By Eric Stock
BLOOMINGTON – Local advocates are urging the public to take a stand against domestic violence.
Representatives with Mid Central Community Action announced a month-long awareness campaign on Monday called “Stand Up with Me; a Victim’s Call to the Community’ during Domestic Violence Awareness Month.
“Hopefully by the end of October and throughout the year, no victim should not know our services or know there’s help out there, because that’s the way we can break some of those barriers,” Mid Central’s Director of Countering Domestic Violence Senna Adjabeng said.
The campaign announced two chairs, retired prosecutor and judge Charles Reynard and journalist Judy Valente.
Reynard suggested ‘awareness’ is too tepid a phrase and too easily mirrors its ‘evil twin’ – denial.
“Children switch it off, even when it’s going on in their homes, victims switch it off because they think they have survived it in the past and can survive it in the future,” Reynard said.
“We all switch it off in one fashion or another because we don’t want to think the world can contemplate so disordered a way of living that involves violence being perpetrated by family members on family members.
In 1993, Reynard led an effort to bring Mid Central’s legal advocacy services to the McLean County court system.
“Now that’s more common practice, but in 1993, that was unheard of,” White declared.
Reynard also wrote the book ‘TheViolence Stops Here.”
Valente, a reporter at WGLT Radio, called herself a ‘poster child’ for the need for awareness about domestic violence.
“One day I just mused to a colleague that I didn’t think I knew anybody personally who was a domestic violence survivor and he just look at me and said ‘Yeah you do. You know my mother,” Valente said. “It just struck me how ignorant I was myself thinking that I was more about then the majority of people.”
MCCA Director Deborah White noted that 95 percent of domestic violence relationships involve financial exploitation.
“Because if you do not have access to your paycheck or your bank account it is much more difficult but not impossible to leave a dangerous situation,” White said.
As part of the campaign, Mid Central has launched a fundraising campaign through the Allstate Foundation. The group hopes to raise $10,000 through online donations for its Purple Purse Challenge at www.crowdrise.com/midcentralcommunityaction-purplepurse2016.
The group encourages the public to wear purple each Wednesday throughout October, to donate old cell phones which can be programmed to call 911 for domestic violence victims or recycled to help pay for domestic violence protection services.
Mid Central is also producing a domestic violence simulation on Oct. 26 at First Christian Church in Bloomington entitled ‘Experience, Reflect, Act.’
Eric Stock can be reached at eric.stock@cumulus.com.
