October 2005 Wynona Ward: Road Warrior for Justice

Wynona Ward founder of Have Justice Will Travel. “Once women leave their abusers they grow and blossom.” –WW.

Photo: Margaret Michniewicz

She used to drive big rigs cross-country, but now trucker cum lawyer Wynona Ward logs at least as many miles in her four-wheel drive vehicle bringing legal counsel to isolated women and children on the back roads of rural Vermont. Ward is the founder of Have Justice, Will Travel (HJWT), situated in the heart of Orange County. Now with satellites in Bennington and Brattleboro, HJWT is essentially a mobile law firm that brings legal services to those in need. When she meets a client who is being sexually assaulted at home or who is seeing one parent beaten or strangled by the other, Ward knows exactly what that client needs: not just through her law degree – but because she was there once, herself.

Ward is a remarkable example of someone who broke out of the cycle of generational violence and abuse in her family. She notes wryly that she is now in demand as an “inspirational” speaker around the U.S. But it’s apparent that she’d like nothing better than to share this distinction with as many people as possible. She is committed to showing women who find themselves in the nightmare of domestic violence and sexual abuse that it’s not their fault and that there is help.

Ward speaks frankly and candidly about having grown up in a home in which her father physically assaulted her mother for years, and sexually abused Wynona and her sisters from the time they were very young children. Years later, when Ward was married and in business driving a tractor trailer with her husband Harold, she was notified in 1991 that her brother was continuing in his father’s footsteps, and had sexually abused – or, raped, as Ward insists it really is – a young child within the family. This was the defining moment when Ward redirected her life: she simultaneously undertook the pursuit of a law degree and led the effort to send her brother to prison, and keep him there until and unless he acknowledged that he needed to undergo treatment as the only hope for breaking the generational cycle of abuse he had suffered and would perpetuate otherwise. There was a schism in the family as father, mother, and eldest sister defended the brother, while Wynona and her two younger sisters insisted that the denial come to an end.

Last month, Ward took a rare vacation but typically combined it with work: she visited the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota to share ideas on how a HJWT-style unit can be set up in that rural and isolated community. Just prior to embarking, Ward spent the afternoon with Vermont Woman offering her perspective on the domestic violence issues facing Vermont women today.

Vermont Woman

What motivated you to be able to escape the generational cycle of domestic violence?

Wynona Ward

My whole goal in high school was to get an education so I could get out of home… I realized that if I got married and had kids that there wouldn’t be a lot of money and I saw [a] definite way that women were held back. My father was an alcoholic… his money went first to buy beer and wine and if there was something left over, it went to the family. But quite often there wasn’t any left over so my mother struggled for years, to try and feed us and clothe us. We were taught as young children that you worked during the summer from 6th grade on up – you either did chores for the neighbors or I babysat, my brother worked on a farm. But I think the other thing that really saved me from getting caught up in the cycle is the fact that I met Harold in 8th grade and I… realized there were families that existed without the abuse.

The HJWT Team: (from left) Robin Goodrum, legal intern, Janet L. Babcock, Esq., Wynona Ward, Esq., Johnnie Mae Doyle, office manager, and Kathryn A. C. Kennedy, Esq.

Vermont Woman

Given the candor with which you talk in public about your family history, how is your relationship with your mother now? Does she acknowledge the work that you do?

Wynona Ward

Ever since my father died [in 1996] we’ve had communication and we’re beginning to put our relationship back together a little bit. She brags, you know, like any mother would… “This is my daughter, the lawyer”… and she’s come to hear me speak sometimes. It’s taken a while but now she talks about it. I talk about family publicly and she knows that. She encourages me – and refers people! Call my daughter – maybe she can help you.

This is how much it stayed with her. [Pauses] She was with my father for over 50 years. There was one point when we said to her…we can have him move out of the house. He’s abusive to you, you can get a restraining order and he’ll have to move out or if you don’t want to do that, we can find you a safe home, you can go there and live and he won’t be able to abuse you anymore. And she said, “Hmmphh, there’s no sense doing that, he’ll just come and drag me home by the hair of my head.” So I wonder if she hadn’t done that in the past. I haven’t asked her about that. But that was her comment way back then.

