Twin Cities advocate puts head and heart into helping battered women

Carmen Anderson was braced for the sight when she pulled into Cornerstone's Bloomington lot in February and saw the fluttering blue flag. She'd heard the news about Trisha Nelson, that her fiancé had run her down with his car and shot her in Plymouth, ending her life at 28.

The Live Free Without Violence flag is raised in a memorial ritual whenever a woman is killed by her partner.

"It becomes heart-wrenching," Anderson said. "It's heart-wrenching because you know it symbolizes that someone has lost their life due to the actions of a person they didn't want to be with anymore."

Anderson is one of the many who labor in the trenches of the war against domestic violence. For the past 16 years, she has worked at Cornerstone Advocacy Service, founded in 1985 to aid victims of domestic violence.

Over the years at various shelters, she has slammed doors on pursuing boyfriends, or driven vans full of women for miles, trying to find affordable apartments. She has calmed rambunctious kids giddily aware that they're no longer scared.

She has listened, and listened, and listened.

On the most intense days, she slips into her office and pops on headphones and lets her head empty.

When a woman is ready to leave Cornerstone, Anderson sometimes retrieves a photo taken when that person arrived. It could be a week or a month old, but it's always like looking at a stranger.

"It's actually just watching the growth in an individual — that is why I do this."

Anderson is emergency services manager at Cornerstone. On any given day, she talks with wives whose bruises still swell, cuddles children who flinch, counsels women who defend their abusers, suggests logic where little makes sense.

Above all, she tries to break the cycle.

She remembers a neighborhood party from her childhood in St. Roberts, Mo. She rounded a corner to see a man holding his wife against a wall, hands gripping her neck.

Life went on. She wanted to be a nurse until recoiling at the sight of diseased lungs at an anti-smoking exhibit, "and I thought, 'Mmmm — no.' "

Then she wanted to be a lawyer, or more pointedly, "wanted to put criminals in jail," she said. But she wondered how she'd feel if she learned that she was defending a guilty person, "and for me, wholeheartedly, I couldn't do that."

After her family moved to Minnesota in 1986, she began volunteering at Womankind Inc., which provides support to battered women, prompted in part by the memory of that neighborhood party. She did intake, filed police reports, hunted for housing, changed sheets, always listening, listening, listening.

"When your head and your heart are truly in it, you learn to listen to what they're saying," she said. "And you hear what they're not saying."

For the past three years, battered women's shelters in the Twin Cities area "have been really full, even in the wintertime," she said. That's unusual because couples in abusive situations often try to remain together over the holidays. "And people don't want to move during winter unless it's really bad at home."

Anderson shifts forward on the pillow-plumped sofa in the small counseling room. The lighting is soft. Two bookshelves are stacked with things to tempt a child's attention — small animal figurines, books, a few puzzles. The other chairs are soft and overstuffed. The effect is of a warm cave with all the edges buffed smooth.

"Why doesn't she leave?" Anderson echoed. Her soft voice rose a notch, still soft, but with a note of steel.

"Why are we not asking, 'Why did he act that way?' Why are we not blaming that individual? We all have choices in deciding how to respond to something. Why does he make that choice?"

She makes a fair point. So why do we ask The Question?

Anderson leaned back against the pillows.

The work can catch up with you if you're not careful.

"I'm very much about self-care, and I instill that in my staff," Anderson said. "I work out a lot, spend a lot of time with friends and family, watch mindless TV." Although, she added, she can't watch Lifetime movies anymore, "because they're too close to what I do."

A sense of privacy, for her or the women she meets, guides her conversation. Her job may warrant movie-worthy drama, but you won't hear it from her.

"I'm naturally a calm person and I like staying in that realm," she said. She doesn't mind dining alone and often goes solo to movies.

Calm, she's found, is the most valuable emotion she can exude to lives in various shades of panic.

"Are you watching 'Arthur' without me?" she playfully asked a little boy tuned into the popular cartoon. Kids, she said, are amazed that she knows their shows, that she's taking an interest.

"Miss Carmen, will you watch with me?"

She said she couldn't at the moment, but asked him to promise to tell her the next time it was on, and she would.

And she would. "Don't ever tell a child you're going to do something and not do it, especially if they're in crisis," she said.

She learned that lesson when she once promised to return to tuck in a young girl, who'd then lain awake waiting for Anderson to return.

One way to put a dent in domestic violence is to reach kids who see it at the kitchen sink, in the car, at the dinner table. Sometimes she may witness children treating their mothers as they've seen them treated by their fathers. "They're mimicking all they know," she said.

She listens, listens, listens.

Anderson worries over people she'll never see, the people whom violence leaves behind.

It's parents calling about a daughter in another state. She's getting beat up. She won't come home. Isn't there anything Anderson can do?

It's the drivers in Plymouth who saw a young woman running through traffic, pounding on car windows, begging someone to call the police.

It's the little girl who comes around a corner and sees a man strangling his wife.

When Anderson is out and about, she pays attention. She may look at a sidewalk argument a little more closely. She can tell when one car is chasing another. She knows when the body language of two people in a park has shifted.

If necessary, she calls 911, asking police to do a wellness check, just in case.

She understands why not everyone can do this. What if he finds out who called the cops? It's none of my business.

"But wouldn't you want someone to do that for you?"

As long as she can work out at the gym, spend time with friends, hang with family, catch the occasional movie, she'll be there. Here.

Listening, listening, listening.