 This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. This is Think Tech Hawaii, and I'm Cynthia Lee Sinclair, and I'd like to welcome you to Finding Respect in the Chaos. Today I am here with Andrea DeCosta, who is a survivor who has a really wonderful, powerful story of tragedy to triumph that she's going to be sharing with us. Today I spent the day at the Capitol at the Women's Administrative Council and Caucus. They had quite an open forum that was really an interesting and powerful time where lawmakers came together to listen to survivors and to advocates for domestic violence. They spent a lot of time listening to some really powerful stories of people that have been through a lot and are trying to come out the other side. And more than anything, what they were trying to do by listening to these stories from the survivors and from the advocates was to get a better feel on how the justice system is letting these people down and protecting the abusers in so many different ways by not following through with TROs, and a TRO is a temporary restraining order that is absolutely imperative when you are trying to escape an abusive situation. If you don't have a TRO that you know is going to be enforced, it makes it really hard to try to keep yourself safe or to keep your children safe. And so that was what the lawmakers were doing. There was a handful of senators, a couple representatives, some people from law enforcement. It was a very powerful four-hour session that they had today. And now after it was over, I came straight over here and all of the lawmakers that were involved in this forum today, they stayed behind and were going to spend another two hours discussing what they learned. It was a really powerful time. I was able to start my white ribbon campaign with all of them. I made all of the men take a white ribbon and then take the white ribbon pledge. Now I've talked about the white ribbon pledge on the last episode and it is trying to get men more involved in the prevention stages of domestic violence. Because if we're really going to make sustainable change, we've got to get the men that don't abuse to stand up to the men that do. It needs to no longer be just a women's issue, but a human rights issue. So in the white ribbon campaign, I got two senators, Senator Kelly, Senator Chang, and Representative McKelvie to take the white ribbon pledge and I have that footage for you right now. If you'd roll that for us, that'd be great. Commit, condone, or keep silent about violence against women and girls. I'm just so proud that the senators and we've got legislators and I'm just so excited that they're willing to stand up. And every man, of course, in the forum today put on the white ribbon and took the pledge. And pretty soon you're going to see bowls of white ribbons with the pledge written on the front of it. They're going to be in 7-Elevens and schools and hospitals and everywhere I can think to put them because I want every man in Hawaii to start wearing those ribbons. I don't know what you think about that, Andrea. I know it's a big thing, but you know. I think it's an incredible opportunity and I appreciate the fact that you're having me on your show today and I give you a lot of credit for going down there and challenging people in the community to really walk the talk. So there's a lot in the news these days about the Me Too campaigns and different things and certainly we're all aware of different instances where there have been really news worthy types of efforts, but I think we want to transition from just being on the news to taking action and having it really apply to survivors, right? So like you, I kind of, I reject the idea of being a victim. I say my abusers chose me as a target. And so I'm a survivor of their targeting and I would like to support other individuals who are perhaps going through their targeting at the present time and still suffering and wanting to get to the other side in having the community come together and challenge some of these norms. And one of the norms is we just don't talk about it. In my family, that's been the part for the course. I am a lifelong survivor and my first abuser was an elder brother who targeted me because he had a poor relationship with my mother, who is his stepmother. So, you know, and there was a lot of domestic violence. I don't remember a time that there wasn't domestic violence in my house and it was so hectic that I ended up not even living at home for several years of the last few years of high school. I actually lived with other people, other family members, and at other times I would live at school. So, you know, it becomes a very hectic environment for children. And as a parent of a child who ended up being collateral damage and is not with us any longer, I take that seriously because I think that we have to look at the next generation. What example are we setting as women and as men in the community? What example are we setting for the next generation in terms of what we're tolerating and what we're willing to accept? And I just don't think that we should accept violence in any way, shape, or form. And I also want to challenge some of the ideas that we have about who the targets can be because it could be a male or a female, it could be female or a male. It doesn't even have to be a husband and wife, it could be boyfriend and girlfriend. It could be a girlfriend and girlfriend, it could be boyfriend and boyfriend. It could be cousin against cousin or siblings against one another. So, domestic violence, one in two women out there is a survivor of some sort of domestic violence. So that's a big number. And that's the reason why perhaps women are generally the ones that are the focus of this dysfunction in our society. But I think that we all are a part of it and I know that there are men who are suffering as well. So I want to make sure that everybody out there who needs the support gets the support and that we challenge some of the norms and break down some of the barriers to folks getting their story out and