Goddard.mp4

Goddard.mp4: Video automatically transcribed by Sonix

Goddard.mp4: this mp4 video file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Speaker1:
Marty Goddard, welcome to the oral history project. Thank you. We're going to start by asking you to say and spell your name for the record, if you will, please.

Speaker2:
My name is Marty Marty. Why Goddard Geode R.D.,

Speaker1:
As I have learned, not Marty with an eye over the years, right? Marty, I want to start by asking you why and how and when did you first get involved in the crime victims movement?

Speaker2:
Well, there wasn't a crime victims movement as such then, so it's a little convoluted how I got into the eventual area. So bear with me for a second. In nineteen seventy two, I started working for in Chicago for a small family foundation, very liberal. We provided seed money for community organizations and groups that other corporations and foundations would not touch with a 20 foot pole. And it kind of opened my eyes to what was really going on in a large city in terms of a number of areas of crime and poverty. About six months after that experience, while I was still working there, I hooked up with a group called the National Runaway Switchboard. Metro, which is based in Chicago, still is based in Chicago, and they had received federal funding to handle runaways around the country on an 800 line. And I joined their board of directors. I was asked to do that and stayed there for eight years. And I'll tell you, that gave me a great foundation for finding finding out why were these kids leaving? What? What was the problem? And it was not just runaways and throwaways kids who just weren't wanted by their families or guardians, but so many of them had to leave home because they were sexually abused. And I I was just beside myself when I found the extent of the problem and part of being a board member was we had to do phone. Answer the phones and be trained on that.

Speaker2:
So we'd understand what our staffs went through. So we did that for a while and in nineteen seventy three I was asked to address a group of women who were who were interested in doing something about rape. Very vocal. It was just the whole issue of rape back then was just coming into the media about seventy three, a little bit in seventy two, but not too many articles written. And what was written was very critical. And I, they wanted to know how to raise money and write grant proposals. So I, as as one of the few foundation women back then I went and attended a meeting, gave my little presentation and they asked me if I wanted to stay and here was the turning point for me. I said yes. And they had their regular meeting and my, frankly, my jaw dropped. I saw after an hour, I realized there were two distinct, distinct groups of women in that room. One the most vocal and the largest. Use terms such as cops or pigs. All cops or pigs. Prosecutors are pigs. We've got to do something the area's bad and the other one was very quiet and very self-assured and composed, and they, whatever they contributed was was well spoken and a very low key. Let's see what we can do about the area. We need to do some research. Find out. Pardon me. Find out what the problem is. What can we do to address and fix the problem? The divide was so great that I after the meeting, I asked the second group, Could I have your name and your telephone number? I didn't know a single soul in that room.

Speaker2:
I would like to have lunch with you because there's some stuff going on here and I don't get it. So we did that. I hooked up with a woman who was assistant professor at U of I Chicago, Cynthia Porter, Dr. Cynthia Porter, Gary. And as it turns out, her degree was in small group communication. And boy, did she prove to be valuable in that area. And we talked about it, and Cindy and I decided because we were both very fortunate to be able to travel Iron Foundation business in the country and and Cindy for U. Of I business. So what we did, we decided that behind the scenes we would every city we went to, we would walk in cold. We were separate, of course, walk in cold to the local police department and we would say she from U of I and I from a foundation which of course, calmed everybody down. And we'd like to know we'd like to talk to someone who could tell us what's happening in your city and state regarding victims of rape? How are they handled? Do you have any brochures? And back in those days, the doors were open key here. The doors were open in seventy to seventy three, even seventy four. So we amassed information than we come home and have dinner and we take it all down and we'd start writing things.

Speaker2:
Well, it looks like it's because of this or this or this or this. And here's what I was doing, and here's what New York's doing and so forth. So in the meantime, we had no political connections. So what we did was and it was good because I could say, Gee, I'm Marty Goddard from the Webull Foundation, and people would just let me in their door. So I went cold into the state's attorney's office and I asked to see him. And don't ask to this day how I got in, but I did. Was a wonderful Republican call named Bernie. Bernard Kerik, and he proved to be. He liked the style I brought Cindy in. He liked our style. It was low key. We never used the word pig. And he said, Look, we've got a problem. I don't know what the answer is, but how would you like to kind of work with us to work it out? I said, great, but we need the cops in on this. So one day I was at a meeting and I met a sergeant. He had just made sergeant named Rudy Nimocks, who ended up, by the way, at the end of his career, being the second in line as deputy chief of the Chicago Police Department for Superintendent. So I mean, we we just hung together and work together all those years, and it was just amazing.

