good i'm tommy olsen and this is my co host stacy hammarlund welcome to belmont rising twenty sixteen we support one billion rising in its goal of rising dancing and striking against domestic violence one woman and three is a victim of domestic violence that needs to stop we hope our work will help in twenty sixteen we hope to complete five thirty minute informational and entertaining videos the first aired on valentine's day appropriate as a symbol of love today we are very pleased to have middlesex district attorney marian ryan will talk about the cut it out initiative she brought to middlesex with that we also have two local stylists my friend and neighbor cindy rufo steven salon in cambridge and elizabeth three of our very own belmont robertson line and we hope this will help them spread the word to other stylists about this great program mr ryan would you like to give us background and then we'll follow with stacy cindy and elizabeth asking questions when they cut it out program was actually began in alabama in two thousand and two in response to a large number of domestic violence incidents that had taken place was really a grassroots organization begun by stylists who realized that they had some unique perspectives on the issue of domestic violence and when we learned about the program i brought the program to middlesex in two thousand and nine and we've changed the program in a lot of ways so that we've developed middlesex county now we do really three things we go into schools vocational schools and really get students early in their cosmetology careers to train them about that and allow them to provide service we do a day of service for victims who are in local shelters we have then gone into the adult schools beauty schools to really train people there before they go out into the workforce and then as the third phase we go to private salons in towns across the salons and you know we're always looking for the opportunity to come out to us when what works very well is if a local salon is willing to especially in the smaller towns maybe host three or four styles with three or four of the other salons bring them together for the winning we chat with when you know doing they're here and allowing them to feel comfortable enough that they you can win their trust and then you build the relationship right and little by little then you know people start trusting and being able to haul a little bit more about their lives and what's going on in and it's and it's such a privilege as such you know i feel like it's a blessing to be able to help someone else you know i think  god gives you an opportunity to do something for him in this world the end that's helping someone else right i enjoy my job so much every single day and that only my job but my coworkers and my husband and i you know all of that we are in the salon so we love mentoring and helping and the ching these girls they come in without confidence but overall we have a great team you know and we communicate all the time and it's it's a great great thing that we have i mean you know this is such a wonderful opportunity you know to be able to you know not only help the people that come to work harass but the clients you know that come in but i think it's a really unique relationship it is what it is you go to the you go to your local coffee shop and have a wonderful relationship with the us and the guy behind the counter you see them all the time but where else do you go where somebody you know pampers you know and there's like there's a content like when you know you're the guy at the grocery stores and hold your hand lay eggs and to have somebody like washing their hand and touching you and spending time and you something very personal very embarrassing and we had to sort of do that one of the things i'd suggest that you would probably dread the most is watching the look on the person's face saying you're telling you know whether it's your mother who is so disappointed or your best friend who is outraged for you or whatever it is and when it took me a long time of doing this program to really think about the fact that if you consider usually when you're at the salon lots of what happens especially if your h being done the person who's doing it for you is behind you they're very close to you and unless you're looking in the mirror you don't have to see their face so it's in a way almost like talking to yourself so you're talking somebody is going to be answering you back here yeah but you don't have to see how are they reacting to this awful tale that i i'm telling them and i think that's part of what makes that little bubble sort of security to give people with courage to talk about little one thing that you mention was stylists going into group homes and things like and having a day where they helped women how would you go about arranging for that we what we do w vocational schools is we will reach out to the local shelters and clients who would like to participate they're brought over during the day and so we meet with the students first we train them a little bit on things the program things they might see ways that people might make a disclosure to them and then we bring really be a loads of folks over and you know people forget that when you leave a bad relationship and go to a shelter you gave your physical safety but you leave a lot more in the abuse know you know that everything you know leave your silent as you leave your whole your home you know to their you know and very often when you know folks who've been in the shelter for didn't mean that's the first time in months or maybe even years they've been able to have their hair done or get their nails done and we tailored around the school day piece because many of them have children so we bring them over after they would have gotten their kids on the bus they have an opportunity to have some services you know  we also collect gently use business clothing that the retail students at the vocational schools will set up a you know the extra work kind of setting so everybody has an opportunity to to get an outfit that's been donated you know for if they have to go advocate for their kids at school or they go in for that important job interview that's what it thing and then the college there is students do and church and you know the luxury of just sitting around with other women with nice linen tablecloths and having some