being heard and getting to the other side of healing, right? Okay, that's what the name of this show, this episode, I should say, is Survivor Central Comes to Think Tech, Hawaii. And there's a reason for that because in the last episode, I announced that I wanted to start a new program called Survivor Central. I don't know if you'd call it a program exactly. But an avenue or a place for survivors to be able to share their stories. And so you can send your story. I think it was just on the screen a few moments ago. You can send your story to survivorcentralatthinktechhawai.com. And I can read your story out on the air and change the names to keep you safe, if that's what you would like. Or if you are in a position where you would be safe and there's no liability things going on with your abuser, then and you want to tell your story on the air, I will be glad to let you do it. That's really what this program is all about. It's all about giving survivors a safe place to come and tell their story. There is healing in the telling. I know this because I'm a survivor myself of brutal child abuse. My father molested me basically from infancy and shared me with all his friends. And that, of course, set me up, that same, you know, the cycle, right? It sets you up to go into a relationship in adult, in your adult life that is abusive too, because that's what your program to think you deserve. But there's a way to break that programming. And part of the way is telling your story. For so long, survivors have felt like they are embarrassed to tell. There's shame involved in telling. The only person in place where that shame comes from is society. It's society that puts that shame thing on top of all this. We don't really want to hear about that. That's ugly, right? Because as humans, we want to look at pretty things. Well, you know, if we can just remember that there's pretty on the other side. There's hope and healing on the other side. And if we can focus on the hope and healing, then we can handle the ugly. Absolutely. Right? And it's just a matter of letting it get out there without having. And I really want that Me Too campaign groundswell that has started to continue and to give it voice and to give everyone here, especially here in Hawaii, to give everyone a voice if they want it. And so, Andrea, I'm so grateful that you're here today to tell us all about the things that you have gone through in learning to become a survivor and to leave that target. I love that you call it a target. I've not heard that before. I really like that. I think that's cool. Well, I think, I don't know. It's possible that I read it somewhere in some sort of psychological manual or something. But I was a nontraditional student and I went to school later in life. And actually, it was my college thesis that was the demise of my marriage because I had to basically choose between the thesis and what I was working for for so many years and wanting to accomplish. And an intimate moment with my spouse. And to be frank, outside of my daughter's funeral, that's the last time I ever saw him was when he tried to compel me to have sex with him. And I thought spouses shouldn't force other spouses to have sex with one another. And I went to the service to see if I could get some help. And that's one of the things that I found challenging is that no matter where I went, people listened to me, but nobody really wanted to help me. Even folks like DVAC, I went to a lot of different events and I tried to meet with people and tried to talk with them and get some help. But I found that abusers are extremely agile at manipulating the system. And so what happened in my case, whereas mine was very affluent and of course, in a much better position than I was when we were going through our divorce, he was able to go to Hawaii Legal Aid Services, even though he doesn't live here, get services and conflict me out so that I couldn't get services. And it was an odd sort of situation. I felt like, wait a second, how is this dude doing it? But since that time, I've had a chance to talk with others who are engaged in custody disputes. And what I've learned through talking with some of these other people is they're sharing their stories about how maybe there's some sort of custody dispute and instead of dealing with it on that level, the abuser will decide that they're going to call CPS or CWS on the custodial parent and then that leads them through a whole other path. And I don't know if you remember the story about Talia, little Talia recently, who was a child who was taken from her custodial parent and she was a disabled child. So I think that we have a lot of obligation to make sure that it's balanced out and that both the target and the abuser have access to support services. And what I'm finding is that there might be a lot of hoopla and hip-hip-hooray in the community about the different things that these different agencies are doing. But in real time, I wonder about whether or not people are really getting the help that they need because I'm a fairly articulate and intelligent individual and I was challenged with that because I couldn't find... I'm sorry to interrupt you, darling, because we're going to go to break in just a few minutes. But you know what you're saying, or just a few seconds, sorry, but what you're saying is exactly echoing what was said today in the caucus, everything. That's exactly what every single one of the survivors that they had speak today had to go through ridiculous hoops. And if the abuser, which was in my case too, if the abuser has a good job, it's very affluent, then tough luck for you. If you are just a mom, a stay-at-home mom, then you don't have resources or anything else to keep going. Right. It's a challenge. It is definitely a challenge. And I think that our lawmakers are starting to see that because they listen today when everybody told their story about how their abuser lied, called CPS on them, they had restraining orders against them, and their children taken away. They went through these crazy custody