569609
research-article2015
VAWXXX10.1177/1077801215569609Violence Against WomenStark
Commentary
Commentary on Summer’s Death
Violence Against Women 2015, Vol. 21(4) 544–547 © The Author(s) 2015 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1077801215569609 vaw.sagepub.com
Evan Stark1 Summer’s Death was written by Lori Post, an associate professor at Yale Medical School, a domestic violence researcher, and a close friend. On September 22, 2011, the Winter Solstice, Lori’s sister and brother-in-law, Terri and Michael Greene, were brutally murdered in the couple’s home in Delta Township, Michigan. Terri, age 46, was an environmental researcher, and Mike, age 62, was a retired State Police detective. The killer inflicted numerous injuries on Terri and Mike both before and after he shot them in a style designed to mirror a Mafia execution. He sexually assaulted Mike and staged the bodies, almost certainly to torment anyone who found them, which happened to be Lori’s elderly parents. He also constructed an altar on Terri’s body, which he left floating in the family pond. More than 2 years later, Christopher Perrien was convicted of the murders and received a life sentence without parole. Poetry is one of the many media used internationally to relieve the effects caused by violence-related trauma. As a student of domestic violence and partner homicide, Lori has a deeper understanding than most of the inescapable traumatic effects of such a loss. However, none of this prepared her for the abyss she faced in the wake of the killings, the feeling of being “alone, forsaken,” of walking her sister’s “death march”; lessened the shock, fear, or helplessness she felt; or insulated her from the inevitable attempts to self-medicate and escape this pain. Victim-witnesses such as family members commonly experience survivor’s guilt, the sense that our health or happiness is at the expense of those who have been harmed or that something we could or should have done would have saved them. The hope is that making poetry or other art can help contain the trauma and make it more manageable, restoring a sense of control where there is none and providing a certain apprehension of evil that is beyond understanding. What does Summer’s Death have to do with violence against women? Mr. Perrien had no prior relationship to the Greenes and no known motive for killing them or desecrating their bodies. By tracking his use of the Greenes’ cell phone and credit and ATM cards, Lori and police identified the killer within a week. But robbery explains 1Woodbridge,
CT, USA
Corresponding Author: Evan Stark, 11 Forest Trail, Woodbridge, CT 06525, USA. Email: [email protected]
Downloaded from vaw.sagepub.com at GEORGIAN COURT UNIV on March 10, 2015
545
Stark
neither the fact nor the manner of the killings. At the time of his homicides, Mr. Perrien was simultaneously on parole, in jail for credit card fraud, and on “work release,” although he had no job. But he had no known history of violence, a fact that “puzzled” the lead detective. The court deemed him a “narcissistic sociopath” with substance abuse dependencies and depression. The picture painted was of a crazed sociopath whose pathology had lain dormant until that fateful, sunny afternoon. The most obvious link to violence against women is the realization that the complex of feelings Lori expresses is also felt by the family and friends of the battered women whom we study, work with, and represent. We have yet to fully appreciate, study, or mount an appropriate response to the effects of femicide, partner abuse, and coercive control on adult family members, friends, and co-workers. The recognition that “witness-survivors” are also co-victims (and potential allies) is particularly important as advocates seek to help abused women who choose to stay with abusive partners build safe and empowering spaces within their families/communities. Lori wrote Summer’s Death during a phase in the case when she knew the killer’s identity but was forbidden to speak about it publicly. The poem’s dynamism reflects the tension between her experience of being “silenced” by this mandate; her felt “speechlessness”; her overwhelming need to give voice to feelings of fear, rage, loss, and helplessness; and the fact that her most constant confidant, her sister, was dead. Even after the trial, Lori was urged to confine her experiences of suffering to herself and her therapist, a wise precept perhaps, but impossible to practice. Like Lori, victims of violence against women and their families commonly report being silenced, either explicitly by a court order or a coercively controlling partner, or implicitly by disbelief or the reluctance of outsiders to accept the depth and durability of the grief involved. In Summer’s Death, Lori refuses to mute her suffering, “get over it,” or to let her sister and brother-in-law remain the nameless victims Perrien sought to make them. Judy Butler (2009) points out that a hierarchy of race, sex, gender identity, and nationality shape the “grievability” of death and suffering in particular groups. Lori challenges us to make the tragedies of the women and families we study or work with “grievable.” As in the poem, this starts by naming those in whose names we claim to speak (a major point of recent protests over police shootings of young Black men) and ensuring that the victim-survivors we work with are no less valued than anyone else and their narratives no less seen or heard or privileged. In fact, Perrien was a chronic batterer, though his abuse had remained “invisible in plain sight.” Excluded from the official investigation, Lori applied her considerable technical skills to track the killer’s history. She identified 132 independent domestic violence events over 25 years involving partners in four Michigan counties. His abuse included multiple physical and sexual assaults, stalking, threats to kill, child abuse, child neglect, attempted homicide, home invasion, and breaking and entering. Confronted with this history, the detective replied facetiously, “Well, he had a lot of girlfriends.” The prosecutor acknowledged that this litany of abuse was not reflected in the six-line rap sheet. Still, like the jurors in O. J. Simpson’s criminal trial, he wondered what this history had to do with the “real violence” reflected in the killings.
