Cat Fisher recently stood in the middle of her room at a humble Kalispell motel, pointing out how she’s made the small space hers. She moved there the week before, after spending six months at the Abbie Shelter, the Flathead Valley’s primary service provider for survivors of domestic and sexual violence over the last 40 years.
Her walls are decorated with crosses, scarves, artwork, and enough framed photographs of Fisher and her daughter to make any teenager embarrassed. She is brewing her own kombucha and growing three little plants, offshoots from a leafy green plant at the Abbie Shelter, in repurposed marinara sauce jars and plastic cups.
“I have come so far and I am very nervous to move out,” Fisher said on the day she left the shelter. “But life is going to be OK.”
For the first time in a long time, she controls everything. She and her daughter are safe. She has a new job, new friends. She plans to be on track to home ownership and a nursing assistant certification within three years. Now, Fisher holds the power.
By all accounts, Fisher’s story is a success. After receiving the care she needed from law enforcement and domestic violence support services, she is free and healthy. Not all survivors can expect the same experience. For the one in three Flathead Valley women who will experience physical violence at the hands of an intimate partner in their lifetime, how their story plays out might depend on where they live.
Local police departments are not equal in their approaches to domestic violence, a subject around which there is an ever-evolving body of research and psychological theory.
“Understand that there is a model of domestic abuse. There’s a pattern, a very predictable pattern,” said John Buttram, a Kalispell counselor who runs a therapy group that every convicted domestic abuser in the valley has had to attend since the state passed a law in 1988 mandating 20 hours (it’s since been increased to 40) of therapeutic treatment for offenders.
More than the sum of a black eye, some harsh words, or broken dishes, this particular type of violence is a long-term, goal-oriented pattern of behavior with an insidious grooming process. As the abuser establishes control over a partner, their behavior intensifies along a reliable continuum that typically starts with small verbal and emotional aggressions and can build to homicide.
From 2000 to 2013, nearly 130 fatalities in Montana were intimate partner homicides — and during 2013 and 2014, 27 percent of those deaths were in the Flathead, according to the Montana Domestic Violence Fatality Review Commission. In the last two weeks, a Butte man killed his wife before turning the gun on himself, and a Great Falls man was charged with homicide after killing the woman with whom he lived, who was found with signs of strangulation and blunt force trauma.
The Montana statute that exists to protect families from domestic violence, formally called Partner or Family Member Assault (PFMA), casts a wide net. It deals with bodily harm and the apprehension of bodily harm between partners, siblings, parents, and children, so its fundamental focus is not the specific dynamic of power and control appearing in intimate relationships. It doesn’t require officers pay close attention to non-physically abusive behaviors appearing earlier in a relationship. But when a police force is educated in verbal, emotional, mental, and spiritual red flags, they can intervene before violence escalates.
All law enforcement jurisdictions within the Flathead want to see domestic violence decrease. The Kalispell Police Department has long championed a progressive early-intervention approach, reaching beyond the requirements of duty by addressing the roots of intimate partner abuse.
“Kalispell has really taken ownership,” said Amy Meyer, a survivor of domestic abuse and the victim advocate who helps survivors in Kalispell, Whitefish, and Columbia Falls connect with emergency resources, file restraining orders called Orders of Protection, or embark on the court process. “I don’t think it’s anybody (in the other departments) doing a bad job, but it comes down to openness and willingness to be educated, having a paradigm shift (to) … change the culture. We see that in Kalispell. They took it on from the leadership down.”
In 2006, KPD created a domestic abuse-specific detective position and a Domestic Violence Action Team (DVAT), a task force fostering collaboration between PFMA experts in law enforcement, the legal system, and survivor-support services.
Local support providers say survivors can feel victimized, blamed, or judged when reporting domestic violence, which can act as a deterrent. According to a 2011 report prepared for the United Nations by intimate partner violence activists and academics in the United States, “incidents of domestic violence are notoriously under-reported.” Sixty percent of family violence victimizations between 1998 and 2002 were reported to police, a 2005 Department of Justice report found, and just 36 percent of those incidents reported to the police resulted in an arrest.
“One of the biggest fears of survivors, and from my own experience, is people (not) believing you,” Meyer said. “That’s what you’re told, that people won’t believe you… If you pick up that phone… are they going to believe your story?”
In the 1980s, a group of activists in Duluth, Minnesota, designed a diagram called the Power and Control Wheel that outlines systemic patterns of domestic abuse. It lists a number of behaviors, organizing them into broad strategies, such as shifting responsibility and the use of intimidation, coercion, threats, isolation, and male privilege as well as emotional, economic, physical, and sexual abuse. Any behavior that cements the abuser’s dominance and undermines the survivor’s independence has a place on the wheel. The wheel also looks beyond the flurry of emotion surrounding an abuser’s conduct to the motivation: they believe that it is justifiable to employ these behaviors to exercise some degree of control over their partner.