And more recently, just before she went in for [triple bypass] surgery I said, “You know, they’re going to cut right into your sternum, your chest bone right here and it’ll be painful.” She said, “If it’s right here, I worry that something might be wrong with me because I remember when your father threw that boot at me.” I remember him sitting there one night, and… he picked up a boot and he threw it at her and she was just black and blue all over… Here it is, probably over forty years later and that’s what she remembered as pain to her chest. It’s something she’ll never ever forget.

Vermont Woman

Wynona Ward

If you want to look at why women have a difficult time getting away from abuse and staying away from abuse, I think the generational cycle is one of the big factors: that they grow up in it, it was accepted, “that’s what mom and dad did, so that’s what I can expect out of my marriage.”

I think the next most important factor is the economics. If I get away, and go for a relief from abuse order, I have to think about going to court, saying I have been abused, which is [perceived as] shameful because the victim will have self-blame, and I have to write down exactly what’s happened so the court can see whether they think it’s physical abuse or not, because they don’t consider emotional abuse [in granting] a relief from abuse order, on a temporary basis.

[Then], if the court doesn’t order the abuser out of the home, that means I have to go find a roof to put over my children, they have to have heating, clothes, food; will they have to change schools if I move? And if they do order him out, and I’m home, and I’ve never had anything to do with the finances, then where do I get all this money? If he was the keeper of the purse strings, and many times they are – what do you do? You have to find that money somehow. I think that’s the next important thing.

[And] even before job skills and daycare is transportation. When I was in law school, I sat in Orange County [court] and read almost 200 affidavits where [people] – mostly women – were asking for relief from abuse hearings and sometimes they wouldn’t come back to finalize them. And when they did come back, the batterer had the purse strings [to] hire an attorney and the victim couldn’t. So she would be there to litigate for her safety and her children’s safety against an experienced attorney in a courtroom. You’re sitting three feet from the guy that may have kicked you, or hit you, or threatened your life, or held a gun to your head…

Vermont Woman

Wynona Ward

Yes. God forbid if you don’t get your relief from abuse order and you have to go back to him – if you’ve said too much in court you’re really in for it.

Vermont Woman

Wynona Ward

There have been a couple of times when I have, yes... Usually by the time they call us they’ve got a temporary restraining order. If they haven’t, we probably would not go out to their home, but would meet them somewhere to talk with them about whether they wanted to get a relief from abuse order. We refer them to [organizations like] Safeline, because they’re the ones who are the experts about where the resources are and what they can use to get them out. If we are not sure it’s okay to go to a client’s home we’ll talk with a victim advocacy group. If they don’t know [the situation] we go to law enforcement, and if they say, “No, you can’t go there” or “We really don’t know” then we ask that the woman meet us in a public place, where we know it will be safe.

Vermont Woman

Have you found cases where the local law enforcement official is friends with the abuser?

Wynona Ward

That has happened sometimes, especially in your small, small towns. There was a case recently in southwestern Vermont where that happened and it was difficult to deal with. But for the most part the Vermont Network Against Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault [does] a lot of training with police officers that go through the Vermont State Police Academy, and a lot of deputy sheriffs. They’ve done a wonderful job training.

And all the work that HJWT does really builds on the work that’s been done in this state and across the country for decades that was started by grassroots organizations with 24-hour hotlines. [Groups that] started saying it’s not okay [for abuse to occur], and shelters, helping transport women, things like that – all of our work builds on that which was already there… And thank God they did all that work, because, when my mother was going through all of it there was nothing. There were no relief from abuse orders, there were no victim advocacy groups, and everybody just accepted it as a way of life. It was just accepted.

Vermont Woman

Are there any legislative bills that are pending or that you think should be raised?

Wynona Ward

I would like to see nothing better than to put me right out of business [by having] the State appoint attorneys for relief from abuse hearings and high-conflict divorces, because people can’t afford attorneys. I had one judge say to me, “I don’t know why people just go out and hire someone when they fall, but they don’t think it’s important when they have a divorce case.” Well, if you hire an attorney when you fall, they’ll take 33 percent [of the settlement] and are glad to take the case – you don’t have to pay them anything. But with divorce or abuse, you have to have a retainer of $3,000 to 5,000 minimum now. My client doesn’t have three dollars! I would love to see the State appoint attorneys for both parties, if they can’t afford one… Justice would be so much more equal that way.

