Two women make sense of a lifetime of abuse and gun violence: ‘How did I get here?’ | Domestic violence

By August of 2023, Alisha Thomas* had come to realize that she had two choices: leave her husband, or die. Their 20-year relationship had been rife with verbal and physical violence. Over the years, her husband had choked her, run over her foot with a car and thrown her down a flight of stairs, resulting in a miscarriage. She had told him their marriage wasn’t going to survive. The verbal abuse and harassment only worsened.

Four months later, her husband returned to their home one night, loaded his shotgun and berated her for hours – his finger on or near the trigger the entire time. The couple’s teenage daughter heard the commotion and called the police, which gave Thomas a chance to escape the home and run to a local store, where she waited until the police arrived. Thomas tells me this story in September, displaying a mix of calm and disbelief at the realization that she had survived years of violence and a childhood and adolescence that made it all feel normal.

“There had been so many incidents leading up to him pulling the gun out,” she said. “But because I didn’t know that that wasn’t OK, I still thought: ‘This is what we do, we’ll be OK.’”

Thomas, 49, grew up in Sacramento, California, where she remembers facing violence both in and outside of her home. Her parents struggled with drug addiction and would often get into physical fights. Meanwhile, the crack epidemic was in full swing and the gun violence that accompanied it was always within earshot. In 1992, when she was a teenager, a group of men approached the car she and her friends were sitting in. They demanded money, then shot into the car, killing one of her friends. The trauma threw Thomas into a downward spiral of alcohol abuse and bad boyfriends. After a stint in juvenile hall, she turned much of her life around, but she still found herself in a violent relationship.

Since leaving that relationship, Thomas has been trying to connect the dots between her childhood experiences with gun violence and spending most of her adulthood with a man who regularly harmed her.

As we parsed her story over dinner, she said it had become clear to her that the domestic and the community gun violence she had faced shared some root causes that had gone unaddressed, like a lack of financial resources, family stability and early exposure to physical conflicts. “There were no preventive or supportive measures for teenagers like me back then, so it made me grow very angry and very cold,” she said.

As an adult, she’s been better able to navigate the resources that are available, including those specifically for domestic violence survivors. She’s stayed in a shelter with her kids, is in therapy and, with the help of a domestic violence response group, got a restraining order against her husband. But she believes that, had she had this level of support when she was first exposed to violence as a child and teenager, maybe she would have stayed out of juvenile hall and away from her abusive ex-partner.

Stories of women like Thomas, who have dealt with several forms of violence throughout their lives, are common but under-discussed in both domestic violence and community gun violence prevention circles. Black women are among the most vulnerable to facing that dual challenge.

Black and Native American women in the US have long had a higher risk of being killed than women of other ethnicities. In 2022, the most recent year for which data is available, the homicide rate for Black women was 8.3%, meaning that out of every 100,000 Black women in the US, at least eight were killed. The year before, it stood at 9%. Across those two years, the rate for white women held at 2.1%, according to research compiled by the state of Michigan.

Black women are also overrepresented among fatal victims of domestic violence. From 2018 to 2021, the most recent years for which data is available, Black women represented nearly 30% of those killed by an intimate partner, despite making up just 8% of the US population, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

In Sacramento, the trends are similar. Black people made up about 11% of the county population in 2024, but represented at least half of the county’s 86 homicide victims that year, according to the coroner’s count of closed cases. Of the 20 women killed in 2024, at least six were Black. They were all shot to death.

Sacramento city and county touts a network of organizations providing resources to people who are the victim of domestic violence. Like a growing number of cities in the US, it has several street-outreach and violence-prevention programs.

But women like Thomas told me they felt neither were seeing the complete picture.

Many community gun violence prevention groups are run and staffed by men, and aim to reach the teen boys and young men who are responsible for – and fall victim to – violence. While the field of violence prevention has grown – in part due to unprecedented federal support from the Biden administration – domestic violence is only minimally addressed.

This exclusion feels especially troubling given that in the past decade, the percentage of women killed by an intimate partner has grown nationally, according to a 2023 report by the Violence Policy Center. More than half of the women killed that year died from gunshot wounds.

Meanwhile, researchers, survivors and advocates told me that mainstream domestic violence advocacy is largely shaped by the experiences of white women, leaving a vacuum of solutions tailored to the unique ways that violence in and outside the home affects Black women and girls.

“It speaks to why women feel like: ‘No one’s gonna help me,’” said Leia Schenk, a Sacramento-based activist who works with victims of gun violence, sex trafficking and domestic violence. “It’s because they’re in marginalized communities. The communities that no one cares about and are over-policed and underserved. It all connects.”