Downloaded from vaw.sagepub.com at GEORGIAN COURT UNIV on March 10, 2015
546
Violence Against Women 21(4)
Twelve of Perrien’s previous victims emailed or phoned Lori during the arraignment, and some showed up in person to give support. These women told similar stories of the authorities disbelieving their claims, minimizing Perrien’s abuse, and ignoring his repeated violations of court orders. Amid their show of compassion, these brave women were shocked to learn about Perrien’s other victims, kept secret because none of the harms they had suffered were sufficiently grievable to merit public notice. To them, the connections between their abuse and the killing of Michael and Terri were clear, although these threads were invisible to police, prosecutors, and the court. Ironically, to these women, Perrien’s trial for murdering strangers was the first validation they had that their experiences were real or important. One woman had been stalked by Perrien for years, filed numerous reports, attained both no-contact and nostalking orders, but was ignored when he violated these orders. Realizing she could easily have been the one murdered, she asked the lead detective rhetorically, “See! Do you believe me now?” Perrien’s motive for killing Michael and Terri may never be known. The prosecutor claimed that his propensity for violence was a by-product of mental illness. As likely, his violence and narcissism express a “normal pathology,” whereby “doing manhood” requires constant proofs of dominance over women and men. Whatever his motives, it is clear that Terri and Michael Greene would be alive today had Perrien been held accountable for any combination of the violent acts he committed against women and children prior to September 22, 2011. Had any combination of the various police, prosecutors, or judges involved with Mr. Perrien previously seen his victims as real persons with full equality before the law, the danger he posed to public safety would have been clear. He would not have been on parole and not allowed to roam freely on work release. Lori’s parents would have been saved the horror of discovering the bodies of their daughter and son-in-law, and Lori and her family would have been spared the life-changing trauma from which this poem was born. At bottom, we owe Summer’s Death and the killings of Terri and Mike to the same proximate cause. This cause is the failure of our legal, justice, and service systems to treat violations of women’s human rights to physical integrity, dignity, liberty, and equality with the seriousness these harms merit. Presented with the evidence Lori gathered, her mother replied plaintively, “I thought domestic violence was a crime.” It is by no means clear how to answer this rhetorical question. Summer’s Death is an agonized and agonizing cry for us to ameliorate the pain suffered by all trauma victims and witness survivors. But the poem also makes it clear that, once inflicted, much of the suffering caused by abuse cannot be ameliorated. This leaves us with a political question: Is ameliorating suffering caused by abuse enough, or have we reached a stage in our social development where it is possible to eliminate the causes of this suffering in the first place? Declaration of Conflicting Interests The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Downloaded from vaw.sagepub.com at GEORGIAN COURT UNIV on March 10, 2015
547
Stark Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Reference Butler, J. (2009). Frames of war: What is death grievable? London: Verso.
Author Biography Evan Stark is a forensic social worker and Professor Emeritus at Rutgers University–Newark and Rutgers Medical School.
