Domestic violence survivor and former Fort Wayne Deputy Chief Dottie Davis joins co-author Kathy Curtis to discuss their new book Strangled: A Survivor’s Plea to Men Who Look the Other Way, urging men to challenge silence, recognize warning signs, and help break cycles of abuse. Davis shares how surviving domestic violence shaped her decades of work in law enforcement and advocacy — and why she believes the next step in ending abuse requires men speaking up.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: Dottie, Kathy, thank you for being here.
Dottie Davis & Kathy Curtis: Thank you for having us.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: Dottie, your story is extraordinary. Becoming a police officer to nearly being killed by one and then rising through the ranks in law enforcement. What was the moment you realized you would not just survive, but speak out?
Dottie Davis: I became empowered by seeking help, by working with mental health professionals to understand how I got into that relationship and to ensure that I wouldn't return to another unhealthy relationship.
The moment that I decided to speak out, I was pretty quiet initially, because of being ostracized by law enforcement by speaking out against another officer, by reporting it, and so it wasn't until I had a captain who said I'd like for you to do some training for us, who encouraged me to become a domestic violence trainer, that I then found the power in sharing my story and realizing that I didn't walk this path alone, that there are so many people that I encounter, and no matter who the audience is made up of, that have also walked that same path.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: So, Dottie and Kathy, you both co-authored the book. Who did you write Strangled for?
Kathy Curtis: Well, I can speak to that. When Dottie and I first met to talk about the book, you know, I said to her, your question-Who is this for? Thinking that it was going to be for women.
And she said, after thinking about it for a minute, she said, "for men." And it was a shocking like, oh, okay, but, but the more that we got into it, and the more that the book evolved, the more excited I became about the fact that, I think this is a really unique focus for a book like this.
And it's the thing that, as she said, we can't change this without men, standing side by side with women. So yeah, it's really geared towards men, but I have a feeling women are going to love it.
Dottie Davis: I wanted to focus on men because I've been doing this work since the 1990s and the data has gotten so much worse. It used to be one out of every eight women living with a man would experience domestic violence in their lifetime. Nationally, this statistic now is one out of every four. Here in Allen County, it's one out of every two. That is just not acceptable, and so I know that the vast majority of those who are perpetrating domestic violence are men.
That means that I need that seventy-five percent of men who aren't perpetrators by national data, to stand up and say this is not acceptable, and that we need to model for other men what is respectful behavior, and we need to raise good boys. We need to raise sons who understand what boundaries are and what a healthy relationship looks like as well.
Kathy Curtis: Yeah, and I would add to that, the way we talk about them is they are the good guys. That's our target.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: Yeah, the good guys. Yeah, wow. I did not realize… Those statistics are wild. Wow.
The subtitle of this book is a survivor's plea to men, men who look the other way. Why focus specifically on men who aren't the perpetrators? Why are we focusing on the good guys that remain silent?
Dottie Davis: Because the system needs to hold those who are abusing accountable. And when I say the system, a lot of people think I mean the criminal justice system. No, I mean society. I mean everyone in society, those who are hearing objectification of women, those who are seeing the subtle, if you will.
And you can see my air quotes here, subtle touches brushes past a woman, the cat-calling, all of those things that are things in society, that are small, things that people can start, you know, saying, Wait, that is not acceptable.
And my hope is that not only am I giving men a voice and teaching them how to stand up and resist this, but I'm also hopefully giving women power to say it's not okay.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: And what do you hope happens in a man's heart or a mindset? After reading this book?
Dottie Davis: I hope that our numbers change. Indiana saw the highest domestic violence homicide rate in history last year. I hope our data changes. I hope that people take to heart the small steps that they can do, and I hope that we start to see more men involved in this.
That means that we need people in clergy who are willing to talk about this from the pulpit. We need people who are educators being willing to call out that behavior they see in the classrooms or in the hallways, and we need households to understand that this is not acceptable behavior and that we don't have to carry this from one generation to the next.
When I joined law enforcement, I was dealing with one group of individuals, and by the time I left three decades later, I was dealing with third generation of the same households with domestic violence. So we know, unless there's some intervention, we will continue this cycle one generation after the next, and I know that it only takes one person to effect change, and I'm hopefully one of those people.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: As someone who became a deputy chief and domestic violence advocate, what did you learn from seeing the system on both sides, as a survivor and as a leader within law enforcement?