Vermont Woman

You have commented before that people need to talk about the “rape” of children in Vermont, as opposed to “sexual assault” – anything further to comment on that distinction?

Wynona Ward

Vermont was one of the states that decided to not use the word “rape” anymore, like it was a four-letter word. They changed it to sexual assault; molestation for a child, or incest, or child sexual abuse, and so on, but what it all amounts to is rape. The child is being raped. A child is having their trust taken away, children are being used as adults. Child sexual abuse victims suffer trauma and the amount and different kinds of trauma they suffer is more acute than any other kind. And, I say that from experience.

I could easily disassociate when I was being sexually abused, which is a talent that all children that are being sexually abused [develop] as a way to survive. But the thing that I could not disassociate from was when my father was beating my mother. Just to see that happen, to hear it happen, was devastating. So that’s happening: the child is seeing the abuse in the home, and being raped in the home at the same time. It’s just so much trauma going on that it’s hard for a child to comprehend it all. To be able to do that, you’ve got to disassociate yourself. And living in a household like that is like living two lives: at home, this happens and outside, at school, at the neighbor’s it doesn’t happen, and you learn to live two lives.

Vermont Woman

In some cases rapists actually retain parental rights after the abuse; what do laws like these say about our attitude towards domestic violence?

Wynona Ward

And abuse. My husband has frequently said since he’s been volunteering with HJWT that he would like to put a sign on our front lawn that says: “If you want to do less time, beat your wife not your dog.” In Vermont, a person gets more of a sentence for animal cruelty than for actually assaulting [his] wife. A person gets more time for jacking deer, taking deer out of season, than he does for assaulting his wife in Vermont.

One of the laws that we’ve worked with is a family court procedure rule that we came up against in Bennington representing a mother who had brought a relief from abuse order on behalf of her 6-year-old child, who had come home with welt marks, and said, “Daddy hit me, Daddy used a belt.” The judge in that case refused to allow the mother to testify about what the child had said – and that really was the only evidence they had – [because it was] hearsay.

If a child has been sexually abused in Vermont there are rules of procedure that [allow] the mother or the psychiatrist or the counselor to testify on behalf of the child, but not for physical abuse. Or if a judge feels there’s high conflict in a divorce, they can appoint an attorney, a guardian ad litem for the child. In a divorce case, or in a criminal case, a child must have an attorney appointed [if] that child is going to testify. Nowhere in the statute for relief from abuse does it say that a child must have an attorney appointed before that child can testify in court. That judge wanted to get the child out of school, bring her to the courtroom and have her testify and the mother refused. So she did not get the relief from abuse order on behalf of the child who went back to see the father.

Vermont Woman

In these matters, how are the judges in Vermont – are their good ones and bad ones?

Wynona Ward

I think both. There are some really good judges who have been educated and understand it, and then there are some judges that haven’t been educated… We have batterers in every line of profession. Whether it’s judges or attorneys or police or doctors or nurses or whatever. Somewhere, in those professions there will be batterers. Not that I know of any judges that are specifically an abuser – a lot of them are well educated in Vermont about it; others, I think, aren’t so well-educated [but] more and more training is being done all the time and that’s helpful.

At Have Justice we say we [address] the whole problem – not just the legal problem. Part of that has to be treating the batterer. That’s something that other professionals need to do and we encourage that to happen with opposing parties: that they get some kind of treatment, counseling, and so on. I think it’s important – it has to be an important part of stopping the generational cycle.

One of the important things about victims is they need to understand that it’s not their fault, that no matter what they did [or didn’t do] they were going to get physically harmed and beaten. Victims need education, support, economic support. So, when I say treatment, with batterers it’s education and treatment. With women, I think it’s more about getting the basics that they need to survive on their own.

Vermont Woman

Wynona Ward

It’s case by case. I think the way the law is, there’s the tendency to generalize. There are many cases where a woman will be charged because he’s been to some kind of treatment program or has smartened up after he’s been arrested for the third time how to cry wolf, and he’ll call and report her for abuse! Then the police come and they have to decide which one to arrest – or maybe they’ll just arrest both of them, whatever… And so those kind of cases go on. I think the practical way to look at that is to look at size. When you have a man who comes into the courtroom who’s 6 feet tall and weighs 275 or 300 pounds and the woman comes in who’s 5’4” and weighs a hundred pounds soakin’ wet – then you can imagine that would be a little bit hard for anyone to see that she had been physically abusive to him.

