‘Humans of New York’ Just Featured a Latina Who Broke the Cycle of Abuse
Abuse is a tough cycle to break and even after walking away the fear will always linger. This Latina abuse, who was featured on the photography page Humans of New York, has spent her life fighting against abuse. She’s finally at a place where she feels safe and comfortable.
Jessie Garcia grew up in a house of violence where her mom would beat her for anything from asking for food to breaking a dish.
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“My mom was very religious, so she’d take us to church and we’d listen to the pastor talk about love,” Jessie recounts. “Then she’d still take us to the back room and beat us. I ran away when I was thirteen. I lived in group homes and foster homes in every borough.”
After living in group and foster homes, she thought she finally found the man to protect her and care for her. She was 16 and he was 32.
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“Looking back, I don’t know if it was love or lust. I didn’t have anything to compare it to at the time,” Jessie says about the man that wooed her. “He started driving me home from work. Then we started going on little dates. Soon we were spending all our time together. I moved out of the group home and began living with him.”
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Jessie moved in with him…it wasn’t long before he began abusing her. The first time he hit her, she was seven months pregnant with their first child.
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“I remember one night he hit me because I mixed his vegetables with his rice. I became very still and quiet around him,” she said about living with the man. “Just like I’d been with my mother. Remember—this was all I’d ever known. ‘It’s normal,’ I told myself, ‘Everyone gets a beating sometimes.’”
The man blamed his rough upbringing for his temper but Jessie thought about the violence in her youth and how she’d never treated anyone that way.
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It took strangers to help her gain the courage to leave. “I told the counselor [of HeartShare] what was happening. She discussed the option of domestic violence shelters,” she remembers. “But I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want to break up my family. Then one day he beat me so badly in the stairwell. He punched me so hard that he got blood on my children.”
So she left with her kids and found a shelter.
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He did track them down using the GPS on her phone and attempted to attack her while she was in the shelter. “The kids started screaming. He pushed me to the ground. While the security was dragging him away, he was screaming that I’d stolen his children,” she said about the last confrontation with the man. “And that everything was my fault. And it made me feel guilty. He always knew how to make me feel guilty.”
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As a single mother of 5, she’s started over. Though she struggles, she is grateful that she and her children are finally safe and she feels lucky.
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Jessie is currently working as a case manager with Coalition for the Homeless. “I’d love to hang up nice curtains. Or paint the house. But I don’t want to make our apartment into a home because I’m afraid to get too comfortable,” she says of her new life away from the violence. “I’ve already come close to missing rent so many times. I feel like I can never relax. But I have the most wonderful children. They never want me to buy them new things. But I’m afraid that I’m damaging their confidence. I can’t do anything nice for them. And I don’t want them to grow up feeling like they don’t deserve nice things. But at least we’re together. And we have a home. And we’re safe.”
Share this story to raise awareness of domestic violence. Some times you never know what the person you see every day is really going through.
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