Loretta's story

By Jamie Anfenson-Comeau
jamieenews@bellsouth.net

Three months after she married her high school sweetheart, he began to hit her.
“Loretta”, who asked that her real name not be used, became swept up in a six-month courtship and married her first husband at the tender age of 17.
The honeymoon ended quickly, however, with verbal abuse beginning two weeks after the wedding.
Three months later, the insults and name-calling escalated into violence.
“It started off that I didn’t cook dinner right. I didn’t cook what he wanted the way he wanted it,” Loretta recalled.
“He threw the plate, and it started from there. I picked up the plate and I was none too quiet; I mouthed off, and he got up and slapped me across the face, and that’s how it started, and it got continually worse.
“It got pretty bad pretty quick. It became at that point weekly, then it became every other day,” she said.
Loretta was in her last year of high school at that time, but dropped out.
“I had to hide the bruises and stuff so I didn’t finish,” she said.
Her husband, out of school by then, also began causing trouble for her at school until she left.
She began blaming herself for the abuse, convincing herself that it really was her fault.
She soon cut herself off from contact with family and friends.
“I wasn’t telling my family anything. And when I was bruised I’d stay away,” she said, adding, “I isolated myself, because I didn’t want them to see the bruises.”
Loretta’s experiences are not unique; according to U.S. Department of Justice figures, each year, 1.3 million women and 835,000 men are victims of intimate partner violence, often called “domestic violence”, in the United States.
According to the DoJ’s Office on Violence Against Women, domestic violence is defined as, “physical, sexual, emotional, economic or psychological actions or threats of actions that influence another person.
“Domestic violence can happen to anyone regardless of race, age, sexual orientation, religion or gender. Domestic violence affects people of all socioeconomic backgrounds and education levels. Domestic violence occurs both in opposite-sex and same-sex relationships and can happen to intimate partners who are married, living together or dating.”
Twenty-five percent of women and 7.6 percent of men aged 18 and older have been victims of intimate partner violence at some point in their lives, according to the National Violence Against Women survey.
Roxanne Peltier, former outreach advocate of the Opelousas Faith House office, a crisis center for battered women and children, said that abusers generally work the abuse in gradually, after the relationship is under way.
“The abuse is very gradual, and the abusers are so very charming. Nine times out of ten they are a people person,” Peltier said.
Peltier said that they maintain very different public and private personalities.
They also work to sever connections that the victim has with family, with friends, with school and with work.
“They will try anything they can to sabotage, anything, because they want their victims to be so dependent on them, because it’s about power and control, and they want these women afraid,” Peltier said.

The abuse escalates to death threats as Loretta’s story continues next Sunday.