Fighting domestic violence.

• Author: Ervin, Mike
• Position: On Our Own/Hear Our Cries women's group

Chicago

The bustling corridors outside centralized domestic-violence court in Chicago are packed with harried people. In the midst of the fray, Susan Murphy Milano moves calmly through doors usually reserved for attorneys and court employees.

It is testimony to the power and influence she has built in the year since she helped start On Our Own/Hear Our Cries, a group dedicated to protecting women who are trying to escape domestic violence.

While court is in session, Milano sits in the gallery or stands next to the woman appearing before the judge. She thinks the presence in the room of someone from On Our Own makes the system do more to protect women.

"I just want them [the judges] to do a good job," she says. "I don't want more women to die like my mother did."

Milano was in the corporate world doing mergers and acquisitions in 1989, when she went to her father's house one day and found her mother dead on the kitchen floor from a point-blank pistol shot to the head. Milano's parents had been separated, against her father's wishes. That day, her mother had brought over the papers for the sale of the family house. The papers were on the kitchen table, and Milano's father lay dead in the bedroom, having shot himself with the same gun he used to kill her mother.

It was Milano's nightmare come true. When she was a child, her father--a violent-crimes detective with the Chicago police--ripped the phone out of the wall when she crawled up on a kitchen chair and tried to call for help during one of his abusive rages. The times that the police did respond, he would flash his badge and they would go away.

For years after her parents' death, Milano barely functioned through a paralyzing depression. She hated all police. She began to recover when she realized she could help save the lives of other women in situations like her mother's.

"If I knew then what I know now, she would be alive," Milano says. "She wouldn't have gone there alone." Milano considers it a measure of success...