“Using violence and the dynamic it creates can be very rewarding for users,” said Hilary Shaw, executive director of the Abbie Shelter and Violence Free Crisis Line in Kalispell. “Violence works the best to get what you want, which is the easiest way to understand why abusers do what they do.”
The wheel shows that domestic abuse does not happen accidentally. It’s not a loss of control in the heat of the moment, nor is it an uncontrollable byproduct of an angry person or substance abuse. Excuses like these redirect focus to the abuser’s feelings – such as anger or passion – which muddies the waters when the underlying drive beneath the violence is concrete, according to Buttram, the Kalispell-based counselor of people convicted of PFMA.
“This behavior is done to have an outcome,” he said. “There’s no real mystery about where it comes from and what it is. The idea that it’s a feelings problem, that they have more anger than the rest of us, or that they can’t manage it, is kind of a pop culture myth.”
As Fisher put it, “It was a slow breakdown of everything, there was a good answer for everything. What they call on the streets a ‘slow play.’ Just slowly pushing, finding out where I stand, then breaking down those barriers and those boundaries.”
She says that once her former partner moved in, the relationship quickly started to spiral out of her control, eroding her sense of empowerment and stability. It felt like he called all the shots, no matter how destructive Fisher thought his choices were.
“It’s ingenious,” Fisher said. “I swear that these guys go by the book. They systematically break you down … I really tried to flirt with getting away from him. I was with him for a year and a half, and I was with him for six months before I started planning my exit strategy … he had his hooks in me.”
Buttram says that in therapy, he tries to hold abusers accountable, point out inconsistencies and contradictions in their conduct, and poke holes in their worldview.
“It’s about challenging their attitudes and their belief system,” he said. “For example, there’s a lot of misogyny. They have attitudes about who gets to make decisions and how they’re going to behave when things don’t go their way, when they get their feelings hurt, when they get worried, anxious, when they feel powerless. They get a sense of power by dominating other people. So it’s just continually hammering away at those ideas and belief systems.”
It’s not a simple process – these beliefs can be deep-seated.
“I’ve worked with grandfathers, their sons, and now I’m working with their grandsons,” Buttram said. “There are whole family systems (of abusers) that I have become acquainted with, one generation to the next.”
As Buttram noted, the domestic abuser’s worldview surfaces in broader cultural narratives. While it has influenced the law enforcement and court system’s approach to intimate relationships and offenders, institutional beliefs about what counts as domestic violence and as a crime have been changing.
“If you were to look how it was handled back in the 1950s and ‘60s and even ‘70s, it’s much different from the way it’s handled now – in that it is handled,” said Sgt. Myron Wilson, the detective at the Kalispell Police Department who oversees domestic violence cases. “In that it’s not just viewed as the husband and wife having a spat and, oh by the way, the husband is the head of the household and he gets to do whatever he wants to do. Those days are gone. And that’s good, it should be.”
The work is far from done, he continued.
“Think back as far as you can,” Wilson said. “Every homicide that’s happened in the valley, I don’t care if it’s Whitefish, Columbia Falls, Kalispell, wherever. Think about it, was it domestic-violence related? And I’m not kidding you, you go back and look at it and (nearly) every single one of them are.”
Ten years ago, the Kalispell Police Department successfully applied for a $395,000 federal grant from the Office on Violence Against Women. They didn’t yet have a detective dedicated to domestic violence cases, and as Kalispell Chief of Police Roger Nasset said, “we felt it was important to specialize.” The grant helped form a multi-jurisdictional Domestic Violence Action Team, which counted Buttram and Kalispell’s current Captain of Detectives Scott Warnell among its original members. When the recession hit two years later, the department lost its federal funding, but the tough-on-domestic-abuse legacy had taken root.
“Domestic violence touches so many different aspects of our community,” Nasset said. “It wasn’t a matter of if we could, it was how we were going to continue to dedicate a specialist to domestic violence. It wasn’t an option to let it go.”
Nasset downsized, reining in the DVAT’s focus from the valley to the Kalispell city limits.
Thanks to that commitment, “the Kalispell Police Department is running exemplary services for (domestic) violence, even on a national scale,” Shaw said. “KPD really established a culture of caring about domestic violence.”
Now a decade old, the group includes Wilson and Meyer, as well as Assistant Attorney General Emily von Jentzen. The three members meet weekly to discuss cases, build the stronger ones for prosecution, and craft tailored plans to help local survivors.
“We want to do, at the very least, what the law asks,” Nasset said. “Anything above and beyond that we can do to curb domestic violence, we will. We take this very seriously… More than reactive, we want to be proactive, and stop it before it gets rolling.”
