Thursday, July 7, 2011

****The Many Faces Of Abuse****

This summer, as all summers in the past 3 years, is shattering me. One of the hardest things in the world is trying to survive through life threatening homeless conditions. Through serious winter weather and having so much hope that summer will bring an answer. THIS year you can get a home. Of course, there hasn't been a home, nor any opportunity to renovate the single wide or finish the barn and my nerves are fraying. Each day without hope is a day further away from ever having a roof over our heads again.

Dorothy McKeever went through perhaps 4 or 5 years, or more, of this torment before her heart gave out and she went to be with the Lord. I know that I can't survive another bad winter. I am scared and I cannot pretend otherwise.

Yesterday I spent the afternoon shopping for my boss and catching up on my own monthly bills. The weather was absolutely gorgeous, but the number of tourists in the village seemed terribly low. Lower than usual. Yet it's still so painfully dry, and we need rain in the worst way.

Before sun-up this morning I woke with an awful migraine, but one that did come under control after taking medication and going back to sleep for an hour. But during the day the stress of trying to find a way to get a home on that land before winter sent me back into a violent migraine.

The difference between abusing women physically and emotionally, and career criminals stealing their home through fraud and embezzlement, isn't two different subjects. It's simply different actions resulting in the same consequences. The intentions are the same. To destroy for personal gain. To strip a person of everything they have whether it start with their finances matters not, because once left in dire financial straits a battered self esteem, fear, intimidation all become part of the picture.

The continual threats criminals make against their victims are no different than one would see in domestic violence situations. It's a control mechanism, a bullying into submission. Women who are scared are too frightened to act.

More than once Robert Huckins threatened & bullied my family and in 2008 it made me so ill and upset I wrote this lengthy e-mail to the domestic violence shelter H-E-A-L, describing the sheer terror I was living through. Within that e-mail I said, "You can beat a woman within an inch of her life. You can strip her down to the bare bone. You can ruin her life, leave her desperate and destitute, shred her self esteem, lead her through years of torment and destroy her. Yet never put a finger on her.

Abuse is not something that happens in domestic situations only. Abuse is abuse, and it has many faces."

I wrote it not knowing, at that time, that Robert Huckins had stolen over $30k from HEAL, and they too saw the reaction when Robert Huckins was asked to be accountable.

It's shows a teflon coated audacity when an abuser steals from an organization designed to protect those who are being abused.

It really puts the judicial system into perspective when a judge allows a convicted felon to retain the home he purchased with money he acquired by victimizing people ... and the majority of those victims were women over the age of 55 years. For most women self worth is truly flushed down the toilet when that factor is taken into account, and it cannot be ignored or denied.

Dr.Kenneth Ogilvie, Patricia Ogilvie-Huckins, Malcolm Huckins. Your brother, cousin, son stole our building fund. Until he returns it we are destitute and desperate and I appeal to you to have mercy upon us and motivate him to return our money to us so we can live in a home. I'm unsure how anyone can view leaving women, like Dorothy McKeever and myself in the worst situation any human being can be in, as acceptable. It's not acceptable. Victimizing women should never be acceptable behavior. All I want is the money for our home returned - our building fund - and to be allowed to have our lives and family back. That isn't a lot to ask for, just asking for what is ours. But it's everything to us.

Goodness makes greatness truly valuable, and greatness make goodness much more serviceable. ~Matthew Henry