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Monday, August 29, 2005

Inspired Maneuvers Against Domestic Violence

Posted by on August 29 at 8:32 AM

After reading Friday’s awful story of the Pierce County woman whom police say was killed by her fresh-out-of-jail-for-domestic-battery boyfriend, I was hungry for any sort of good news in the fight to protect women from violent boyfriends/husbands. Then came an item in Newsweek, about the hot new weapon in early abuse detection: hairdressers.

Cut It Out, a national organization sponsored by beauty-industry leaders, is currently training stylists to recognize the signs of domestic violence and offer resources, like hotline numbers and referrals to crisis centers for clients. “You get a client in the shampoo bowl and they just open up and tell is that they are being beaten,” said Twanda Hamilton, a Wichita, Kansas cosmetologist to Newsweek. “We hear so much in the salon that no one else hears.”

Launched in Alabama in 2001, Cut It Out now has programs in 11 states, with seven more scheduled to join up in the coming months. Meanwhile, the Kansas Attorney General has announced plans to expand Salons of Hope, a Wichita-based program similar to Cut It Out, to include over 22,000 cosmetologists in 3,600 salons.

It’s hard to pin hopes for such a vast problem on cosmetologists, but maybe if shit gets sussed out in the salon, it won’t escalate to the horrors found in last Friday’s tragedy, where a woman who did everything right (pressed charges, got a restraining order, called 911) still loses her life.