Schenk, who is 47 and constantly on the move, speaks quickly, relying on an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the stories of people who have been killed in Sacramento in recent years, and which cops and service providers she trusts. Schenk’s advocacy is not constrained to a single issue: she goes to court with homicide victims’ families, gives out plan B and condoms to the women working in the city’s commercial sex corridor, speaks at rallies against police violence and tries to help women get out of violent relationships.

She’s also been outspoken on the lack of attention paid to preventing domestic-violence homicides in Sacramento. “We talk about gun violence each and every day. We talk about police killing us. We talk about community crime. We NEVER hear anyone acknowledge the deliberate and intentional killing of BLACK WOMEN!!” she wrote in an Instagram post last year.

“These women, all shot and killed by Black men. Most of them were killed by a man that claimed to love them. Domestic violence, Black femicide, and the blatant hatred for Black women is alarming. SACRAMENTO, we are in a state of emergency!!”

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Sacramento is California’s state capital, but the areas outside of the city’s commercial corridors can feel small and country-like.

Like many cities, gun violence is mainly concentrated in a handful of neighborhoods with mainly Black and Latino residents and histories of disinvestment. One cluster of neighborhoods that includes an area called Del Paso Heights, about 10 miles (16km) from the state capitol, has long borne the brunt of the city’s violence. Last year, it recorded 30 shootings; half of the shooting victims were Black.

Thomas’s friend, Latoya Smith*, grew up in Del Paso Heights in the late 80s and 90s. Raised by a deeply religious mother, Smith was sheltered from much of the chaos outside their apartment when she was little – drugs, gun violence and extreme economic stress. But she grew up watching her parents get into physical fights. Her mother, a former boxer in the navy, was “never the underdog” in the conflicts, she said.

The dynamic contributed to Smith’s own toughness; she preferred to fight boys instead of girls in school so she could have a real challenge. It also normalized settling conflicts through violence, she said.

By the time she was a teenager, Smith had to confront the gun violence that surrounded her. When she was 16, her uncle was shot and killed across the street from her home; years later, during a visit home from college, someone shot at her car. She escaped with a scratched cornea after a piece of the shattered car window hit her.

Smith eventually met her husband and says that he hit her about five times during their relationship. She often swung back.

When he hit her for the first time, she was briefly stunned, but minimally fazed. “From that moment on I was thinking: ‘Damn, he really likes me, he cares,’” she recalled.

By 2023, the couple had decided to see other people but continue living together until their son graduated from high school. The arrangement didn’t last long.

At the end of December, less than a week after Thomas had fled her own husband, Smith was suddenly snatched out of the shower by her hair. Her husband hit her, causing her to fall into the tub. He stood over her and looked for a handgun. While he searched and Smith lay in the tub, he yelled at her about her relationship with another man.

She recalled scrambling out of the bathroom, searching for clothes and her phone while he looked for bullets. As she sat on her bed texting Thomas, he came in and began yelling and shoved the barrel of the gun into her chest. A few minutes later, their teenage son came into the room, giving her the chance to escape and run to Thomas’s home, where she waited until police arrived.

When I met Smith at her office in September, she told me her story at breakneck speed. When I asked whether she saw any connections between being exposed to various forms of violence before experiencing domestic violence herself, she boiled it down to childhood traumas and a familial culture of silence. But going back and untangling how it all added up to a 20-year-long toxic relationship was a difficult and ongoing journey.

“How did I get here with this man?” she said. “There’s a root cause to all of this. Him doing what he did will never justify my own dysfunction, but it does help me understand why I was with him.”

“I’d seen it with my mom and dad and it was normal. They stayed together,” Smith continued. “My grandmother and great-grandmother probably experienced some type of trauma, too. But nobody talked about it.”

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Dr Tameka Gillum, a researcher and associate professor of public health at the University of New Mexico, is one of the few researchers in the US who looks at how race, violence and gender interact.

“Many women have been exposed to gun violence before entering abusive relationships, just by our community experiences,” she said. “These two things are converging but the responses to date have been operating in silos, and that poses a challenge for addressing the intersection.”

She argues that these issues ought to be treated as symptoms of the same disease: structural racism. Seen this way, understanding factors like redlining, chronically underresourced schools and social services can help lead to more holistic responses.

“This isn’t about making excuses,” she adds. “But it is important to understand this so we can provide better resources to boys before they become men so they don’t end up being perpetrators.”

Communities like Del Paso Heights that are hit hard by gun violence often rely on groups like Movement 4 Life (M4L), a local violence-intervention organization that responds to shootings and connects the residents at the center of violent conflicts to behavioral health and job-training services.

M4L is made up of longtime Sacramento residents who have seen the dynamics of gun violence up close – and at one point in their lives, even participated in it.

Community violence is the staff’s primary focus. Sometimes the shootings they’re called in to help with are tied to domestic violence.