battles because of all of this. And we need to change this so that it's not that way anymore. We support not just the abuse of victims that are starting to try to be survivors, but the children that are involved. The children are very important. Because the abuser wants to hurt the wife or the partner and doesn't even think about the fact that they're hurting the child in the process. The child is a proxy. The child is a proxy. The child becomes a proxy for abuse. And we'll be right back with more with Andrea and more about this important subject. I hope you'll stay with us. Aloha, I'm Kili Iakina, and I'm here every other week on Mondays at 2 o'clock p.m. on Think Tech Hawaii's Hawaii Together. In Hawaii Together, we talk with some of the most fascinating people in the islands about working together, working together for a better economy, government, and society. So I invite you into our conversation every other Monday at 2 p.m. on Think Tech Hawaii Broadcast Network. Join us for Hawaii Together. Aloha. Welcome back to Think Tech Hawaii. This is Finding Respect in the Chaos. And I am here with Andrea Dicosta, who has a powerful story of abuse and triumph from the abuse. She has turned her life around and made something pretty special out of it. And I know that you have, Andrea, a pretty powerful story about your daughter. And I thought that if you would talk a little bit about that. Sure. Well, my daughter, Elizabeth, 24 years old, she passed away. And she ended up becoming collateral damage in this domestic violence arena. That was one of the things that I saw or came to recognize later in her life. And I guess that Elizabeth did as well because she spent a lot of time invested in trying to help other children who were also in the collateral damage or their proxies of domestic violence. And I felt for her. In her life, it was very challenging because she had to deal with two parents who were pretty set on how we thought that things should be. And unfortunately, when she got older, she decided that she wanted to marry someone who was in the military. And two out of three military members who have returned from the arena, they're reporting domestic violence in their home. So not only did my daughter grow up with domestic violence in her home, but once she became married, just as a byproduct of the PTSD that her spouse suffered, she also endured additional abuse there. And, you know, unfortunately, even though she was aspiring to become a social worker herself. I think we have a picture of her at a conference in Georgia, I think. Yes, yes. She's so beautiful. Yes, there she is in Savannah, Georgia. Absolutely beautiful girl. She's a great girl. And she had, she and her spouse had moved there and she had gotten a job as a aide with one of the centers that focus on runaways who are the targets of sex traffickers. I love that. Yes, yes. My daughter had herself struggled with behavioral health issues for many years. And one day, in fact, the day after this event that she attended, inexplicably, she was found shot in her bathroom. And to this day, we don't know exactly what happened. The report is that she committed suicide. But, you know… Do you doubt that? Do you doubt that? I'm not sure what happened. Her husband said that he left the gun out with the bullets, you know, available. She had had a fight with him the night before about something. And he said that she had threatened to kill herself the night before. But rather than secure his gun and put it away, he left it out and left her at home all day. And by the time he came home from work, he said he found her deceased in the bathtub. And the last time I ever saw her was, I think, May 16th of 2012. I am so sorry. I had to be so hard for you. It was a challenge. But my daughter had a mission. And her mission was to help others through this time. I can't aspire to be a clinical social worker like she was aspiring to be. In fact, she was going to be 25 and get her clinical degree, which is pretty cool. But I can't do that. But what I can do is I can help encourage others. I can help break down some of these barriers and these walls. And I can do it in my daughter's name to make sure that the work that she started and what was so important to her is continued. After she passed away, survivors of suicide will use a little semicolon to mark that their story is not over. So, you know, I want to show everyone here that this is in recognition of my daughter. Well, it's a butterfly. And it's got a little semicolon. Oh, my God. Yeah, thanks to your friend, a tattoo artist, Dan. Thank you, Dan. And a lot of folks in my family got these tattoos with the little semicolon. We chose different versions of them. But in each instance, many of these individuals who choose suicide or end up committing suicide, they're a target in some way, shape or form. We hear stories all the time about how they've been subjected to some sort of abuse in the community. You know, online, people are so unsevaled. Social media has become so, so hostile. Oh, my gosh, yes. And even a violent form in itself. Well, that one little girl who ended up committing suicide because she was so bullied by those other girls. Right. And I can't even imagine that. Yeah. And they take these things to heart. So, I think that even social media has a obligation to make sure that the people, the billions of people that are part of their platform are protected from this type of violence because what I'm focused on is not just domestic violence, but any kind of interpersonal violence. And I see, you know, that harassment and cyberbullying, all of those as being another extension of violence. It's part of the chaos. That's part of the fight. We're going to try and find respect in the midst of all this crazy chaos with people trying to hurt each other, respect. You know, if we can just have it, get it, show it, you know, know it for our own selves also, then I really believe that we can make huge inroads and change this whole paradigm, respect. But first, we're going to find it, right? So that's where