Dottie Davis: I saw a different angle. I have a different lens because, one, I'm a woman in a non-traditional career. Two, I have a tendency to question the why. Why are we doing this? I know we've always done it this way, but why.
So, what I've seen is that even though I rose through the ranks, it was not an easy journey, and that law enforcement traditionally, it's male dominated, and it's not very welcoming for women. We do a lot of work in recruiting women currently into the law enforcement field. Unfortunately, we don't do a good job of retaining them, because the culture is so poor when they get there that many will leave. They will not stay, and if they do stay, I've worked with many agencies I train all around the world on leadership for women in law enforcement, and we've had agencies that have never had a female in rank, never, and they're like, we can't, we can't overcome the barriers.
So that's from working within that system, that I see that, and that's why I work still, to try to build the strength and the power and the systemic change within law enforcement, to change that culture so that there is room for women at the top within that profession. People always look at me and like I just got asked to do a keynote presentation on leaving because of my child, and I'm like, I'm one person, and that's my story.
But some women may stay in the violent relationship because they believe in a two-parent household, or because of financial constraints-they don't have a good paying job with benefits like I had. There are so many factors, and so my story is my story, but one size does not fit all, and we cannot cast judgment on people why they're staying. I wish we would put, excuse me, more focus on the person who is being violent than on the person who is being victimized, but society puts all the pressure and onus on the victim, rather than the onus and pressure on the person who is using violence toward the person they profess to love and the mother of their children.
And let's just even talk about coercive control, which doesn't rise to the level of a criminal offense, and yet, jealousy and stalking are high predictors of homicide, but jealousy, it's not an arrestable offense, and stalking is one of the most under filed felony charges around the nation, because they're looked at as isolated incidents, instead of connecting all those dots to see that this is a serious felony that is occurring, that is controlling this victim and forcing the victim back into that relationship, because it's safer if they stay than if they try to leave.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: And it's interesting too, because there's so many factors too, of the society that you talked about, because it's not just, you know, it's always like a “mind your business”- I feel like I heard that, you know, growing up.
Dottie Davis: We also hear “boys will be boys.”
Brianna Datta-Barrow: Oh yeah.
Dottie Davis: We know that boys are socialized differently than girls, especially when, in my generation, girls were to be seen, not heard, and girls didn't hit. It wasn't lady like but my brothers, you know, I had four brothers, and they all either played sports that were contact sports, and they engaged each other in, you know, physical altercations, and that was just the norm. Boys are roughhousing.
And what we know is that we turn a blind eye to that, and we don't say that, hey, that doesn't just stay in our house. That goes out onto the street, that goes out onto the playground, that goes out onto the school bus, and I get people ask me all the time, Why are kids today so violent? And my question is a question back, I don't know. What does their family of origin look like? What are the rules of engagement they are taught?
And so, there's so many more questions we should be asking instead of labeling this kid as a bad kid, what's going on in their household? And if it's not their household, maybe they're being raised in a gang infested, very violent neighborhood, and so they're constantly in the fight or flight syndrome, right? So, there's a lot of things that we could peel back the curtains on to examine a little bit further about why we have such a violent society.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: So, Kathy, as a writer who helps people tell their most impactful stories, helps people work through grief, what struck you the most about Dottie's journey when you began working together?
Kathy Curtis: Well, I was, you know, blown away by her story number one, and that's what drew me to her, was just hearing enough and knowing enough about her that I reached out to have coffee and just have a chat, because I wanted to learn more about her life. But when we began to work together, I think it came slowly, but I began to realize that she was actually working through some of the emotions that she had always had about the whole thing that she maybe thought she had dealt with, you know, getting into the story deeper thought we could create a book brought him back out, and she would have to go through these, you know, grief sessions, you know, in order to just kind of move through it.
But then in the end, what she had to say is, you know, now I'm like, I can talk about it now and not get all emotional. So, I feel like the journey of writing a book has been very healing for her and, you know, enlightening for me.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: That's amazing, the power of just kind of writing it out and processing your grief through that. Yeah, was there a moment in that writing process that changed you, personally, either of you?
