Domestic Abuse Survivor Tells Her Story

August 9, 2009

By Dawn Wallis Kasper

Editors Note: Dawn Wallis Kasper has been a friend of mine for almost 25 years. I want to thank her personally for sharing her story with Stopping The Hate. As someone who grew up in a household with domestic abuse, it is important to help anyone you know who is in this situation to get out of it and seek help, not only for themselves but for their children.

Stopping The Hate Founder-Meghan Chavalier

“I’m not afraid of him anymore because I have control over my own life.”

Dawn Kasper figures she left her abusive ex-husband at least 30 times before she finally seized the chance to break free for good. Taking advantage of the support available to domestic abuse victims, she found a new life for herself and her daughters. Now, more than 10 years after she last endured the pain and humiliation of domestic violence, she wants to tell her story, in the hopes that it might encourage others to get out of abusive situations.
“If I can tell and it helps one person I don’t care if I have to get into the gory details,” Dawn said.
Dawn started dating her ex-husband when she was 17 years old. The violence started when Dawn was pregnant with their first child, Danielle. During that first incident, he was angry that she wouldn’t let him drive when he’d been drinking.
“The first time he hit me I was about 6 months pregnant with her,” Dawn said. “He punched me in my face so hard that all the teeth on the left side of my face were loose. I bit my tounge so bad that the left side of my tongue turned black.”
From that point things got worse. Following an accident in which her husband suffered a head injury, he became more violent.
When Danielle was 2, Dawn sought shelter at a domestic abuse shelter in Ironwood, Mich., where she lived at the time. That followed an incident in which her ex-husband had thrown Dawn and her toddler daughter over a bed and Dawn’s head went through a window. He was arrested that night, one of six times he’s been arrested for spousal abuse.
The atmosphere in Dawn’s home followed a cycle of violence and calm. Dawn did what she could to keep the peace while always waiting for the next inevitable eruption.
“I never thought it was going to be okay, I was always on edge,” she said. “I kept everything perfect so he would have no reason to get mad. I never thought things would be good, I never thought they would get as bad as they did.”
Dawn and her daughters were residents of the shelter in Michigan on and off for about 7 years. Dawn wanted to get out, but she had unwittingly gotten into a situation where her ex-husband controlled every aspect of her life. They now owned a home, had two daughters and Dawn didn’t work. Her ex-husband had also isolated her from her family and friends.
“I wanted to leave but I was afraid to leave,” she said. “I didn’t know how I was going to support (Danielle) and then a year later I got pregnant with her sister and now I had two kids which compiled everything that he used as tools.
“He was say things like, if you leave I’m going to take these kids and you’re never going to see them again. I would go back and forth, and he would use himself contemplating suicide as a tool, the kids as a tool, he would take pieces off my car so I couldn’t go anywhere. If I was out in public he would come in to where I was. I had no friends, I had nobody.”
As Danielle grew old enough to witness the abuse and understand what was happening in her home, Dawn and Danielle both attended counseling. There, Danielle learned to be prepared for the worst.
“She said, ‘Mommy don’t worry if something happens and we have to make an emergency exit I have my bag packed,’” Dawn remembers. “She had a duffel bag packed with pajamas and a clean set of clothes for herself, pajamas and a clean set of clothes, an extra pacifier and a blanket for her younger sister and pajamas and an extra set of clothes for me in a duffel bag hidden in her closet.”
Dawn continued to endure physical and emotional battery. She was thrown through a window, choked unconscious, pushed so hard against a wall that a nail stuck in the back of her skull. She would leave, and come back. She would make him leave, and let him come back.
The final straw came after Dawn had made him leave and he snuck back in through a basement window. He pulled out the phone wires and shut off the power before coming upstairs to confront Dawn. He tried to take their younger daughter and struck Dawn, fracturing her jaw, which she wouldn’t know happened until years later at a dental appointment. She was able to yell out to her parents as they drove up to the house and they called the police.
“I didn’t really want to involve my parents too much,” Dawn said. “My parents until this incident actually believed it was me that was causing the problem. I didn’t tell many people because I was afraid that if anyone else got involved that he would use those other people as tools or hurt my friends or hurt my family.”
The Gogebic County sheriff’s department picked up Dawn and the girls that day. That incident prompted the first of nine restraining orders filed by Dawn against him.
Due to Dawn continually winding up in the domestic abuse shelter, the state of Michigan gave her a choice.
“They would pay for my divorce and get me out of this situation or Social Services was going to step in and take my kids because I was in a dangerous situation,” she said. Given those options, Dawn returned home from counseling and started packing her stuff on the sly. She had 30 days to get out on her own.
“I knew (all along) that the ultimate ending of it was going to be either I was going to be dead, my kids were going to be taken away from me or I was going to have to leave,” Dawn said. “They made the decision for me, which was much easier.”
The Salvation Army and St. Vincent de Paul paid her security deposit and rent on an apartment, utility connections and SVDP gave her six months worth of groceries.
“I thought, you know what, I’ll start over,” she said.
Dawn was finally on her own, but the nightmare wasn’t over. Her ex-husband soon started following her. One night she woke to find him staring in her window. He was convicted of stalking and a restraining order was enforced. Her divorce was final in 1998.
Still, the fear of her ex-husband persisted until she moved to Merrill in 1999 and put some distance between them.
“When I moved here I felt a lot stronger,” she said.
In Merrill, she met a different kind of man and made a fresh start. Before she married Kevin Kasper, she made it clear to him what he was getting into.
“You have to know that this is really truly what you want because I have two kids that have been through hell I have been through hell,” she told him.
It took some time for Dawn to adjust to a healthy relationship.
“I didn’t know what a normal relationship was, I didn’t understand because I had been in that relationship for so long,” she said. “I had so many trust issues. I sit and look at my husband now and I can never imagine feeling threatened by him, being afraid of him.”
And, still the healing process continues.
“I don’t think that you ever completely heal from that,” Dawn said.
Danielle, now 19, is also still working to recover from the traumatic experiences of her youth. After her parents divorced, her father retained visitation rights to the girls. When Danielle was 13, she returned from a visitation with bruises, prompting Dawn to seek help from HAVEN, Lincoln County’s domestic abuse shelter and resource facility.
“After we moved here, that’s when he would start hitting me when I would go on visitations and I would call the police,” Danielle said.