To be proactive, Wilson and his officers use the power and control wheel. Its theory is central to his mindset – when discussing PFMA, Wilson interchangeably refers to domestic abuse relationships as “power and control relationships.”
“It’s so important to look at the power and control wheel, look at the little things, when you talk to (the couple),” Wilson said. “When you respond to a scene as a police officer, even if there doesn’t appear to be any evidence of domestic violence, when you start hearing things like, ‘He won’t let me have a cell phone,’ ‘I have to ask him for money,’ ‘He’s constantly talking about taking away my kids,’ ‘He doesn’t allow me to go out with friends,’ that raises red flags. And I start really looking into those cases.”
Wilson says he knows every name that crosses his desk, and he keeps track of homes the police are called to repeatedly, even if there’s never an arrest. Looking for patterns, he tries to step in earlier rather than later.
“When we see power and control, all stops come out,” he said. “Sometimes, I’ll get the report and there’s no probable cause to make an arrest, but the case scares me, it makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.”
Often, he’ll just call the survivor himself simply to let them know he’s on their side.
“The women that are caught up in this are not going to call,” Wilson said.
He takes that initiative, telling them, “‘If it starts to build, if it goes from the tension phase to the exploding phase, hey, my door is always open, give me a call. We’ll figure something out and get you out of that situation.’”
Aside from pursuing justice through the legal system, or if a survivor needs immediate help to get out of danger, they can find solace and refuge at the Abbie Shelter, which opened in 1994 as an expansion of the 24-hour Violence-Free Crisis Line and is named after Abigail Fredericks, a Flathead activist and Quaker. The “line,” as its founding mothers called it, was started in 1976 with the help of a federal grant.
“Most survivors at the time weren’t telling anyone,” Shaw said. “They were going to their graves without ever speaking of the trauma that had happened to them.”
As open discourse about domestic violence grew, so did the hotline, which, over time, received more federal funding that helped the activists open the shelter in a home purchased with the support of local donors. Now with five bedrooms, the shelter offers a place for survivors and their children to regain independence.
“They’re so brave and resilient and have endured for so (long),” Shaw said. “Recovery from domestic violence is so hard. You have the skillset that has allowed you to survive a horrific environment, but it doesn’t fit in the rest of the world. Shelters can’t just be a safe building. That’s why we call them survivors – they’re surviving it daily.”
After keeping a DVAT team funded for a decade, Kalispell’s police chief recognizes that while “all (local departments) try to stick to the law, going above and beyond is dependent on caseload, availability, and resources.”
For smaller local departments like Whitefish and Columbia Falls, tight budgets and small staff can pose real limitations.
“A big reason is manpower, what you have available,” Assistant Whitefish Police Chief Mike Ferda said. “I’d hate to say we can’t help people with their problems because it’s a numbers game. But it does come into play.”
What the other departments also lack is a holistic understanding of violence in intimate relationships, according to Meyer. In Kalispell, that insight – not an abundance of resources – lends itself to a unique sense of urgency regarding domestic abuse cases.
Columbia Falls Police Chief Dave Perry said his department is strictly concerned about bodily harm and apprehension of bodily harm, as is outlined in the PFMA statute.
“We deal with the physical violence,” he said. “Domestic violence is when there’s been a physical altercation. Personally, I think our approach and the law is adequate … I don’t know if there’s ways of improving it.”
Both the Columbia Falls and Whitefish departments’ primary goal regarding domestic violence is to enforce the letter of the law.
As Ferda said, “KPD is probably dealing with the whole part of the matter, not just the consequences. And Columbia Falls is probably dealing with just the aftermath, the criminal justice side of it. We’re probably a lot more like Columbia Falls.”
Some Whitefish police officers do receive additional domestic violence training, and Ferda explained that though he doesn’t want officers “to get too far from what their responsibilities are, we want them informed, we want them to care and to be able to see the subtle hints out there.”
“We do our best to do the right thing,” agreed Flathead County Sheriff Chuck Curry. “I think the law has changed significantly in the last 20 years and we are much tougher than we used to be … (but) the law doesn’t do preventative.”
Ultimately, Ferda said, “the causes of domestic violence have been the same rooted problems in society long before I was ever a police officer. I think how we deal with it changes with how much society wants to deal with causes instead of just effects.”
The Kalispell community hasn’t been more outspoken than any other in demanding domestic violence safeguards, but KPD leadership displays a noticeable drive to become a leader in addressing this age-old form of lethal violence.
“I don’t think (society wants) to deal with it,” Wilson said. “They want to look at it, condemn it, condemn him, ‘That’s an awful thing, he never should have done that,’ and then they want to move on. They don’t want to actually look at the root causes and how ugly domestic violence in our country really truly is.”