Garage Sale to Benefit Women’s Resource Center

Go outside in your front yard and count three homes to the left of you and two homes to the right. One family out of those six homes will experience intimate partner violence, better known as domestic abuse.* Home is supposed to be where the heart is. But what if your heart, and the hearts of your children, lived in a home filled with hateful words, hitting, slapping and kicking? What if you felt trapped in your own home – a prisoner behind those freshly painted walls and newly carpeted floors – and leaving meant the risk of being beaten up, or worse, being beaten so badly that you were left for dead?

Want more alarming statistics? Over a 12-month period starting in September 2006, almost 1,900 women checked into Oklahoma shelters seeking reprieve from violence.* In 2007, 23,400 domestic abuse incidents were reported across the state to police.* And finally, here’s a proud ranking for the Sooner State – we rank 7^th nationally for the number of women murdered by men* (typically husbands, boyfriends or former partners).

As frightening as those statistics may be, Norman’s Women’s Resource Center continues to fight back for women’s rights each and every day. Founded in 1975, the agency “believes that women have the right to live in safety, to be treated with dignity, to make choices and to hope.” In addition to their battered women’s shelter, the WRC operates a 24-hour crisis line and a rape response team. As with other organizations coming on hard times during this crazy economic period, WRC funding has been cut by almost 50 percent.  

That’s why a Norman family, Danny and Bobbi Johnson and their four children ages 10 – 17, are organizing a weekend garage sale to benefit the agency. Planned for Saturday, Sept. 26, the sale will take place from 8 a.m. – dusk at Cornerstone Christian Church in Norman, on Classen Blvd. between Lindsey Street and 12^th Avenue SE. Donations are still being accepted, and Bobbi is looking for people to help at the sale.

Give Bobbi a call at 405.640.6401 if you can help or if you have items to donate. Thanks to efforts from Bobbi’s family and to the excellent work performed by the WRC, women and children may once again live in peaceful homes where the threat of violence never enters the door.

For more information about the Women’s Resource Center, visit www.wrcnorman.org

*Statistics compiled from Oklahoma state agencies like Department of Health, Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation, U.S. Census 2000 and Office of Oklahoma Attorney General and printed on the Oklahoma Women’s Network Blog.Jan Sperry Astani
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