ROCKPORT — The Rockport Public Library is revealing on outside windows what women all around us are enduring inside their homes, in a Finding Our Voices exhibit during Domestic Abuse Awareness Month.
The photo portraits of 15 survivors along with handwritten testimony of abuse they endured by someone claiming to love them is papering the library’s lower bank of windows on Russell Avenue through October.
The 12 women from the Midcoast who are standing proud and speaking loud about their experiences in the month-long outdoor window exhibit include Meg Barclay from Camden, partner in Scholz & Barclay Architecture; Jess Bowen a nurse in Rockport; Courtney Davis (formerly Billings) a hair stylist in Rockland; Christine Buckley, a Camden business owner; and Mia Mantello, a psychotherapist and co-owner of Sewall Organic Orchard in Lincolnville. The Power and Control Wheel each has customized was created in the 1980s by the Duluth, Minnesota Domestic Abuse Intervention Program and lays out the pattern of tactics that domestic abusers use to get and keep control of their intimate partner.
Patrisha McLean is the Camden-based president/founder of Finding Our Voices. She said customized Power and Control Wheels were part of the 2019 multimedia exhibit featuring her photo portraits at the Camden Public Library that launched Finding Our Voices as a sisterhood movement. The group became a nonprofit in 2021.
McLean said, “I am grateful to the Rockport Public Library for giving us the opportunity to bring back the customized Power and Control Wheels in a big and bold way, to alert and educate everyone to the insidiousness and complexity of domestic abuse and also to its uncanny pattern. Seeing many of these customized wheels in one place helps to answer the ‘How’ and ‘Why,’ as far as smart, accomplished women becoming trapped in dangerous relationships. The testimony also offsets the minimization that is so common with abusers and victims both, so all can see that emotional abuse is abuse, and can be every bit as devastating as physical abuse.”
Local businesses sponsoring the exhibit are Birch Point Wealth Management, Graffam Bros. Seafood, Seasons Downeast Designs, Plants Unlimited, Vision Midcoast Vision Care, Frantz Furniture, Rockport Automotive, and Ralston Gallery.
The exhibit, taking place while the Rockport Public Library is closed for repairs, is part of the Finding Our Voices two-month statewide tour of public libraries. This tour includes survivor-led community conversations and short films on emotional abuse and the impact on children on MDI and in Millinocket, York, Kennebunk, and Damariscotta. The Finding Our Voices fall tour ends on Nov. 28 at the Camden Public Library with a panel of men talking about growing up with domestic abuse, and breaking the cycle.
Finding Our Voices is the grassroots nonprofit filling in the gaps in Maine for services and programs for women domestic abuse victims and their children. Its groundbreaking public awareness campaigns destigmatize domestic abuse, and its sister support mitigates the isolation and financial abuse that are key factors in keeping women trapped in danger at home. Its programs include financial assistance, the pro bono dental program Finding Our Smiles, healing retreats, and online support groups including one for women estranged from their adult children due to manipulation by the ex.
For more information visit https://findingourvoices.net.
