Anne Parry vividly recalls her first encounter with family violence even though it occurred nearly 30 years ago.
It was 1969, and Parry, a nun at the time, was teaching 1st graders in Baltimore.
“One of my students came into my classroom with the side of her face all bruised, cut and swollen,” she remembers. “When I asked her what happened, she told me that she had fallen on the kitchen floor and slipped into the cabinet. As a very young teacher at the time, that sounded good to me, and I went on with my lessons.”
The tale lost credibility at the end of the school day when the pupil’s mother showed up to bring her daughter home. Her face, too, was badly bruised.
“I tried to talk to the mother,” Parry continues. “She was extremely upset and nervous and denied that anything had happened. It was complete denial. Later that night, the mother and father came to my door, denying again what was obviously a problem and trying to talk me out of making a report.”
Parry did report the incident through proper channels, but the abuser uprooted the family, and Parry never heard from the pupil again.
“That was my first experience with a system that doesn’t always work real well on behalf of the welfare and safety of women and children,” says Parry.
Parry has since made violence prevention the focus of her professional life, most recently as the director of the Institute for Choosing Non-Violence at Chicago’s Rainbow House, an agency that offers a variety of domestic-violence services where she created the “Choosing Non-Violence” programs for children and adults.
She developed and supervises a community-based action plan at Whitney Young High School to help stop cycles of violence, a program known as “Take Ten.”
She is also the author of four guidebooks for reducing violence, and she is in the midst of developing a non-violence training program for adults.
“I’m deeply angry at the amount of violence in our society, but at the same time, I am motivated to do something about it.”
Parry credits her mother, who died when Parry was 16, with providing the impetus for her activism.
“She lived for two years with cancer, and the doctor had no idea why she was still alive,” Parry recalls. “She told me one day that the reason she was still alive was she was not yet finished with me. She said, `I believe that you’re going to do some crazy things with your life, and I’m here to tell you to do them. Whatever it is you’re called to do, go do it.’ And I treasure those words, because that has been my motivating force all these years.
“It was a very freeing experience. It truly strengthened me. I had my mother’s permission to do what I needed to do, and no one could stop me. If it’s in my spirit, in my gut, then I do it. And I’ve been happy with the choices that I’ve made, despite the often painful nature of this type of work.”
After teaching from 1967 to 1970, Parry worked as a community organizer with migrant farm workers in Orlando, Fla., establishing a health-care facility and a self-help housing project.
“Within that community I encountered many, many serious incidents of family violence. Then, when I moved to Chicago in 1978, I worked at a women’s social-service agency on the South Side, from which I again learned about domestic violence, from the battered-women’s program that was part of our agency.”
Parry eventually left the sisterhood and married, taking time off professionally to start raising a family. But her commitment to women’s issues remained strong. When Rainbow House, which grew out of Southwest Women Working Together and Mujeres Latinas en Accion, approached Parry in 1985 and asked her to develop the education and prevention arm of the agency, she jumped at the chance.
“I thought we should start with teenage girls, who perhaps had not yet become so involved in abusive relationships. If we could teach them how to identify danger signals and how to define healthy relationships without violence, that would be a logical way of breaking into the cycle.”
Parry developed a six-week abuse-prevention mini-course, which served more than 600 young women during its three-year existence at Lane Technical High School.
“Although it was exciting in many ways and although it was a good, solid approach, I quickly learned that teenagers are already deeply involved in violent relationships,” Parry says.
“For instance, a senior showed me a knife wound in her arm. When I asked her what happened, she said her boyfriend did it. He told her she had on too much makeup, and when she refused to remove it, he slashed her arm.
“Unfortunately, that was typical of the hundreds of stories we heard.”
Though Parry admits she was shocked at the stories of violence that filled the students’ lives, she did not give up.
“That was when I decided to go to even younger kids.”
Grade-school children were the next target.