Dottie Davis: I will say this, Kathy put together things that I had never connected. So the title of the book, you know, people are going to think about, that's how my abuser tried to kill me. Was strangling me to death. But I was born in the same situation. I came into this world with the umbilical cord around my neck, and I almost died at birth, and my mom almost died at birth. So, that's how I was blessed immediately by a priest, and I got my mother's name because my father wasn't sure if I would survive. Well, the joke in my family was because my first name, my given first name, is a little different. I always said, I live. You could have changed my name, right?
But I hadn't put that connection together that I came into the world the same way. I almost went out. She did. And I was like, wow, that's a big aha moment for me. You know, seeing, having someone with a different lens, and she's just listening to me, and I'm just telling my story, and then she stopped me periodically, and she's like, go back, tell me a little bit more about that. And then I'm like, Whoa, light bulb moment.
The other thing I would say is, you know, I reached out to a lot of people to help me with the historical perspective. And there were things that I literally had put in a box, up on a shelf, and had put away in my memory. And then a person that I spoke with said, do you remember this? And I'm like, wait, tell me again. And then it came back to me. I had forgotten things. I had compartmentalized. I had boxed it up and put it away like it was too painful to deal with. I didn't want to.
And they brought it back out so that part of it was like sometimes survivors question their truth. Like, yeah, did that really happen? Is my memory failing me? Is it playing tricks on me? And then it was so affirming to have people in my past say this happened to you and this happened to you.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: That's wild. Just, how a survivor's memory, just you get like holes in your memory from going through that.
Dottie Davis: Well, you have a trauma experience, and a lot of people think that survivors are lying because they can't tell you from start to finish what happened during that hour, and it's because of the trauma and what happens to the neurobiology of your brain when you're put into those modes. It's one of the questions I get asked all the time is, did you fight back? And I said, it depends. And there are people that are like, What? What do you mean 'it depends'?
And we know that abusers, if you do fight back, they will up their level of violence. And so, my injuries would be much more prominent or severe, that I wouldn't be able to go to work, and so I either had the choice of physically engaging or not, and if I didn't, the emotional abuse was worse than the physical violence.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: Yeah, because it just breaks someone down, you know, over time.
Dottie Davis: Yeah, a hundred percent. Who you see today. Bri, is not who was in that relationship.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: Well, I'm glad you're here.
Dottie Davis: Thank you. Me too.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: Yeah. So, the book invites men to look behind the curtain at what women face at home, on the street, in offices and within institutions. What are some realities that you believe many of the good guys or the well-meaning men, just simply do not see or don't fully understand about that experience?
Dottie Davis: Oftentimes, people believe, what did you do to provoke him? And the fact of the matter is that this is about power and control. This is about one person in the relationship wanting to gain and maintain that power and control in all facets of your life, and so they begin to strip away your identity and even your ability to make decisions, because you're punished for making decisions.
Simple things like steaks were on sale at the grocery store, so I bought four of them. I'm really proud of myself because I saved some money, and then you get chastised because we didn't have that money in the budget this week. You're so ignorant, you're so stupid. Why don't you check with me? And so the next time you check with them, and they're like, Are you that stupid? You can't even make that kind of a decision. So, you're constantly caught in that, damned if you do, damned if you don't, and you become helpless to make decisions for yourself because of that punishment.
And women who are in these relationships create these long lists of things that they can do to avoid the violence, not talk to this person. Don't be on the phone with your mom when he gets home from work. You know, all these things. And the fact of the matter is, you can keep adding to that list day after day after day, and nothing's going to change unless someone holds the abuser accountable because they control the violence. That's what I want people to see. It's not what the other partner is doing to provoke the violence.
They don't control it. The abuser does, and so I want them to start understanding what that looks like, financial control, using the children as pawns, taking the children, prohibiting them from having contact with their mother, using-so I had a woman that I worked with where he stopped calling her by her name and just calls her woman, and all of her children now have started to just call her woman. And she doesn't even get the title of mother or her first name.