We have one male client right now – the big part of the case is not relief from abuse, it’s parental rights and responsibilities, custody, visitation – she was refusing to allow him to see the child and was both physically but mostly emotionally abusive to him. It definitely happens. If you look at statistics about 90 to 95 percent of your victims are women and the perpetrators 90 to 95 percent are men. But that doesn’t mean you don’t have same sex relationships where one will be the abuser; it doesn’t mean that you don’t have relationships where women abuse men.

Vermont Woman

What would you do if you talked to a woman in an abusive situation, and she said she was going to get a gun for self-defense?

Wynona Ward

I was brought up in a household in Vermont that was very dysfunctional [and] there was a loaded gun, rifle, in every corner of the house. With babies running around, little kids running around… we were all taught to respect what a rifle is for. My father never had handguns, but my husband does, and I did the NRA training in high school. I was taught to hunt by the time I was 7 years old, it was mostly what we lived on…there weren’t any food stamps then.

I would tell the woman the same thing anyone would tell me: If you’re going to have a gun, be prepared to use it. You’ve got to be able to shoot someone with it, because if you don’t they’re going to take it away from you and shoot you. I think I would be practical about it, say, really, what we really need to think about here is, just how do we need to protect you and your children? And how can we get you safe?

Sometimes it’s not always the best thing for them to leave, because most of the murders, most of the women who die, [are ones who] have left. So maybe what we need to do is just have a safety plan with them. To have things packed if they need to leave in a hurry and documents like birth certificates, licenses, things like that that they may need. …And all the victim advocacy groups have safety plans because they know: it’s the most dangerous time, when you leave. And if you get a relief from abuse order, unless the guy’s going to pay attention to it, he can come back anytime.

I always talk to my client about that. Even if he’s been ordered out of the house, is he going to abide by this? And if not, then we need to arrange for a safe place for you to go to, even though you’ve been awarded the house, because that happens. And if the police enforce it, that makes a big difference, right there, because when you violate a relief from abuse order, that’s a crime. That’s a felony. Domestic assault isn’t necessarily [a felony] – the first time, it’s a misdemeanor. But if you want a felony on your record, violate that relief from abuse order. It’s serious, it’s taken very seriously.

And the other comment I’ll give you. Don’t ask me why she stays. I get tired of people saying well why doesn’t she just leave? Why does she go back? Well, maybe she didn’t have any choice! Ask me why he beats her. And then maybe we’ll come to the end of it.

Signs of Abuse

Jealousy

In the beginning of the relationship, jealousy feels like love and concern. As time passes, these characteristics may look more like entitlement and possession. (For example, false accusations of sexual behaviors with others.) Jealous behavior begins to isolates victims who then stop seeing family members and/or friends in order to make their partner happy.

Substance Abuse

There is a strong connection between violence and alcohol, but these are two separate issues and must be worked on separately. Many times an abuser uses substance abuse to excuse offensive and harmful behavior.

Rigid Gender Roles

Some abusers believe in rigid, stereotypical gender roles and use tradition and culture to justify their abuse. There is a sense of entitlement that the abuser is “the boss” and is “in charge” of the relationship.

Use of Violence

Abusers may have a history of using force or violence to solve problems. They may display a quick temper, overreact to little problems and frustrations of everyday life, throw objects, punch walls, be cruel to animals, and have a criminal record for violence.

History of Violence

Abusers tend to grow up in families where violence is normal behavior. The abuser may have a history of violence prior to the current relationship or may have a criminal record for violence. Is This You?

Wynona Ward: Road Warrior for Justice

By Margaret Michniewicz

Vermont Woman

Wynona Ward

Vermont Woman

Wynona Ward

Vermont Woman

Wynona Ward

Vermont Woman

Wynona Ward

Vermont Woman

Wynona Ward

Vermont Woman

Wynona Ward

Vermont Woman

Wynona Ward

Vermont Woman

Wynona Ward

Vermont Woman

Wynona Ward

Vermont Woman

Wynona Ward

Vermont Woman

Wynona Ward

Vermont Woman

Wynona Ward

Signs of Abuse

Jealousy

Substance Abuse

Rigid Gender Roles

Use of Violence

History of Violence

Physical Abuse

Emotional Abuse

Sexual Abuse