“I went to elementary schools and asked children, `What do you do when you get angry?’ And they were leaping out of their seats, wanting to share with me the violent things that they do when they get mad,” Parry recalls. “An 8th grader told me his teacher was on his back all day, so on the way home from school he beat up a kindergartner. A 5th grade girl told me she was so angry with her mother once that she ripped her mother’s favorite wall-hanging to shreds. A kindergartner told me the last time she got angry she killed her cousin’s cat.”
Parry decided to intervene even earlier.
“Grade-school kids are already programmed for violent response,” she explains. With the support of Chicago’s Department of Human Services, Parry set up a pilot program, now known as “Choosing Non-Violence,” for 3- to 5-year-olds. The program is based on a few simple premises. One is that children need to be taught language skills enabling them to express their emotions.
“Lots of times kids say they feel good or bad, and that’s it. So we teach them how to say they feel disappointed or embarrassed, for example, and what that means to them,” Parry says.
Teachers in the pilot program reported noticeable changes after several months, Parry reports.
“The kids were no longer coming up to them 800 times a day and saying, `So-and-so hit me,’ or `So-and-so won’t share.’ They were solving those conflicts themselves.”
The program also teaches kids they have choices to make.
“We say to them, `Are you feeling angry? How are you going to choose to be angry today?’ We let them know that hitting is not an acceptable response, but there are other effective ways to handle anger without violence, such as drawing a picture, or talking to the person you’re angry at, or walking away from the situation until you cool off.”
The program expanded to adults when it became apparent that violence affected their lives as well.
“The parents and teachers needed to talk about their own experiences with violence. If a woman has been raped, for example, it affects how she relates to people the rest of her life, including how she deals with her children, what she teaches them about relationships and how to perceive the world,” Parry says.
Some parents challenged Parry’s efforts, at least initially.
“They asked me, `Are you telling me that I should tell my kid that if someone hits him he should just turn the other cheek? Because if he does that, he’ll be dead within the year.’ “
To address such concerns, the program has maintained a healthy dose of reality, Parry says.
“We don’t say that children should practice their non-violent skills out in the streets walking home from school. We’re not so bold as to say that. But the premise is, Children have learned violence real well. What they haven’t learned well enough is non-violence. To learn it, they need an arena where they’re safe enough to practice it. So when they are out on the street, they really do have a choice; they’re not responding out of the only choice they know, which is violence.”
Though originally designed for schools, the program has drawn the attention of groups ranging from the Teamsters to the American Bar Association.
“It’s an issue that hits home with a lot of people,” Parry says.
Violence hit home for Parry several years ago when her 16-year-old daughter, Tabitha, was killed in a car crash.
“I was absolutely devastated,” Parry says. The tragedy was another turning point for Parry, one that made her reflect deeply on powerlessness and personal responsibility.
“A car crash is definitely violent, and it’s something above and beyond anyone’s control,” she says. “It made me realize that there are a lot of things that we can’t do anything about, but there are a lot of things we can do something about.
“We can choose paralysis, we can choose hopelessness, or we can actually choose to act in all the little ways that come before us every day,” she continues. “Daily we’re faced with choices about what we say, how we look, what we do, who we do it with, and we need to make healthy choices. Otherwise it wouldn’t be worth getting out of bed in the morning.”
Parry’s efforts have not gone unrecognized. She received Mayor Richard M. Daley’s Chicago Local Hero award in 1994 and, the following year, the Rainbow House Individual Courage Award. She serves on the Illinois Council for Prevention of Violence, the Chicago Board of Health Violence Prevention Task Force and the citywide Chicago Project.
Parry is not one to rest on her laurels, however. Her goal, though simply stated, is nothing less than “systematic change as well as individual change when it comes to dealing with violence.”
An impossible dream? Not necessarily, says Parry. “I am more hopeful today than I was 10 years ago. I look at the behavior of smoking, for example, which was definitely a national behavior when I was growing up, and I see how that behavior has changed.
“Everyone–public health officials, criminal justice officers and educators–needs to sit down and say, `We have a problem to solve, and we all better have a piece of the answer,’ ” she says.
Many would credit Parry with holding several of the pieces herself.
