In the early 2000s, the Jeanne Geiger Crisis Center, a domestic violence organization that serves a series of small towns in northeastern Massachusetts, developed an innovative program to prevent domestic homicide by targeting situations where abusive men showed signs that they might turn to lethal violence.
The program worked well and now the center is fundraising in hopes of teaching other communities how to use some or all of its program to prevent homicide in their own communities. With this approach, leaders of the Geiger Center also hope to help reshape the public understanding of domestic violence. They advocate for more focus on helping survivors not just escape violent situations but also get their lives back on track, and clearly putting the responsibility on abusers, not victims, to stop the abuse.
"We all read those stories that happen almost every day in our country about domestic violence homicides," Suzanne Dubus, CEO of the Jeanne Geiger Crisis Center, told Salon, meaning cases "where there’s a ton of history and the police know this guy’s dangerous and he goes and kills his wife and kids" -- and often, as in the Texas church shootings last year, kills innocent bystanders as well. "We’re always jumping up and down on the sidelines going, wait a minute, there is a solution,” she said.