And it's those subtle things. They're not subtle to me, but they're subtle to other people who don't have an understanding of domestic violence. I want folks to start understanding those subtle things so that they can start to say, That's not okay, that's not a healthy relationship.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: One of the things I think that isn't talked about a lot, too, is how it affects children who grow up in those kinds of homes. It's crazy how much the abuser can manipulate the children into going along, because the children are also living in fear and living in, you know, walking on eggshells the same way the victim is. And so, it's, it's just wild.
Dottie Davis: My daughter, she was three when I left, and a lot of people have said, you know, yay, domestic violence victim leaves, and now there's no more violence. And she took the national stage at a conference and said, "You know, when my mom left, people congratulated her. I was 3, and I had to go for visitation, and I didn't have to watch him hit my mom anymore, but I got to watch him throw things at me, and hurt my dog, and do abusive things to his new partner."
And so, she said, "did that impact me? I was 3." People are like, oh, kids are resilient. They'll move past that. And yet it has impacted her life to this day, with trust issues, believing that men are good, believing that men will stay, believing that there is such a thing as a healthy relationship. And I can't tell you the number of times that I have apologized to her for her having to experience that. And we have a really strong bond. And I think the most I mean she's my legacy, my legacy, that I can see now that she is in a healthy relationship, that she knows what love is, and that she does believe that men will stay.
But it took her to age thirty-four to find the right person, to find the good guy, if you will, because the options sometimes are not great, and when you yourself are carrying all that baggage, you have to love yourself first before you can love somebody else. And that's one of my messages. Once I learned how to love myself and understand who I am, I was forty-two before I figured out what a healthy relationship is. That's tragic, and if I can save younger generations by telling my story, some people are like, why are you telling that? That is so much shame. Why are you casting it out there?
And I'm like, I'm not ashamed of what happened. If anyone should be ashamed in our society are the abusers, and that the victims, the survivors of this crime–and I want to call it a crime, because it is a crime. I want them to know that they don't deserve to be treated that way.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: Absolutely, I'm so glad that you said that too, because there's no shame in what happened you know, and what happens to you or what you're a survivor of.
Dottie, you have spent decades training law enforcement and advocating for violence prevention, but you say you cannot end domestic violence alone. When was the moment that you realized that this plea needed to be public and direct to men?
Dottie Davis: Well, honestly, as I watch the data, and I'm a data geek, it drives the work that I do. I look at what is happening in our county, our city, our state, to try to better train law enforcement and best practices to responding to family violence. What shifted for me is continuing to see our numbers and how horrific they are. In Indiana alone, we have a twenty-four percent higher rate of domestic violence homicide by firearms than any other state in the nation.
When I see things like that, I don't know factually why that is, but I train law enforcement to respond to every home as if there is a firearm there, because the likelihood is pretty strong. Now, I'm a former law enforcement officer, and I carry a firearm. So I'm not standing here, sitting here, telling people that I don't believe in the right to bear. I'm saying an abuser of domestic violence should not possess a firearm, and I will work diligently to make sure those firearms get removed from that home.
That's the training that I do, because I know law enforcement. You know, they all carry firearms. I want them to see from a different lens, what that looks like in these households, and that firearms can facilitate that violence, and certainly are facilitating our domestic violence homicides in our state. So, I realized, by looking at data, that I needed to be willing to poke the bear, if you will.
I will have, you know, in training, I'll see some people sitting with their arms crossed and and I'll get at first, I would get like, you hate men. I'm like, okay, so let me just start front loading my presentations. I've been happily married for twenty-five years to a man who is a former law enforcement officer. So, I don't hate men, and I certainly don't hate law enforcement, but what I do hate is the data.
And so, men, if you're mad at this data, where I'm saying that men are perpetrating, you stand up and you change these numbers. And until they do, our numbers aren't going to continue to do anything but grow.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: I mean, because who else can change it? You know? Yeah.
So International Women's Day is often a celebration of women's achievements. What do you hope that this timing signals to listeners, especially men?
Kathy Curtis: Well, I was telling Dottie a little earlier, I feel like we are in the in a moment of where there's a big wave of change coming, and that her book, and some of the you know, things that we're reading about daily in the news from around the world, women are, you know, finally being listened to, they're being heard, they're being believed, little bit at a time. But I think this book falls right into that way.