history as you learned you know when you when you're living in a shelter that may not be a lot of opportunity for that so it's it's a great piece because it's a it's a real service you know i'm a big believer that school should be about learning obviously but it also be about learning to be a good citizen and it's an amazing thing to watch the students i always say the first time we did this we were doing it at one of vocational strip schools and so we had students that were you know fourteen to eighteen in that range and it was the sort of thing that sounds like a good idea and then all of a sudden  vians were pulling up i thought how is everybody going to react to everyone else the students are amazing they they really appreciate that opportunity they treat their clients with such dignity it really gives them another dimension to their career to be pursuing i'm not just providing salon services i can really be connecting with someone and helping them incredible resource for that and yet i have an early age rather and early age in a state you know what i mean by the level of the education that they're getting i truly think that it's such a treat to make someone feel good you know what i mean after the events that we are such trauma runs such abuse and give them a little self worth you know because they lose that and then telling them that they look beautiful and that they're you know where the and that they're you know just encouraging them and giving them that confidence that they have lost you know and it starts with their you know with the beauty on the outside and then if you can you can go inside the heart and then make them feel well so beautiful cindy you and i have talked to does my hair it's we've talked and not without disclosing any any personal information have you had any clients that you felt had you known about this program and what exactly can we opt out mary i have happen countered this one of the somebody who was wearing long sleeves and doesn't want to change into a little or it's a hot summer day and they come in and they're dressed with long sleeves except for cambridge cambridge  yeah and they confide in you when you hear about this boyfriend or that boyfriend in and or my husband and it's part of our job to to listen to them just listening to them and and when they really have your trust you can make some recommendations and and help them through because that's what we are and they're as a consultant almost and they're known for their beauty inside and their well being but is there more that they should they're not mandatory reporting is how can the stylists you know if they see that sort of thing how do you think they best approach well there's a couple of days i mean first of all what we make clear to folks when we do this cheney is we do have a wife you confronting an abuser and you know you don't decide you go out the parking lot and have a good talk where they you know you'll follow your client home way you do that kind of stuff that we don't want anybody putting themselves in that kind of danger but a piece of the training when we go out to do the training we bring with us representatives the local police department or somebody from the local domestic violence shelters you know it's not helpful for somebody who is in that situation to there's a shelter one hundred miles away so in a lot of that you know people have to have a fear of why they can't leave i wouldn't be able to take my kids or i don't know where i would go and so by giving the stylus those kind of that kind of information they're able to say you know what i'm aware of this program but that program or you want to go to the police station and not just walk into the police station you know which can be formidable but i know detective susan someone who is really great  i'm sure if you called her so they already have that connection and they can share that we when we go out to the private salons we ask them to be willing to put our materials in discreet places you know those laws you know whether it be in the restrooms or out in the  what's interesting is every time we do that even in very affluent kinds of communities where people might have the impression we don't have these issues the owners of the lawns are forced back to us those materials disappear pretty fast and people are pigs you know that that's a wonderful thing for us because it allows us to share our men with that many more people at without having to expend any of our resources to do that here's the materials out there and you know maybe someone takes in and they have a sister or friend someone who needs that information so part of your training would help stylists recognize local resource reiss and it's part of it do you produce this subject like his do you help the styles silence speed the one to bring the topic up as opposed to the other person waiting to confide something one of the things we talk about in the chain is a few things i mean the person really pretty basic is obviously the confidentiality of whatever and you know we know from doing this work that someone being able to share what's going on is often a process you know people may make lots of attempts to share something or they kind of testing the waters where they put everything out there and people need to do that at their own pace and so what we talk to people about is really just being on a list you know first of all maybe if you see if you're seeing something all the time you know someone's always coming in they've always got some funny injuries you know maybe a question of is everything ok very kind of general concern and question and you might get probably often the first time we'll get a yes everything's fine and kind of moving on you know sort of building that chest or maybe they come back or if somebody does tell you something really letting them set the pace of what they want to tell you and you know people who find themselves in a situation of being a victim they really need to come to where they want to be and what's happening it's not you know i think sometimes we all especially as women have that instinct to kind of rush in and say let me tell you how you should fix this and people are getting to the being willing to take certain steps in the process and we talk about that in the training about you can make it as cindy said you know you can make recommendations you can offer up i know about this place or