October 18, 2000

Buel speaks to students about domestic violence

By Carol South
Herald contributing writer
       Sarah Buel carried her crusade to stop domestic violence and sexual assault to students at Traverse City West High School and the Alternative High School Thursday morning. Speaking to more than 150 students at West, Buel told students abusive behaviors are unacceptable from anyone in any circumstances.
      Using statistics and describing typical abusive behaviors and justification, she told students that growing up in an abusive home has lifelong repercussions. Many times it is part of a cycle of abuse that spans generations.
      "The impact of domestic violence on children is huge," Buel said. "Children growing up in abusive homes do not need to be abused themselves."
      Buel also told students things they can do right now to stop domestic violence, including programs such as Expect Respect. Another program hands out posters and pay phone stickers that include a toll-free number to the Battered Women's Justice Project.
      "You don't have to wait until you are grown up. You don't have to wait until you finish college, get married or have a family," said Buel, an attorney and advocate who has worked in the field of domestic violence for 21 years. "You can help stop abuse right now. It is very important to have peers speaking up about subjects like domestic violence."
      Her talk caught student interest and some were talking about forming a group at the school to raise awareness of domestic violence and sexual assault issues.
      "I think it is very important to hear about domestic violence because there are people who need help and are afraid," said Danielle Webb, a sophomore at West High School. "I think its wonderful that they are saying it is okay to talk about it, some people might not even understand that abuse is wrong."
      Buel also shared her own life story with the students, starting with her own history of juvenile delinquency that got her expelled from eight high schools. An early marriage to her high school sweetheart rescued her from her abusive home life, only to throw her into another. She stayed three years with her husband before fleeing with her young son, for years moving from city to city to escape his stalking.
      Looking back, she can see her choice to marry an abuser as almost inevitable.
      "I was raised to be a good victim," she recalled. "I was raised to be quiet, good and that I would be lucky to get anyone at all, better to have an abuser than no one at all."
      After a brief stint on welfare to provide for her family, she began working as a legal aid with battered women, abuse children and juveniles. She started attending night school as the first step on the path to becoming a lawyer, a lifelong dream that had been discouraged by both a seventh-grade school counselor and family members.
      "I wanted to be a lawyer since I was 12 and Perry Mason was my hero," Buel said. "But my grandmother said women couldn't be lawyers and I could be Della Street."
      For seven years she went to night school before entering Harvard Law School, from which she graduated cum laude. She spent years as a prosecutor in Boston, putting away batterers, and is now a clinical professor at the University of Texas Law School.
      Eschewing more lucrative work, Buel's law career has always focused on helping battered women and children. Even while in law school, she trained law students to be court advocates for women and children. At the University of Texas, she founded the Domestic Violence Clinic.
      Ending domestic violence is her life's work and Buel travels extensively to educate people of all ages and professions about all aspects of this issue. With a notebook stuffed with numbers, business cards and e-mail addresses, both gathered and given out at each stop, she is a woman determined to find justice for both the abused and abusers.
      "Abusers have that sense of entitlement and the belief that they have the right to do whatever they want to do," Buel said. "I even had one case in Boston where an attorney wrote up a four-page list of everything his wife, a dentist, had to do to not be beaten. I prosecuted him and he went to jail."