WPTF Afternoon News
Monica Kearney on the Tragic Wilson Murder-Suicide and the Urgent Need for Domestic Violence Support
Recently, funeral services were held for Kira Massenberg and her six-year-old daughter, Zoe Jones. They were victims of a murder-suicide. Investigators say that Massenberg's boyfriend de Kwan Jones of Wilson killed her and their daughter. Monica Kearney is the executive director of Safe Space, which is a nonprofit organization that helps domestic violence survivors and encourages men and women to take the steps needed to get out of abusive relationships safely. And she joins us now. Monica, thank you for your patience. How are you? - I'm doing well. How are you today? - Not bad at all. So how active and how often do you hear about situations like we heard about over in Wilson a couple of weeks ago? - Way too often, statistically every three to nine minutes, woman in this country loses their life to domestic violence homicides. So way too often. - Yes, way too often. Now, how long have you been running Safe Space? And what does it aim to do? - I've been the director for 10 years. I've been the director here at Safe Space for 10 years. However, our organization has been in existence since 1997 as the only local nonprofit organization in Franklin County that provides services to victims of domestic violence, sexual assault and human trafficking. - And what do you help women do? I mean, so much of it comes down to communication in so many different ways, not just between a woman and her husband, also a woman and who simply has to speak out. Is it tough getting women to speak out about this issue? - It is because it is how society still views the issue as something that happens between intimate partners that we shouldn't get involved in. It's still considered kind of like a private matter. So what's important is being able to let the community and to know what services are available, what the organization is for and to really amplify how dangerous these situations can escalate to. So part of our scope of work is providing those advocacy services that gives people options around counseling and referrals and information in conjunction with our law enforcement entities. And our medical personnel so that there are resources available even when it comes to the big question, why don't they just leave? Often the answer is, where am I going if I just leave? So that's part of our comprehensive array of services in addition to the safety planning that we have to do with those clients, to helping them understand the very dangerous situation that this could escalate to. Because oftentimes people even in our community general population don't understand that the most dangerous time for a victim is when they are attempting to leave these domestic violence circumstances. - You mentioned communication being so important. You also said that people need to encourage code words with their children. What do you mean by that? - So sometimes violence can escalate in homes where children exist. And sometimes it may be difficult for a child to even know or even process. What do I do if someone in my house is being hurt? So putting some safety planning steps around what happens if violence starts and my kids are in the home. Do we hide another cell phone? Are there words that we can do? Is there another escape route that the child can take to get to the neighbor's house, to get the law enforcement entities on scene that are available to the family? Safety planning is that big component and it's a way to kind of pre-plan just in case this happens, here's what we can do. But it's still hard in those live situations sometimes. And that's why it's important for people to know ahead of time what the resources are and what resources are available. - Right, and often it's just a situation where a person could be in a harmful situation, but they stay in it because it's what they're used to as opposed to stepping out into something new, which is also unknown and hence, in their minds at least dangerous. - It's what they're used to sometimes that's part of it is well, but we also got to put a lens on the perpetrators of domestic violence because we put a lot of weight on the victim and I use the analogy of, certainly when we get in a car we put our seat belt on and that is to help protect us against getting hurt. But can we control if a car hits us or not just because we have a seat bed on? No, and that's the same thing with domestic violence. Certainly domestic violence is a learned behavior. So what we see as advocates and experts in the field is that there needs to be more comprehensive strategies in place within our court systems to hold perpetrators accountable for when they cause assault on victims. Typically in these cases we see a history and so some greater accountability, greater interventions on the perpetrator side would certainly help. - It certainly would and Monica Kearney also started up, the Office of Safe Space started the Women for Change campaign to raise money and how can people learn more about that? - You can learn more about the Women for Change campaign by going to our website at www.ncspacespace.org. We are mobilizing in our community and we are trying to reach as far and wide as we can to bring attention to the number of victims who lose their life to domestic violence and to also raise money. We want to mobilize a thousand women to donate as much as they can. We would appreciate a hundred dollars but whatever you can donate to our cause and if you go on our Facebook page, Safe Space, Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault Services, you will also see information about our hashtag where we want to just raise awareness around this issue and raise funds to help our program be able to expand further in our community because the only way we can stop violence is to prevent it and that's where we want our dollars to go, to help prevent violence and also help expand our program and keep the vitality of our services open to our public free of charge, confidential and accessible to victims of all ages, race, sexual orientation, et cetera. - Monica Kearney is the executive director of Safe Space. Monica, thank you so much for your patience with us here. Today, we appreciate it and good luck with this program. - Thank you so much for calling attention to this.