‘Church leadership has to be bold’
– a Latina activist speaks out
by Marianne Arbogast

When she worked at a domestic violence shelter in the 1980s, Pat Castillo saw how religious values could be distorted to coerce women into tolerating abuse.

"The women would quote the scriptures that were used against them – they should turn the other cheek, they should submit, they should forgive," she says.

In her current position as coordinator of the PEACE initiative (Putting an End to Abuse through Community Efforts) in San Antonio, Tex., Castillo helped organize a "dialogue of theologians," hoping to counteract that message.

"We had an event at the local public TV station, and invited 12 clergy members to come and do a theological reflection on the scriptures that were most often raised by the survivors in these situations," she recalls. "They represented a wide array of churches in our community. And they made comments like, ‘Are we talking about a little slap now and then, or are we talking about a really bad beating?’ One guy said, ‘Well, was that person keeping the house clean?’ A roomful of people got up and said things like that."

The experience was eye-opening, Castillo says, in revealing the complicity of the churches, along with other societal institutions, in violence against women.

Although she has seen some positive changes in recent years – she notes the hearings on domestic violence held by the Committee on the Status of Women in the Episcopal Church, and the participation of local Roman Catholic seminarians as PEACE interns – she believes that "the church could play a much more active role as a teacher with regard to this issue. Church leadership has to be bold, to challenge church members to look at this issue, to talk about it, to address the suffering and to do what they can to change it.

"I realize that it challenges the status quo and it challenges the power structure," Castillo says. "It calls for a respect of the genders as equals. Here we are in 2002 and I think there are lots of people who aren’t ready for that."

Building a PEACE coalition

Castillo’s own work with the PEACE initiative – under the auspices of a Benedictine women’s community in San Antonio – seems a hopeful example of the role the church could play. Since 1990, she has worked to build a coalition of community agencies and individuals concerned with domestic violence. The coalition, which now numbers 52 members, meets monthly as a body, and more frequently in subgroups, to develop community projects.

"We do community education, community awareness programming and public speaking," Castillo says. "We organize marches and rallies, we work with the media, we work with the arts community, we work with the gay and lesbian community. We have a little subgroup that we collaborate with that deals with violence between intimates who are older."

When the coalition began, participants felt that the first problem they needed to address was the poor response of the police department to domestic violence complaints.

"There was just incredible inaction in terms of intervention, in terms of resourcing victims, in terms of accountability for perpetrators, in terms of knowledge of the laws. The department was very stagnant and stuck in that old attitude of ‘our hands are tied, there’s nothing we can do, if those women don’t want to press charges, don’t come crying to us.’"

Through public meetings, media work and lobbying the city government, the coalition was able to bring about an overhaul in the police department’s approach. Today the department funds a victims’ services unit geared to the needs of women who have suffered abuse.

87 calls every 24 hours

Castillo is equally proud of the FACT (Family Assistance Crisis Teams) program, which has trained some 1500 community volunteers to work with domestic violence victims.

"They work at the police substations on Friday and Saturday nights until 2 o’clock in the morning," she explains. "Police officers bring cases of domestic violence to them, and they listen to them, resource them, comfort them and encourage them about whatever decisions they are going to make. But the neat thing is that these people end up using these skills wherever they are – not just on their Friday or Saturday night stint – so when people come to them at work, or their neighbor comes to them, or some person at the Little League field starts up a conversation, they know what to say and where to send them."

Castillo labors constantly to correct common misconceptions about domestic violence. People rarely understand how pervasive it is, she says.

"In San Antonio, for example, we have 1.6 million people in our city, and our police department responds to about 87 calls every 24 hours. And if we go by the statistic that the FBI gives us, that only one out of 10 instances of domestic violence is actually reported, that’s an enormous amount of violence going on in our community, behind closed doors, that people are clueless about. Many of them are aware and they don’t want to do anything about it, as well."

There are also misconceptions about available resources.

"It’s a myth to believe that there’s so much help that there’s no reason for a woman to stick around anymore," Castillo says. "That just drives me nuts because it is simply not true. I tell people here, if your police department is answering 87 calls a day, where do you think those people are supposed to go? Because our first response is they’ve got to leave – right? Where do you think they’re going to go in a city of 1.6 million people that has one shelter with 65 beds?"

In her public speaking, Castillo also tries to address the roots of violence toward women.

‘You’re playing like a girl!’

"I get into that whole idea of how we socialize males in our society, and how it’s the perfect set-up for this kind of behavior to surface and thrive. And how much of what underlies that is the fear of the male growing up to be gay. I challenge my audiences about their homophobia, and about how they teach males to hate all that is feminine. What do coaches say to boys on the field? ‘You’re playing like a girl!’ We teach little boys that they’re not supposed to cry, because then they’re wimps and wusses and punks. They’re not supposed to demonstrate suffering. We teach them to cut off half of who they are, their whole emotional life. Then when emotion does come up, it’s usually in the form of aggression and violence and brutality. And then we dismiss it – oh, well, boys will be boys."

Attitudes that lead to abusive behavior are formed early, Castillo says, citing experiences with school groups.