In recent years, Danielle has had limited contact with her father while developing a strong relationship with her step-father, who will be giving her away at her wedding while her biological father won’t be invited.
“I haven’t seen my dad in a year. I just cut him off about two months ago,” Danielle said.
Danielle’s experience as a child in an abusive home led to her own difficulties with relationships as she reached dating age.
“I had a big problem with men, major trust issues,” she said. “I was just so angry with everything that had happened. I had to learn to let down my guard and learn to trust somebody, not everybody is going to do what my dad did.”
Dawn’s ex-husband has since left Michigan and moved to a different state, and has had a string of unsuccessful relationships, including three broken engagements.
“I’m at the point where I feel sorry for him because he now has nothing,” Dawn said. “I have peace with what happened in my life, I’ve gone forward, I’m happy, I have awesome kids. I look back at that and he can say what he wants, he can give me dirty looks, he can send me nasty letters, but I’m not afraid of him anymore because I have control over my own life.”
Ginny Garner-Gerhardt, HAVEN legal advocate, said his serial relationships are typical of abusers.
“One thing we’ve noticed throughout all the years that we’ve been doing this is that they have to have a victim. They can’t be alone. They have to have control over someone,” she said.
While Dawn’s experiences may be shocking to those who have never been in an abusive relationship, the story is all too familiar to domestic abuse advocates like Gerhardt.
“The dynamics, the behaviors, the process, the leaving, the going back, the indecision, absolutely (familiar),” Gerhardt said. “There is research comparing victims of domestic abuse to prisoners in POW camps. Prisoners tend to gravitate toward their captors because they rely on them for everything. The similarities in the two dynamics are unbelievable.”
The building of control and isolation of the victim is also a typical behavior for abusers, Gerhardt added.
“My abuser didn’t want me to work so I was dependent on him financially. I was dependent on him for everything. It got to the point where he didn’t want me going to dinner with my family, he didn’t want me talking to my sister,” Dawn said. “All I had for probably the last three years of my relationship with him was him, Danielle and Dana.”
Dawn wants other people in abusive relationships to know that help is out there.
“I don’t think a lot of battered women do realize all the resources that are out there to get them out of that situation,” she said. “If victims could actually see that there is life outside. Once they’re strong enough to cross that border and see that life outside it is so much better.”
One specific piece of advice is to not fight violence with violence, just leave.
“Don’t fight back because all it does is increase that anger,” she said. “My advice to anybody is let the situation calm down, wait till he’s sleeping, wait till he leaves and then get out.”
Dawn credits the shelters in Michigan and Merrill, and the counseling, with giving her the strength to move on with her life.
“My advice to any other women or men who are being abused is to get counseling because if it wasn’t for the counseling and the group therapy sessions I don’t know if I would have gotten out of there,” she said.
Dawn has also learned that not all men are abusers.
“I think that a lot of women stay in abusive situations because they don’t think that they have another option and they don’t think that there are men out there that will love them and will take care of them, and there are,” she said.
Seeking help is the first step to independence, Dawn added.
“Call the crisis line here (at HAVEN). There people at these shelters are here for a reason. It’s the most awesome thing that a county can have. If you just need somebody to cry on their shoulder at 3 o’clock in the morning, there’s somebody here to do that,” Dawn said. “You have to seek out those options. Once you start taking those baby steps you can see what your end result will be.”
For Dawn, she’s gone back to school and will receive her LPN certificate in December.
Danielle and Dana have been honor roll students. Dana has gotten citizen awards, is an all-star softball player, while Danielle helped organize the Great Speaker Forum, played softball and excelled in art.

Contact Dawn Wallis Kasper

 

Answering The Call For Help

The abuse, both physical and emotional, that Dawn Kasper suffered at the hands of her first husband may be shocking to most people. However, Dawn’s experiences are all too typical of abusive domestic situations.

In 2008, Lincoln County’s domestic abuse shelter, HAVEN, received 1,338 calls to its 24-hour hotline for domestic violence services. A total of 221 women, 139 children and nine men received domestic violence services from HAVEN in 2008. Sixty-five different people were sheltered at HAVEN last year for a total of 1,413 nights.

HAVEN also provided the following services:
258 students received sexual assault education
148 professional were trained on sexual assault
69 people received rape crisis intervention services
278 calls to 24 hour hotline for sexual assault services
1177 calls to 24 hour hotline for information/referral
284 different people received individual counseling
58 different people attended group counseling sessions
127 different people received legal advocacy
125 different people received other advocacy services (medical, economic, housing, etc)
142 sexual assault victims were served

Services provided by HAVEN can be accessed by calling the 24-hour hotline at 715-536-1300.

Website