Leaving with nothing was worth it

She didn’t see the warning signs. “I should have known,” Cadwallader said. “The day I met him, he pretty much moved in and started taking control.”

October is National Domestic Violence Awareness Month, a fact that is often lost as much attention is given to breast cancer awareness in October.

Cadwallader said the crime affects thousands of lives and must be brought out of the shadows.

According to the National Violence Against Women Survey, 21 percent of women and 7 percent of men will be victims of domestic violence in their lifetimes.

The night in November 2007 that Cadwallader decided to leave her abuser, she climbed out of a second story window at 4 a.m. with her daughters, 10 and 12 years old. She twisted her ankle on the way down.

Just hours before, Cadwallader said her boyfriend broke her nose and shattered her jaw after she “talked back.”

There were chipped teeth, broken bones and too many bruises to count through the relationship, much of it witnessed by the children, Cadwallader said.

As on the morning she fled, Cadwallader said her boyfriend routinely locked her and the children in a room from the outside.

“He chose when we got to eat, when we went to the bathroom,” the 36-year-old now working towards independent living recalled. “I wasn’t allowed to do anything with my family.”

After the escape, Cadwallader was homeless and lived in the car with her daughters for two weeks.

She landed at Linda Vista transitional housing facility, but Cadwallader said her boyfriend tracked her down and left her in a pool of blood for her daughters to find.

Getting out

Resources are available to help make leaving an abusive situation safer, said Susan S. Gottschalk, director of the Family Violence Collaborative for the Artemis Domestic Violence Center, an agency that supports battered women and their children.

“We always recommend that if someone is planning to leave their partner they have a safety plan in hand,” she said. “A lot of times victims want to say goodbye, and that can be very dangerous.”

At its heart, domestic violence is about power and control she said.

“Anytime a victim thinks of leaving, makes a move toward being independent, that’s a threat to the abuser’s power and control,” she said.

She and others who work in the field said it’s crucial that women recognize the signs of domestic violence, including isolation, dominance and objectification.

“If they can see their victim as an object and not a person, it is easier for them to abuse them,” she said.

Women of all races, social classes and education levels can fall victim, she said. “The only thing that makes a victim a victim is that someone chose to abuse them,” Gottschalk said.

Anne Eisenmann, director of clinical services for Womanline of Dayton, a counseling services for women, said many domestic violence victims don’t believe there is a way out.

The current harsh economic climate makes things that much more difficult, but it is always hard, she said.

“Whether it is a financial situation, whether it is an emotional situation, where there are children involved, some people don’t think there are choices,” she said, noting that economics is a classic tool batters use to control victims.

Liberation

With teeth repaired courtesy of the Dayton Dental Collaborative of Kettering, Cadwallader smiled broadly as she strutted recently across the stage during Clothes That Work’s Fashioning Futures Modeling Success Luncheon at Sinclair Community College.

The organization, which provides work and interview-appropriate clothing to job seekers, held Cadwallader up as a success story. The crowd, mostly business women with wet eyes, gave her a standing ovation.

Carmen Gooden, co-founder and executive director of the Linda Vista, said Cadwallader doesn’t bear any resemblance to the woman who moved in to the center nearly two years ago.

“We’ve got a mom who is stable for the first time and her children are stable,” Gooden said. “She’s proof that it pays off.”

Through programs at Linda Vista, Cadwalladersaid she learned how to take control of her life.

“I know it’s baby steps, but I eventually want to own my own day care,” she said. “One day I am going to own my own house.”

Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2384 or arobinson@Dayton

DailyNews.com.