Downloaded from vaw.sagepub.com at GEORGIAN COURT UNIV on March 10, 2015
research-article2015
VAWXXX10.1177/1077801215569609Violence Against WomenStark
Commentary
Commentary on Summer’s Death
Violence Against Women 2015, Vol. 21(4) 544–547 © The Author(s) 2015 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1077801215569609 vaw.sagepub.com
Evan Stark1 Summer’s Death was written by Lori Post, an associate professor at Yale Medical School, a domestic violence researcher, and a close friend. On September 22, 2011, the Winter Solstice, Lori’s sister and brother-in-law, Terri and Michael Greene, were brutally murdered in the couple’s home in Delta Township, Michigan. Terri, age 46, was an environmental researcher, and Mike, age 62, was a retired State Police detective. The killer inflicted numerous injuries on Terri and Mike both before and after he shot them in a style designed to mirror a Mafia execution. He sexually assaulted Mike and staged the bodies, almost certainly to torment anyone who found them, which happened to be Lori’s elderly parents. He also constructed an altar on Terri’s body, which he left floating in the family pond. More than 2 years later, Christopher Perrien was convicted of the murders and received a life sentence without parole. Poetry is one of the many media used internationally to relieve the effects caused by violence-related trauma. As a student of domestic violence and partner homicide, Lori has a deeper understanding than most of the inescapable traumatic effects of such a loss. However, none of this prepared her for the abyss she faced in the wake of the killings, the feeling of being “alone, forsaken,” of walking her sister’s “death march”; lessened the shock, fear, or helplessness she felt; or insulated her from the inevitable attempts to self-medicate and escape this pain. Victim-witnesses such as family members commonly experience survivor’s guilt, the sense that our health or happiness is at the expense of those who have been harmed or that something we could or should have done would have saved them. The hope is that making poetry or other art can help contain the trauma and make it more manageable, restoring a sense of control where there is none and providing a certain apprehension of evil that is beyond understanding. What does Summer’s Death have to do with violence against women? Mr. Perrien had no prior relationship to the Greenes and no known motive for killing them or desecrating their bodies. By tracking his use of the Greenes’ cell phone and credit and ATM cards, Lori and police identified the killer within a week. But robbery explains 1Woodbridge,
CT, USA
Corresponding Author: Evan Stark, 11 Forest Trail, Woodbridge, CT 06525, USA. Email: [email protected]
Downloaded from vaw.sagepub.com at GEORGIAN COURT UNIV on March 10, 2015
545
Stark
neither the fact nor the manner of the killings. At the time of his homicides, Mr. Perrien was simultaneously on parole, in jail for credit card fraud, and on “work release,” although he had no job. But he had no known history of violence, a fact that “puzzled” the lead detective. The court deemed him a “narcissistic sociopath” with substance abuse dependencies and depression. The picture painted was of a crazed sociopath whose pathology had lain dormant until that fateful, sunny afternoon. The most obvious link to violence against women is the realization that the complex of feelings Lori expresses is also felt by the family and friends of the battered women whom we study, work with, and represent. We have yet to fully appreciate, study, or mount an appropriate response to the effects of femicide, partner abuse, and coercive control on adult family members, friends, and co-workers. The recognition that “witness-survivors” are also co-victims (and potential allies) is particularly important as advocates seek to help abused women who choose to stay with abusive partners build safe and empowering spaces within their families/communities. Lori wrote Summer’s Death during a phase in the case when she knew the killer’s identity but was forbidden to speak about it publicly. The poem’s dynamism reflects the tension between her experience of being “silenced” by this mandate; her felt “speechlessness”; her overwhelming need to give voice to feelings of fear, rage, loss, and helplessness; and the fact that her most constant confidant, her sister, was dead. Even after the trial, Lori was urged to confine her experiences of suffering to herself and her therapist, a wise precept perhaps, but impossible to practice. Like Lori, victims of violence against women and their families commonly report being silenced, either explicitly by a court order or a coercively controlling partner, or implicitly by disbelief or the reluctance of outsiders to accept the depth and durability of the grief involved. In Summer’s Death, Lori refuses to mute her suffering, “get over it,” or to let her sister and brother-in-law remain the nameless victims Perrien sought to make them. Judy Butler (2009) points out that a hierarchy of race, sex, gender identity, and nationality shape the “grievability” of death and suffering in particular groups. Lori challenges us to make the tragedies of the women and families we study or work with “grievable.” As in the poem, this starts by naming those in whose names we claim to speak (a major point of recent protests over police shootings of young Black men) and ensuring that the victim-survivors we work with are no less valued than anyone else and their narratives no less seen or heard or privileged. In fact, Perrien was a chronic batterer, though his abuse had remained “invisible in plain sight.” Excluded from the official investigation, Lori applied her considerable technical skills to track the killer’s history. She identified 132 independent domestic violence events over 25 years involving partners in four Michigan counties. His abuse included multiple physical and sexual assaults, stalking, threats to kill, child abuse, child neglect, attempted homicide, home invasion, and breaking and entering. Confronted with this history, the detective replied facetiously, “Well, he had a lot of girlfriends.” The prosecutor acknowledged that this litany of abuse was not reflected in the six-line rap sheet. Still, like the jurors in O. J. Simpson’s criminal trial, he wondered what this history had to do with the “real violence” reflected in the killings.
