Women Rule: A New Approach to Domestic Violence

 

There’s a quiet movement underway to have doctors and other health care providers take the lead in spotting domestic abuse and — hopefully — intervening before it gets worse.

Keisha Walcott started slipping through the cracks as a baby.

Separated from her mother in Jamaica and brought to the United States as an infant, Walcott was exposed to “sexual abuse, sexual trauma, hospitalizations and so on and so forth,” she says, from the start. She lived with her father, but it was a chaotic life. At age nine, she required surgery after a particularly violent sexual assault by a close family friend. Looking back, she’s not really surprised that she got into one damaging relationship after another as a teen, then as an adult.

Separated from her mother in Jamaica and brought to the United States as an infant, Keisha Walcott was exposed to “sexual abuse, sexual trauma, hospitalizations and so on and so forth,” she says, from the start.

“I had a mindset of not having self-worth and feeling less than worthy of love and compassion,” she told me this summer. “So I ended up getting into disruptive relationships.”

At 31, she got married. Soon, the relationship turned toxic. She had four kids by then — two with her husband, two from a prior partnership. She didn’t know how to seek help. The fact that she was undocumented made it harder — she didn’t have a reliable source of health care — and she faced the risk of being discovered and deported.

One day, about six years ago, she looked in the mirror and saw a stranger. “I was asking the person in the mirror, ‘Who are you?’ … I don’t know you,” recalled Walcott, now 44.

“I was asking the person in the mirror, ‘Who are you?’ … I don’t know you.”

Keisha Walcott

That moment began her multi-year path toward escape, safety, independence and self-respect. She eventually left her husband and went to a women’s shelter, which helped her enroll in a job training program. A lawyer helped her address her immigration status, enabling her to work legally. The lawyer also connected her with a health care clinic that would change her life.

Walcott went to see Anita Ravi, who runs an unusual clinic dedicated to treating women who have endured intimate partner violence, sexual assault and human trafficking. At her clinic, PurpLE Family Health, in New York City — the name stands for Purpose: Listen and Engage — Ravi treats these patients’ immediate medical needs, connects them to a network of social and behavioral health services that can help them get out these relationships if they want or need to, or help them reduce the harm if they decide to stay. All the care is free, paid for by the PurpLE Health Foundation, which Ravi also started.

See  this article

 

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