But I think my hope is that women just, you know, gravitate to it as an example of what women can do and, you know, I just want to add this in about the book, because it's a really tricky thing to write a book like this. You know what? What is going to draw someone in?
And I want to talk about the fact that, you know, when we figured out that her, her entry into life, she was being strangled, it just gave a whole new meaning to everything that came after that, and her, her childhood, her upbringing, all the ways in which women are conditioned to be the caretaker, to be forgiving, to be, you know, supportive of their man got her into trouble over and over and over again, and she tried so hard to live up to the you know, beliefs and the training that her peers, parents had given her. And so as a writer, you know, how do I take the story and make it universal? How do I get anyone to want to know the story, and how do I give them takeaways, you know, that really matter to them?
And so, I put the reader in her like I put them in her head, so that as things are happening, they're with her, they're seeing it, they're feeling it, they're experiencing it. And not only the, you know, the brutality, which I tried to keep from being so visceral that you wouldn't be able to read it. I tried to rise it up a little bit. But not only that, you're in her head as she's figuring out. How do I develop a voice I've never had? How do I stand up to the men who have kept me down my whole life? How do I bring my daughter into this and help her become everything she can be as a young woman.
And so, I've got chills all over right now, because I got to tell the story, and I got to be in that with her. And I think in the end, you know, you come away with this magnificent light that she bears in the world. Because she's a she's a speaker. Her voice is her her power, as she says over and over. So, I think that this book is, you know, more than just telling her life story, it's like inviting you in to be part of it and to take part of it for you and put it out into the world too.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: What do you hope happens when they finish this book, is it a shift in the conversation? A shift in, you know legislation, you know a woman taking agency like you mentioned?
Kathy Curtis: I want men to care about her the way that I do, and to care about the fact that she went through this incredibly challenging life and made gold out of it. I want them to care about that, but I also want them to walk into their life with a whole new radar for okay, this is happening out there. It's happening in ways I may not see, but what are the clues that I can see around me? Or, what if I walk into a store and I'm like, that guy is bad news. What do I do? I pull my phone out like I, you know, I want people to do little things, mainly, but just be aware, be awake and don't, you know, look the other way ever again.
Dottie Davis: That's exactly, I mean, she took the words right out of my mouth, I would say, my hope is that we start new conversations, and that men are willing to speak up, stand up, speak up, and then do something about it.
And that means that, and I love that you talked about legislation, because we have some pretty decent laws, but we need to continue to look at those laws and how they impact, and one of the things I noticed especially is decisions are being made about women by men, and it's like, where are the women at the table?
I use the saying all the time. Shirley Chisholm, our first black US Congresswoman said, if they don't give you a seat at the table, you bring your own chair. And that's what I want. I want men recognizing, hey, there's not a chair here for a woman at the table. And this is about workplace wellness. Well, they need to have a voice too, because what we our needs are may be different than men's needs, and so just recognizing that we're not including people and we're not having those conversations. And I will tell you this, I had somebody say last night to me, this is scary stuff, and I said it's scary for the victim when nobody does anything.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: So, before we wrap up, I want to make space for anyone listening who might recognize themselves in this conversation. If someone is in a situation that feels controlling, frightening, isolating, and they don't know what to do next, what would you want them to hear right now?
Dottie Davis: I'd want them to know that we do have resources. I would say, you know, I'm on the board of the YWCA, Northeast Indiana. We have a 24/7 hotline. We would love to take your call. We would love to talk with you.
And if nothing else, reach out to 988. 9-8-8, 24 hours a day, you can call, text or chat. You can talk with someone and ask for resources. If you're not from Fort Wayne, if you're not from Allen County and you're unsure, 988 knows where all those resources are, and we can direct you there. We have mobile advocacy, where an advocate will meet you where you are when it is safe for you to have that conversation. But please don't work in isolation. We're here for you.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: Dottie Davis and Kathy Curtis, thank you for your courage, your honesty and for trusting us with this story.
Dottie Davis: Thank you.
Kathy Curtis: Thank you.
Resources:
National Domestic Violence Hotline
