Tallahassee Democrat by Meg Baldwin, Your Turn
October 11, 2019
Refuge House‘s annual Domestic Violence Speak-Out and Candlelight Vigil will be different this year.
For more than 30 years, the most solemn moment of our yearly program has been a reading of the names of victims of domestic violence in our community, killed by their abusers in the past year.
These tributes, honoring those who lost their lives to domestic violence, have been a constant feature of Domestic Violence Awareness Month events across the country, ever since advocates protesting violence against women began organizing these actions in the 1980s.
We will not read the victims’ names this year, because we don’t know who they are.
Until this year, Refuge House has kept track — as best we could — of every domestic violence homicide victim in our community, based on information drawn primarily from media accounts of these tragic deaths, and their circumstances.