Standing up to abuse

<p>Helen Grieco was just 5 years old when she woke up in the middle of the night to find her father mercilessly beating her mother in a corner of their kitchen in Long Island, N.Y.</p><!-- Nothing to do. The paragraph has already been output --><p>“I remember saying, ‘Daddy, stop hitting mommy,” said Grieco, former executive director of the California branch of the National Organization for Women. “From then on, he beat my mother for the next seven years; at least once a week.”</p><p>Though a horrible memory, it was a defining moment in Grieco’s life and the beginning of a lifelong pursuit to stand up to the abuse of power, and to help others to do so, as well.</p><p>“It was the classic story of domestic violence,” said Grieco. “My mother stayed with him. She had no education and no place to go. It ended up that one night when they were out, he got mad and started beating her. She ran out of the car to a phone booth and he drove into it. He could have killed her.”</p><p>Grieco’s mother packed up her four children and went 300 miles to upstate New York to hide from her father. They lived in a shack with no running water or electricity. “We huddled around in fear he’d find us,” she said. “I was 12. The violence I experienced as a child completely derailed my life.”</p><p>Grieco struggled with an eating disorder for 25 years and was a drug addict for a decade. She also dated abusive men.</p><p>At 22 years old, she found herself in San Francisco with just $30 to her name. “I applied to be a sex worker,” said Grieco. “I knew that’s not what I wanted, but I had no other way to eat. I was lucky that a deli offered me a job and I got rescued from that.”</p><p>She was rescued again when a violent scuffle with a boyfriend opened up her eyes. “He got mad at me and threw a candle with hot wax at my face,” she said. “He could have blinded me. I had to sit down in tears to finally realize that I wasn’t doing much better than my mom. I had to turn things around.”</p><p>Grieco made a commitment to change. She got clean and sober, started therapy, removed herself from abusive relationships and went back to college. Grieco began taking women’s studies courses at San Francisco State University.</p><p>“It was mind shattering,” said Grieco of the women’s studies courses. “At the time, I didn’t know there was something called domestic violence. I thought it was just my bad family. That process of women’s studies and therapy was a new dawning in my life.”</p><p>Her life took another turn a few years later when she was working in the San Francisco office of NOW. “I had just come back from doing an interview with the TV show, ‘People are Talking’ when a woman came into our office and became very belligerent and out of control. I told her to get out, and in the next 10 seconds, she nearly killed me,” she said.</p><p>The angry woman punched Grieco in the eye and tried to throw her out the window. “I went home to my apartment and looked in the mirror at my face all beaten up and thought about how many times I had seen my mother’s face look like that. I wondered how did she get beaten like this for seven years?”</p><p>After the incident, Grieco took a self-defense course at the urging of her boyfriend, Patrick, whom she later married. It too, further helped to change her life and led her and Patrick to open Defending Ourselves, a school of self-defense. “We ran it for 15 years and trained 10,000 women and girls in the Bay Area,” she said.</p><p>After the birth of their daughter, she and her husband decided to start a new organization, Building Resources for Anti-Violence Education.</p><p>BRAVE’s goal is to train at-risk youth how to live a healthy, successful life mentally, emotionally, physically and financially. </p><p>Grieco is also in the process of putting together the SHE Institute, an organization focused on training young women and girls in the areas of safety, health and economic independence.</p><p>“The United Nations, as it’s done for many years, proclaimed that the biggest problem facing women in the world today globally is violence,” said Grieco. “Women also have far to go in health care. Health care looks at conditions that affect the male gender more than the female gender.”</p><p>Grieco also feels that women need to be better educated in issues of finances. “We have to teach women how to become economically independent. If women and girls have these things — safety, health and economic independence — they have a chance at a life of equality and quality. My vision is to prepare the next generation of women for the struggles they will have to face. I’d like to create the same thing for boys as well. I’m done with society’s failure to create healthy genders.”</p><p>In the near future, Grieco will be holding an open discussion on the creation of an educational program for young girls. She encourages anyone interested in the discussion to contact her for more information.</p><p>To learn more about the BRAVE program, visit www.bravepeople.org. To learn more about the SHE Institute, contact Grieco at Helen@bravepeople.org or call 780-3015.</p><p>(Contact Yovanna Bieberich at Yovanna.bieberich@argus courier.com)</p>