“If we’re talking gun violence, we’re talking gun violence,” said Ezell Humphrey-Grant, M4L’s program coordinator. “The support is going to be the same. Because you could still have somebody that might want to retaliate.”

During my time with M4L, each member posited their own theory on the connections between domestic and community violence. Some said it’s because men saw their mothers abused, while others cited a lack of preparedness for the stress that romantic relationships can bring, especially if a child is involved.

Stacha Carter, a new staffer, says that in her experience, some men who engage in both street life and domestic violence feel most empowered in the home, where they “know they can win”.

Like other Black women I’d met in Sacramento and beyond, Carter, 32, had experiences with both community gun and domestic violence. She, like Smith, grew up in Del Paso Heights. When she was a teenager, two of her friends were shot and killed, one of them right in front of her. When she was in her 20s, she lost a brother and cousin to gun violence, and in 2017, her then six-year-old daughter was shot and injured while they were setting up for a birthday party at a local park.

She had also been in a violent relationship with a man she said she stayed with in an effort to give her daughters a sense of familial stability she’d never had. Eventually, she realized that having her children in the home with an abusive man would be worse for them than raising them as a single parent.

“I had to realize that it’s better to have that person be absent,” she recalled.

It was these experiences that led M4L to recruit her in November 2023. She’s responded to a few calls that turned out to be domestic violence-related, but the issue continues to largely play out out of view, she said: “It’s happening a lot. There’s just not a public voice on it.”

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Among the reasons for the gulf between the responses to community gun violence and domestic violence is the way organizations are funded, said Julia Weber, a California-based attorney and social worker who trains violence interrupters on gender-based violence.

“There are funding streams that try to do both but they still propose programs that speak to one or another,” she said.

In addition to collaboration among people leading prevention efforts, philanthropic funders and government grant-makers must give these groups more room to spend grants in non-traditional ways, like a domestic violence group paying community violence interrupters to connect with young men who could benefit from the type of specialized support they offer, she argued.

“Both of them could use ongoing support for addressing each other’s issues,” Weber said. “Community violence prevention is about conflict resolution. … We need that training in the domestic violence space.”

These mutually beneficial relationships can also help address some of the stereotypes that follow Black women from underserved neighborhoods through the doors of organizations that are supposed to help them, said Gillum, the University of New Mexico researcher.

“They aren’t the ‘perfect victims’. They don’t always come across as docile, even when they are really scared,” she said. “Historical stereotypes we have around Black women, like the angry Black woman, the matriarch, the jezebel, all play into how the outside world views us. This inhibits African American women from seeking services until it’s a dire situation.”

As the potential for collaboration has yet to be realized, people like Schenk continue to act as a bridge for those who need to access safe housing, or a mentor for a teen boy on his way down a path of violence.

In a perfect world, she would be able to refer a young man who may be hitting his girlfriend to a community-based behavioral health program and connect him with an M4L mentor rather than bringing in police and potentially child protective agencies, she said.

“There’s a handful of us who do that with each other,” Schenk said of the informal referral network she’s built over the years. “It’s a homeboy, homegirl hookup type of thing. It’s that street code. But there should be formal pathways.”

That future is a long way off, she said, citing a mix of ego, bureaucracy and thin resources as major impediments to the kind of coordinated response that could close the gaps among groups working to improve the lives of Black families and other underserved groups of color.

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Both Thomas and Smith have continued to speak out about domestic violence throughout the Sacramento area, and served divorce papers to their soon-to-be ex-husbands last winter. Smith chose not to press charges, and her divorce was finalized in November. She hopes that continuing to speak candidly about her experiences can help teenage girls and young women think differently about how they see love.

“Now that I’m able to express myself and have a voice, hopefully I can help other young women, no matter what color they are, know the signs and the symptoms and know how to get away,” she said.

Thomas’s ex-husband was arrested on 15 December and charged with possession of a firearm by a felon and attempted kidnapping and imprisonment. He posted bail a week later. In the year since, Thomas has relocated with her three daughters. Despite an active restraining order, her ex-husband has continued to try to contact her and showed up unexpectedly at an event for one of their children.

“My biggest hope is that me and my daughters are safe and free,” she continued. “That’s my biggest hope. My biggest prayer.”

In addition to living a life free of violence and raising her kids in a healthy and loving home, Thomas hopes that teen boys and young men who have witnessed domestic violence can get the help they need so the cycle of violence can end.

At some point, Thomas knows, she will have to testify in court about the abuse she suffered, and she’ll have to work up the nerve to do so. In preparation, she’s made a list of the women her ex-husband has been in relationships with and their children, her effort to illustrate how many people could be affected by his violence.

She counted 35 women and kids.

*“Alisha Thomas” and “Latoya Smith” are pseudonyms to protect these women’s safety and the safety of their children