Downloaded from vaw.sagepub.com at GEORGIAN COURT UNIV on March 10, 2015
546
Violence Against Women 21(4)
Twelve of Perrien’s previous victims emailed or phoned Lori during the arraignment, and some showed up in person to give support. These women told similar stories of the authorities disbelieving their claims, minimizing Perrien’s abuse, and ignoring his repeated violations of court orders. Amid their show of compassion, these brave women were shocked to learn about Perrien’s other victims, kept secret because none of the harms they had suffered were sufficiently grievable to merit public notice. To them, the connections between their abuse and the killing of Michael and Terri were clear, although these threads were invisible to police, prosecutors, and the court. Ironically, to these women, Perrien’s trial for murdering strangers was the first validation they had that their experiences were real or important. One woman had been stalked by Perrien for years, filed numerous reports, attained both no-contact and nostalking orders, but was ignored when he violated these orders. Realizing she could easily have been the one murdered, she asked the lead detective rhetorically, “See! Do you believe me now?” Perrien’s motive for killing Michael and Terri may never be known. The prosecutor claimed that his propensity for violence was a by-product of mental illness. As likely, his violence and narcissism express a “normal pathology,” whereby “doing manhood” requires constant proofs of dominance over women and men. Whatever his motives, it is clear that Terri and Michael Greene would be alive today had Perrien been held accountable for any combination of the violent acts he committed against women and children prior to September 22, 2011. Had any combination of the various police, prosecutors, or judges involved with Mr. Perrien previously seen his victims as real persons with full equality before the law, the danger he posed to public safety would have been clear. He would not have been on parole and not allowed to roam freely on work release. Lori’s parents would have been saved the horror of discovering the bodies of their daughter and son-in-law, and Lori and her family would have been spared the life-changing trauma from which this poem was born. At bottom, we owe Summer’s Death and the killings of Terri and Mike to the same proximate cause. This cause is the failure of our legal, justice, and service systems to treat violations of women’s human rights to physical integrity, dignity, liberty, and equality with the seriousness these harms merit. Presented with the evidence Lori gathered, her mother replied plaintively, “I thought domestic violence was a crime.” It is by no means clear how to answer this rhetorical question. Summer’s Death is an agonized and agonizing cry for us to ameliorate the pain suffered by all trauma victims and witness survivors. But the poem also makes it clear that, once inflicted, much of the suffering caused by abuse cannot be ameliorated. This leaves us with a political question: Is ameliorating suffering caused by abuse enough, or have we reached a stage in our social development where it is possible to eliminate the causes of this suffering in the first place? Declaration of Conflicting Interests The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Downloaded from vaw.sagepub.com at GEORGIAN COURT UNIV on March 10, 2015
547
Stark Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Reference Butler, J. (2009). Frames of war: What is death grievable? London: Verso.
Author Biography Evan Stark is a forensic social worker and Professor Emeritus at Rutgers University–Newark and Rutgers Medical School.
Downloaded from vaw.sagepub.com at GEORGIAN COURT UNIV on March 10, 2015
