very well, and nothing I felt I could really operationalize. IIB changed that. “Client-centered care.”

It seemed like such a no-brainer that when my supervisor explained it to me on my first day I was sort of confused as to why she was mentioning it. “Client-centered care.”

“The idea,” she explained, “is that trafficking and DV is about depriving people of their free will. It’s about power and control. We want to be as different from the traffickers as it is possible for us to be, which means that we do not make choices for the clients. We provide information, and then we support them in whatever they decision they make.”

I nodded.

“Understand,” she continued, “This means we support decisions to go back to traffickers and abusers. It means we might have a responsibility to report something to CPS, and we’ll do that, but if a trafficking victim wants to leave a safe house, we help them. If a DV victim wants to move back in with the abuser, we support them.”

This sounded crazy to me. You’re not going to try to stop a woman from moving back in with someone who only two days previously had tried to stab her and her son? But what if he does it again? What if someone dies?

I didn’t verbalize any of that, but my supervisor obviously understood the confusion apparent on my face, because she said, “I don’t know what’s best for people. You don’t know what’s best for people. We are the experts on resources. We are the experts on safety plans. We are the experts on how to get help. Clients are experts on their own lives. Not us.”

Ah. It clicked.

Successful people, that is, rich people, white people, Christians, and men, tend to think that they know better. That a woman who has been abused is somehow deficient, and they constantly want to know, “Why doesn’t she leave?” not realizing that the question is not, “Why doesn’t she leave?” but rather, “Why doesn’t he stop hurting her?” We think we know better. We think we know she should leave, not realizing that, for example, every single woman who was killed by her significant other in Erie and Niagara County (where I worked last year, and I’m sorry, I’m tired, and I’m not looking up the stat right now - but it’s on the FBI and DOJ websites, and you can if you like, or you can trust me) was killed *after* she had left the relationship. Most (I think the stat was like 70 percent) had orders of protection out after these men. Women who had done everything “right,” i.e. had done everything privileged people thought they ought to do, women who had left, women who had reached out, who had gotten help  - they were still killed.

We don’t know what’s best. We do not know what is best for any man or woman who is abused. Domestic violence advocates may be experts on resources. They may be able to help the woman devise a safety plan to keep her as safe as possible (stay out of rooms with knives. make sure you’re always closer to the door than he is. keep a phone on you. keep ID on you.) We can provide information and we can provide support.

But no one, not one of us, knows what is best for any survivor.  We cannot make people free, it is true, because free will is intrinsic to the human condition, not something that can be given or taken. We do not have the power over each other to take free will nor do we have the power to give it. Our options are simpler: we can attempt to enslave each other with our relative privilege and power, or we can respect each other, recognizing each of us has a right to do with our lives as we choose. We are all born free.