that place and they may come back to you next month and they haven't done that but that's fine i mean you know you're serving a purpose by just putting that information out maintaining a relationship right now that you're there as a resource it's all about their relationship and it's all about winning trust and that's all about letting them even robert my husband he they they he's so easy to talk to even to me and then he just listens and then sometimes he tells me like you know so and so you know they have six kids and you know what i need to be able to someone else but we need to go to the next step by which is you know it's important to talk to them but what i like about marion's programs program is maybe we need to have those material i'm a very spiritual person i thought only believe that when you pray with a person you bring them into a place where they feel peace and that they don't feel the fear anymore of being abused they can immediately do exactly what you're telling them to do and not follow directions i guide i'm thinking about getting material into the salons i don't know that you have the budget for that astley and it's my husband's primary goal but that is a good doctor has a lot of doctors skip over that because they have been trained like this that even even physicians often don't get this training and don't know how to approach these subjects and makes them uncomfortable so they don't you have a great doctor that's amazing and a piece of you know the training really looks to is sydney mentioned you know some of the signs that you see i mean you know they may be the very obvious and someone comes in a couple times with a black eye or broken tooth so that sort of day but sometimes it's much more than that and it's it's signs that i might be with you all the time and i work with you and i don't see you know for instance one of the signs that someone's been strangled is the breaking of the tiny little blood vessels in their eyes so you think about most of the and you know we're sitting people are sitting at least as far apart as we want to see that yeah but if i'm washing your hair right in your face i'm seeing that and you know the other piece is domestic iowans has their own in the violence but it's really about power and control and one of the injuries that you see almost exclusively in domestic violence cases and that really the stylus of the folks who are going to see it is if you think about what could be more controlling and painful actually than dragging someone around for instance by the head of the hair yeah that's often happened and you will see and i've been a prosecutor for a long time and i have only ever seen it in domestic violence cases you know people actually missing big chunks of paper you know so again i'm married working with you i don't see that you know you pull your hair back or you've got a scarf on your head or you do whatever i'm not going to see that but you know obviously behavior you know the person who's always saying well i could i could never change my nail polish hell until i check with my husband right now i've got you know i'm usually pet payment methods let me give you three one dollar bills in a five to let me write a check for something else ok maybe there at the end of the month that money is tight but maybe they're also being forced to kind of hide their spending or i can't make it a point let me call my husband before i make the appointment for my next have more experienced pilots often tell us they've seen this you know the boyfriend husband abuser whoever it is who wants to most folks you think if they bring you to your hair appointment are happy to drop you want you know get a sandwich guy whatever stay stays you know first of all stays and doesn't even want to stay in the waiting area w sit in the next because you know that they want to hear what the conversation and i think they don't want the cat let out of the bag and the other people which goes exactly to the other piece of this you know we talked about the relationship we talked about the ability to see some of these injuries but the other piece is that you know very often what we hear from victims is their behavior is so controlled their you know the odometer is checked on their car so when they go to shaun than two miles back they better not be more than four miles on the diameter so very often this is a piece that really makes this program important if you are an abuser especially if you have a certain social status it is important to you to have your wife girlfriend whoever it might be looking good so grudgingly even you may let them go to the salon because you know it is kind of look the reflection right it reflects well on you know that they look good sometimes culturally going to the salon is a part of the culture you know my mother goes my sister goes you know i don't want to let my victim go but i i sort of have to wear a and also if i'm jealous you know salons you know except you know your husband's there but for the most part it's mostly women and men so i don't feel quite so threatened about that so even for a victim who has very limited access to other people the salon may be one of the few places they are allowed to go and they might have an opportunity to be alone so you know that all of those things many professionals in the salon really places individuals who might get that information so this is really a very sophisticated program a lot of psychology behind  get people out to find out more about this program where would they go then just go to our website the middlesex da dot com and then there's a tab for the kind of program i just have one other question i think maybe cindy and elizabeth might be able to help us i know there are hair shows and i i'm wondering how i don't know if there's one in massachusetts or eastern mass is there a possibility that marian could come and speak at one of them are represented in i mean you can think about you don't have to answer now like that posting things there where we purchase our professional products starting with that and they have smaller classes that you could go to and they would probably be more receptive to it got to speak to the big e and then just see you know how we can go about it and you can probably have come in in one of those you know like a seminar seminar already running out of time so i just want to wrap it up and thank everybody for coming today