Donna L. Potts: For victims of domestic violence, blame and shame are all too common

By Donna L. Potts

Jamie Wilson-Spray was found dead in Pullman on March 26. Her friends describe her as “unbelievably caring and generous,” “a beautiful bright light,” whose “light, enthusiasm and passion will be greatly missed.”

She was a Washington State University student who was three weeks from completing her master’s degree while working as a chef. According to newspaper reports, she was a talented singer and musician, “who could learn to play any instrument she picked up within minutes,” could build anything, could do anything.

Ever since my daughter called me to tell me about the death, I braced myself for the inevitable news that Wilson-Spray had been a victim of domestic violence. Wilson-Spray had been married since 2019 to a man 11 years older than her, a man her sisters describe as mean and controlling, whose emotional abuse had devolved into physical abuse. According to her sisters, after an especially severe beating that left Wilson-Spray covered with bruises, she left him.

While interviewing by phone for a job in Spokane, she suddenly screamed, and the line went dead. The prospective employer called 911, and police found her, strangled, with blood pooling around her body. Despite life-saving measures, she was pronounced dead at the scene. Police apprehended her estranged husband at his duplex, which was full of guns, according to court documents. He was arrested on suspicion of second-degree murder and third-degree assault.

Although we can’t know for sure until the case is tried, Wilson-Spray’s death seems to fit the pattern for victims of intimate partner violence.

As a former volunteer for R.A.I.N.N. and Pandora’s Project, two organizations that offer support to victims of intimate partner violence, I’m too familiar with the cycle of domestic violence. The abuser wears down the partner through emotional abuse – blaming, shaming, embarrassing and criticizing. As the abuser erodes the partner’s self-esteem, the violence escalates from threats and verbal assault to physical and sexual violence.

According to the affidavit, officers believe Wilson-Spray was strangled. About 60% of domestic violence victims experience strangulation at some point during an abusive relationship. Strangulation is often the penultimate abuse by a perpetrator before homicide. While a gun was not used to kill Wilson, guns could well have been used to threaten her. Annually, more than 600 women are shot to death by intimate partners, and a woman is five times as likely to be murdered if her partner has access to a gun.

Sadly, many people blame and shame victims by asking, “Why does she put up with it?” “Why doesn’t she just leave?” or “Why didn’t she leave sooner?” Up to 75% of abused women who are murdered are killed after they leave their partners (never forget Pullman’s Lauren McCluskey, who was shot to death after she tried to leave). Wilson would therefore have been at the greatest risk after she left, and her plan to leave town altogether and begin a career in another city would have been the breaking point for her alleged killer.

People stigmatize victims with expressions like, “Hurt people hurt people”; they characterize victims as mentally ill or weak; they assume they must hate men – thereby directing their criticism from the perpetrator to the victim. The opposite is true: Abusers are often misogynists who are threatened by strong women. Rachel Louise Snyder’s 2019 book, “No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us,” reminds us that abusers – “domestic terrorists” – almost always exhibit a deep-seated hatred for women, that 1 in every 4 women is a victim of domestic violence at some point in her life, and three times as many women die at the hands of their husbands or intimate partners than soldiers are killed in combat each year. About 60% of mass shootings were either domestic violence attacks or committed by men with histories of domestic violence.

Of course I learned these truths about domestic violence through my own experience. My partner was 11 years older, and he had a gun. He threatened that if I ever tried to leave him, he would track me down and kill me. His abuse was initially verbal and emotional, but the more successful I became, the more abusive he became. I finally left on a Greyhound bus to a city two hours away, where I stayed with my closest friend until he found a new victim and left me alone.

Before you blame victims, remember Jamie Wilson-Spray, who didn’t deserve any of this at all.

Donna L. Potts lives in Pullman.