the name for the show came from was, you know, there's so much chaos out there with all the stuff that's going on with the Me Too and the sexual harassment. And it goes all the way up to the very top of our government. And until we can say, I'm sorry, you have all these allegations of sexual assault against you, you don't get to be the president. But right now, there's just not, it's not there yet. But I believe this is the only good thing about it, is that it has triggered this whole avalanche. And maybe we needed that to happen in order for the avalanche to happen. Perhaps. Perhaps. That's one of the things that I'm most curious about is we see a lot of people in different public entities being outed, yet, especially here in Hawaii because as liberal as people might perceive it to be, it's very conservative here. It actually is. The idea is that if something happened to you, you should just shut up about it, or else you're going to bring dishonor to the family or disfavor to the family. And in fact, for me, what I found is that after my daughter passed away and I was not willing to accept anymore, I gave grace to my abuser. But when I asked my abuser to acknowledge it and to apologize, he declined and his response to family members was he's concerned about his own job and losing his own job because he has a job that is in the public eye. So I thought that was kind of interesting that family members sort of are shielding that because they don't want to be uncomfortable. They don't want to feel uncomfortable and they don't want to say, hey, yeah, that's somebody in our family that's being hurt or injured and we back them up. They will shy away from it. Yeah, they'll shy away. So I hope that other people will become brave enough to share their stories. And I appreciate the fact that you're here today. I hope that people who have positions of power will listen to survivors and not treat us, not marginalize us, or treat us like victims, but give us the respect and help us to see that other people do hear us. Oftentimes the community, like I said, it'll be in the media and there'll be a hoopla for a short period of time but you don't really see any long-term changes. So I really would like to see some long-term changes. For example, military members, if their spouse reports domestic abuse and if the military member is discharged because of domestic abuse, that spouse gets $1,200 a month guaranteed for three years. But there's a huge hurdle getting to that point of convincing the military that something happened. Military, they don't necessarily want to, especially the higher up the ranks, like mine was very high up, they don't want to get rid of them. They don't want to rock the boat. So they just move this person to another position and the spouse just kind of gets shafted. So in the military, just like in maybe some areas of government and like in my own family, my own biological family, you just have to shut up to get along and not complain about it. So I don't want to complain, but what I want to do is be able to help others make sure that there is some light shed on the truth. Amen. You're not complaining, just so you know. Not at all. You are exactly shedding light on the truth and that's what's important. And that's, like I said at the beginning, you know, there's healing in the telling. And we just have a minute left and is there some specific last thing that you would maybe like to share with everyone? I would like to let everyone know that they are worthy and they are valued. You know, Einstein said that you don't necessarily want to be a success. You want to be a person of value. So I want us all to treat each other with that sort of regard. Not judge people by how much money they have in the bank account, but value each other on a human level and respect each other and come toward each other with a sense of aloha. Not just because of the law, but hey, it's the right thing to do and it feels so much better, right? It does feel better. It really does feel better. Absolutely. And I myself, I'm really hoping that men are going to get, are going to step up to the plate. I know they will. Because for too long, locker room talk has been able to go unhated. And I think it's time to rein it in. No more locker room talk. You know, if you've got some neighbor guy and you're down at the bar having a beer, playing some pool or something and he's talking about how he smacked his wife around, I want men to go, hey, dude, that's not right and get in his face about it. Right on. As a woman, I've done it a few times, but it's not always very safe to do that. Right? No. But I want to close with the White Ribbon Campaign. All you men out there, please, when you see one, take the pledge, wear the ribbon. And I want to thank you, Andrea, for coming out and being brave enough to share your story with us. And I'm so sorry about your daughter. And I really admire you for being so strong and just for having the courage to get yourself safe and to get out of all of that. So if you all will come back and join us next time on Finding Respect on the Chaos, I'm going to be featuring some survivor stories here with coming up the next episodes, few episodes. And then after the first of the year, I have a couple of senators that are going to be coming on and we'll be able to maybe talk about some of these laws that need to be changed and see what they're doing about it. So I hope you all will come back to think tech Hawaii. And I am Cynthia Lee Sinclair and this was Finding Respect in the Chaos. Do your best to find as much respect everywhere and to show as much respect everywhere as you possibly can. So we just thank you all for being here and hope that you all have a wonderful, amazing day. Don't you just love our beautiful waterfalls that we have back here? I think this is an amazing place to do an interview because it's just so peaceful and beautiful and serene with all the waterfalls just right outside the window here for us. So thank you so much for coming and I hope that you'll come back and join us again.