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Transcript

Hope for Broken Families · The World Knowledge

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Well, good evening, listeners. Thank you again, as always. I'm
• 0:03
  Speaker 1: so grateful for all you guys who have built this
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: podcast up, who listen, who watch. And I've just been,
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: you know, falling across so many different stories this year,
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: and they're so different. But I came across Dawn Wilcox,
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: who's on the screen, and then for those listening, you'll
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: hear her voice. And she is a registered nurse for
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: a public school in Texas. But what's really cool is
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: that basically she has two jobs. She does that full-time,
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: and then the other full-time job that she has is
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: this nonprofit that she started that is totally volunteer. And
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: it's Women Count USA. And she documents femicide in the U.S.
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: And I believe she started this 10 years ago, about
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: 10 years ago, and has been documenting femicide cases that
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: have started since 1950. Right?
• 0:53
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: That's correct, yeah. Okay. And she just has this passion
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: for it. And she has this website, which I will
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: link below. And there's an email address. And people have
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: just sent her numerous photos and stories of women in
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: their lives or friends or relatives that have been killed.
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: And she's just documented all of them. And it's just
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: incredible work that she's done. And so I wanted to
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: have her on the podcast just to talk about why
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: she does this and her heart behind it, what it
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: looks like for her. But yeah, so Dawn, thank you
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: so much for being on the podcast.
• 1:33
  Speaker 2: Well, thank you for having me. And I'm really happy
• 1:36
  Speaker 2: that you came across my work. So I'm very grateful
• 1:41
  Speaker 2: to be here. It's something that I'm very passionate about.
• 1:43
  Speaker 2: And I appreciate any opportunity to share what I do.
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: Yeah, no, I, you know, I came across your story through,
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: I think an article that was done on you by
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: this obscure, I mean, it was obscure to me magazine
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: that was done, but maybe it wasn't, but it was,
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: they did really like narrative stories and now I can't
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: remember the name of it, but your name popped up
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: and I was reading it and I was like, this
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: is fascinating that somebody would want to do this full
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: time and has a heart for that. So just to
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: kind of start out for people listening, Why do you
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: do this work? What was kind of, how did it
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: start for you? Was it your own personal experiences? Was
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: it a passion that you had to be a voice
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: for the voiceless? How did that kind of come up
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: that you wanted to start working on something so intense
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: and document it for so long?
• 2:41
  Speaker 2: Well, kind of all of those things. And I want
• 2:45
  Speaker 2: to shout out Krista Hillstrom is the journalist who wrote
• 2:49
  Speaker 2: article for The Atavist, and The Atavist is a magazine
• 2:53
  Speaker 2: that does one long-form story a month, and she did
• 2:58
  Speaker 2: a story about my work called 14,455 and Counting. Yeah,
• 3:08
  Speaker 2: I mean, I sort of approached this work as, you know,
• 3:16
  Speaker 2: a domestic violence survivor, Um, and also because I became
• 3:24
  Speaker 2: very interested in, in sort of finding out like how
• 3:27
  Speaker 2: many women were actually being murdered by men per year
• 3:30
  Speaker 2: in the United States. And what I discovered is, um,
• 3:35
  Speaker 2: it's very fragmented information. It's not readily available. It is
• 3:43
  Speaker 2: often de-identified where you can't really, uh, sort of dig
• 3:48
  Speaker 2: into what the relationships were between the perpetrator and the victim.
• 3:52
  Speaker 2: And I found that like all of those kinds of
• 3:55
  Speaker 2: things are very important because they inform what happened. And
• 4:01
  Speaker 2: I think part of my approach to this work comes
• 4:04
  Speaker 2: from my nursing background, you know, and I do consider
• 4:07
  Speaker 2: this a public health crisis, but if you were looking
• 4:11
  Speaker 2: at a disease, you would want to know, you know,
• 4:13
  Speaker 2: where it's happening to whom, you know, how often, and,
• 4:18
  Speaker 2: And if you can't answer those questions, then you can't
• 4:21
  Speaker 2: hope to cure the disease, you know. And that's part
• 4:26
  Speaker 2: of my goal with this work is to gather information
• 4:31
  Speaker 2: that can be used by criminologists, by people who are
• 4:35
  Speaker 2: interested in this issue, you know, where they could kind
• 4:39
  Speaker 2: of dig down into the data and maybe see some
• 4:43
  Speaker 2: patterns or, you know, some areas where there could possibly be, uh,
• 4:51
  Speaker 2: earlier intervention or, um, you know, where it kind of
• 4:55
  Speaker 2: could inform some more deep study about, about the issue.
• 5:00
  Speaker 2: So the information I'm collecting is not as rigorous as like,
• 5:04
  Speaker 2: you know, for an academic study, but I do collect
• 5:08
  Speaker 2: large amounts of quantitative and qualitative data about women's murders. Um,
• 5:14
  Speaker 2: things that I find important. Like, was there a history
• 5:18
  Speaker 2: of domestic violence, of strangulation? And I'm not only documenting,
• 5:25
  Speaker 2: you know, intimate partner homicide, but also, you know, serial
• 5:30
  Speaker 2: sexual homicide. And so it's everything from, you know, your
• 5:36
  Speaker 2: partner or current or former partner who you're most likely
• 5:40
  Speaker 2: to be killed by to complete strangers and And when
• 5:46
  Speaker 2: I tried to look for that information, I found that
• 5:49
  Speaker 2: not only do we not do a very good job
• 5:51
  Speaker 2: of tracking and documenting femicide, but we're not tracking and
• 5:56
  Speaker 2: documenting homicide very well either. I was pretty shocked to
• 6:02
  Speaker 2: find that law enforcement agencies are supposed to kind of
• 6:09
  Speaker 2: report their homicides to the federal level, to what used
• 6:13
  Speaker 2: to be called the uniform crime report or the UCR,
• 6:17
  Speaker 2: which is now the NIBRS, that that's like not compulsory.
• 6:21
  Speaker 2: That's completely, you know, if you want to. And so
• 6:25
  Speaker 2: the limited background I have in research and statistics, I'm thinking,
• 6:30
  Speaker 2: so when we're hearing pronouncements about homicide rates and whether
• 6:35
  Speaker 2: they've gone up or down, you know, how do we
• 6:38
  Speaker 2: know that? You know, is, is this extrapolation? Um, They've
• 6:43
  Speaker 2: got to be taking a little bit of data that
• 6:45
  Speaker 2: they have and kind of making pronouncements about it based
• 6:50
  Speaker 2: on that. And along the way, just discovered there were
• 6:59
  Speaker 2: some other groups. There's like the Murder Accountability Project that's
• 7:02
  Speaker 2: really looked into this issue. And even the FBI was
• 7:06
  Speaker 2: not reporting to their own federal reporting system. And I
• 7:12
  Speaker 2: understand the reasons why that happens. A lot of police
• 7:16
  Speaker 2: departments are very understaffed. Gathering data, as I know, is
• 7:24
  Speaker 2: very tedious. It's very time consuming. And sometimes the value
• 7:28
  Speaker 2: of gathering data may not be very clear.