"It’s really scary for me listening to what those kids tell you," she says. "I’ve had little sixth-grade boys tell me that if their girlfriend disses them, they’re going to pop her, because girls need to be taught lessons."

From a young age, children are exposed to widespread objectification of women in the media, she says.

"The sexism of viewing women as being around to serve men is an attitude that still permeates our society. Pornography is everywhere. I had an opportunity one time to do a class with little bitty kids, kindergarteners and first-graders. I started talking to them about violence in the family and those kids started talking to me about incest, about rape, about women who dance naked with poles, about men who beat up women – just about every horrible thing you can think of that no child should know about. I just kept thinking, who is supervising these children? They’re thrown in a room and told to watch TV, with no adult to start having critical analysis conversations with about what they’re seeing. I walked out of that school in tears, thinking to myself, where are we as parents, as mentors, as people to be looked up to?"

‘Do we want to keep sacrificing Latino men to the criminal justice system?’

Castillo, who serves on the board of the National Latino Alliance for the Elimination of Domestic Violence, says that that group is doing work that she hopes to translate into projects addressing the situation of young men in her own community who demonstrate abusive behavior.

"Ultimately, what happens to the Latino male when they end up in the criminal justice system is they get eaten alive by the system. So our challenge is, do we want to keep sacrificing our young males to the criminal justice system? We need to stop and think about what this behavior is doing to them. Not with the notion that they need to be given breaks and they need to be tolerated no matter what – absolutely not. But to be willing to examine what it means to deal with issues of racism and poverty and classism and colonialism that are so oppressive and so devastating. And also to recognize the fact that many survivors are going to continue living with these perpetrators. We talk about this stuff in our board meetings – the perpetrators drop off the women at the support groups. And we don’t want to bust up families and have all these kids in foster care, because that sure doesn’t work. So what are we going to do to help people stay together in ways that are not destructive?"

Part of the answer may lie in reclaiming lost or distorted cultural traditions, she believes.

"When you think of the word ‘macho’ you think of all these negative things, right? In our culture, in Mexico, if you were a macho you were a man of your word, a man who was respected by your wife and children, a man who dealt with his obligations, a responsible man, a spiritual man. The definition of that word got completely distorted. Not all of our traditions are good and healthy, but some of them were good, some of them gave us rootedness and self-knowledge about who we are, and our connection to our spirituality and our earth. Those are the kinds of things that we’re talking about, and we’re looking at how we are going to begin translating that in work with males, getting men to be appropriate role models, instead of the drunken, partying, womanizing, sexually promiscuous guy that boys are looking up to."

One block at a time

The PEACE initiative recently received a $192,000 grant to work on a project called "One Block at a Time."

"It’s a model that has been talked about in some of the national programs," Castillo says. "How can we work on this issue by way of neighborhood associations, community activist organizations, committees in churches, youth groups, all of those programs that are out there? Neighborhood people are raising the issue of family violence and how it’s affecting their neighborhoods and their crime rates, so what can we do to address this issue? To give an example, the Cellulars on Patrol program – they’re neighborhood people who take turns driving around with a cell phone. Wouldn’t it be cool if those neighborhood watch people knew of every single protective order that was issued in their neighborhood? And they knew they would have to keep a special watch on those addresses, and they reached out to those survivors and let them know, hey, if you need us we’re here. And to look at it not as if there’s something for you to be ashamed of, but the fact that you have a protective order is just as significant as if you had just been broken into by burglars."

Castillo would like people "to feel as comfortable talking about the family violence in our neighborhood as they do about the leash law or bad sidewalks or potholes, and to come up with the ideas that they feel will work for them."

Castillo, who is 44, has been doing domestic violence work ever since she visited a battered womens’ shelter as a 20-year-old social work intern.

"I couldn’t even believe that a place like that had to exist," she says. "I met some very incredible women in that place and have just remained in awe of the strength of women, the endurance of women, their capacity to live and love and remain spirited in the face of such horrific violence."

She can identify with the challenges faced by survivors of abuse.

"I’m a survivor of child abuse, I’m a survivor of incest, I’m a survivor of substance abuse," she says. "For many reasons I probably should have been dead, for many reasons I probably should have been in jail."

But she testifies to "many beautiful and powerful blessings" in her life. Raised Roman Catholic, Castillo had left the church, but was drawn to the Episcopal Church after meeting Carmen Guerrero, then vicar of a church in San Antonio. Castillo, who was working with women in jail, invited Guerrero to do some workshops.

"Scripture just came alive in her conversations with the women, in a way that the women were totally open to and connected with," she says. "There were problems, because we could only get 60 women in at one time, and everybody knew about her and how she spoke to them in her classes. They were beating the door down to come to her sessions, and we had to figure out ways to get people to take their turn. And I was no different."

Castillo says she is proud of the work the Episcopal Church has done to address issues of violence against women.

"I was very privileged to have worked with the Committee on the Status of Women in the Episcopal Church, to raise these issues up and to challenge our church structures to deal with it," she says. "The work has to continue, because we’ve got a long way to go." l

Marianne Arbogast is Associate Editor of The Witness. She co-manages a Catholic Worker soup kitchen in Detroit.