Leaving abuse behind

Ms. Ferrato has been making raw, intimate photos of domestic violence since 1981. She has also been organizing, speaking publicly, counseling and even offering victims shelter at her New York City apartment. The photographs in her book “Living With the Enemy” helped make the problem brutally real. The images helped create and strengthen laws against domestic violence and raised public awareness of the issue. But domestic violence is still rampant, and women continue to return to their abusers. It has not been an easy path for Ms. Ferrato. While she has published books on other topics, “Love and Lust” and “TriBeCa,” she is continually drawn back to photographing abuse. “It’s really depressing,” Ms. Ferrato said. “I don’t want to do this anymore, but I see a lot of these women, and sometimes men, going back and getting beaten up again or killed, and I feel I have to show something more. I have to show the solution to stopping violence to women and children.” So she has started an uplifting campaign, called “I Am Unbeatable,” that she believes can affect the problem. By celebrating women who have successfully left their abusers and forged new lives for themselves and their children, she hopes to encourage battered women everywhere to leave. “It’s about finding people who have been able to stand up to abusers and get out before that relationship destroyed them” Ms. Ferrato said. “It’s about learning from people who have real courage and are not going to take being abused, verbally, psychologically, sexually, physically. They’re just not going to take it anymore.” To begin this campaign, Ms. Ferrato is undertaking a three-month bus tour through the United States to find and document women who have left their abusers and created new lives for themselves. She will be accompanied by a small crew of filmmakers and bloggers. The trip will result in a film, a Web site and a new book by Aperture that will include the original material from “Living With the Enemy,” but will also have a new section of the photographs and interviews from the bus trip. This could turn out to be the final chapter that Ms. Ferrato was looking for. She is raising money to pay for the bus trip on Indiegogo. While getting women to leave their abusers might seem like an obvious strategy, the situation is complex and dangerous. Ms. Ferrato said that the domestic violence movement has not focused enough on pushing women to leave their abusers. “The whole vernacular, the whole language of the battered women’s community is to not to put responsibility on the woman, not to blame her for her partner’s abuse,” she said. “They might suggest to her to leave, they won’t make it forceful because they know that a women will likely go back and forth between the shelter and her abuser seven or eight times until she realizes that if she returns to him one more time, she’ll end up dead. They have to keep her trust.” Counselors must also take into account that a woman trying to leave could be killed, Ms. Ferrato said. One of her subjects, Hedda Nussbaum, epitomizes the case for women to leave. In a trial that received national attention, Ms. Nussbaum was repeatedly and brutally battered by her common-law husband, Joel Steinberg, who killed their illegally adopted daughter, Lisa, in 1987. He served 16 years in prison and was released in 2004. “Hedda is sort of the poster girl for why women have to find it in themselves to just leave their abuser. If she had left, her beautiful daughter might be alive.“ Because of her work on domestic abuse, Ms. Ferrato was able to gain access to Ms. Nussbaum as she underwent lengthy physical and psychological rehabilitation. “She had these cauliflower ears, her nose was broken in multiple places, and she had that vacant look in her eyes,” Ms. Ferrato said about Ms. Nussbaum. “One eye was shut, there were tears oozing out of her eyes, she had gangrene legs and honestly, no one had ever seen a battered woman who looked like that, ever.” In addition to making photographs, Ms. Ferrato recorded Ms. Nussbaum, and made a short video which is now online. In the 1980s, domestic violence was often still a dark secret of family life and love relationships that few wanted to acknowledge. Mr. Steinberg’s killing of the couple’s daughter enraged New Yorkers. Ms. Ferrato remembers that women in particular were most angry at Ms. Nussbaum, spitting on her in supermarkets. Many women felt that it was one thing to let someone beat you, but failing to protect a child was unforgivable. “I think that women see themselves in Hedda, but they don’t want to think they can be brought down that low,” Ms. Ferrato said. “We women know what we’re capable of. We know our powers to be resilient, stand up for ourselves and survive. So for a woman to go as far down as Hedda did is a very scary thing for women. We could all be battered. We could all be beaten.” Many of the women Ms. Ferrato photographed in “Living With the Enemy” did permanently leave their abusers and create new lives. With her current campaign, she wants to encourage more people to leave, before they are killed or end up killing their abusers. After she documents her new subjects, Ms. Ferrato will have them write about their abusive relationships, how they got out and what their lives have been like since. “I want them to become the stars: to take us to the next place where we can really learn how to live without violence and not be so dependent on someone controlling our mind and our body.”