Speaker2:
So he was my foot in the door there, and I worked with with and through seven superintendents over the years. And then I thought, Well, gee, hospitals are the hospitals are key here. If, if, if what I'm hearing is correct, you all don't have any evidence. So how can we prosecute successfully even if you arrest somebody in the old days? It was the victim's fault, OK, or it was consensual or OK. She may have been raped, but it wasn't me. So I went to the hospital council and the president was Howard Cook at the time and I introduced myself. I don't know how these people agreed to meet, but I think they were so flabbergasted that I had a dress on and worked for a foundation they had heard of. And I just kind of got in and then with Cindy in tow. Holy cow. I mean, Cindy just charmed everybody. So we hooked together. State's attorney, Carrie Superintendent, was ratchford at that time, but Rooney Nimocks did the real work and then Howard Cook. And then we just started figuring out. I said, Give me your best people, two of your best people, the two best police officers, the two best prosecutors and the two best hospital people. Just and make it nurses. Thank you so. They did. We formed an ad hoc committee, we were so informal they were there to this day. I just love those people and we tore the issue apart.

Speaker2:
What is the problem? The problem was we weren't able to apprehend very many people, and when you did get somebody in custody, you couldn't prove your case. So then what do you do to solve that problem? First thing you do is you want to develop a way to collect trace evidence, and we beat our heads against the wall and we visited each other's agencies. And by the time we got to the crime lab, which eventually became my second home, I'm not kidding you at the Chicago P.D. We asked, talk to all the employees, didn't matter what level and said, What is it that you people need? Well, nobody had ever come in there and ask them before we got ever in. One day we were so overloaded with information we didn't have a tape recorder, so we had to scramble and take notes. And basically, here's what they told us. And this really kicked everything off. They said, Mark. We don't get evidence. Sometimes people try and they take two slides with swabs from, say, the vagina or the mouth and or the rectum. They put it on the slides. They make the slides. They rubber band them together in their face to face. So there goes that it's worthless. It's just absolutely worthless. We don't get hair. We don't get fingernail scrapings. We don't. Nothing's mark to tell you what's vagina and what is the rectum. We don't get decent clothing evidence. What they're doing is and by the way, when I say all of this, I want you to understand that this is not a criticism of the medical field because they didn't know nobody ever talked to them before.

Speaker2:
So they didn't know they thought they were helping and they would take scissors and which is very bad thing to do and just cut off clothes. Now, even if you've got a bullet hole or a knife, a knife mark, yes, you have to, of course, take their clothing off there in the air. However, you don't cut it because what you're doing is destroying evidence and you don't just rip it off. There are some circumstances where it doesn't matter about it. You just got it. Get to the patient. However, there are ways to do it to take that off so that you are not. They were cutting through bullet holes. They were cutting through the knife marks. Well, there's nothing the crime lab can really do because it's contaminated. It's contaminated with scissors. The fibers aren't the way they used to be when the crime was committed. And before I forget about the clothing issue, which which became a major issue for us is that back in those days and really up until I'm sorry to say the present time, not every hospital is is doing what I would like them to do. They didn't have any replacement clothing for victims. And I know some some guys from the departments of health around the country have said to me, I never heard of such a thing, and that doesn't really happen.

Speaker2:
Baloney, it does. And if you don't have replacement clothes and you're going to take the patient's underwear and jewelry and shoes and nylons and slip and their dress and their coat in the winter in Chicago, that's what happened and put them in bags. Turn them over to the crime lab. Well, excuse me, but what is she supposed to go home in? And not everybody wanted to tell their mom or their husband or their roommate that they had just been raped. So a lot of people wouldn't call. And do you know, and I'm telling you for sure, not only did I see this, but I've heard too many horror stories around the country. Victims were sent home in those little paper slippers, and they were sent home with a paper or cloth, hopefully cloth gown, one in the front facing front and the other tying around the back. That's what they got sent home in, and they were put in marked cars like the Chicago P.D. or the sheriff's department or whatever and driven home now. Gee, don't you think your neighbors are going to wonder why you're in a police car and why you're dressed in paper slippers and two surgical gowns? Well, of course. So that's an example of of really the horrendous, in my opinion, situation that existed back then. What else would you like to know I can go on for a long time?

Speaker1:
Well, really good segue way to to really describing when you got involved in the field and and take us also, you know, you're very involved in the eighties with the development of the rape kit and taking it on the National and International Road Show. What was the field like then? Excuse me, Marty, including a little bit about the context of the the era, the seventies and eighties.

Speaker2:
Well, now this is just my viewpoint. I'll talk about the seventies because I really started working on developing a rape kit on seventy six with this ad hoc group when I realized I wanted to incorporate in seventy five. It was called Citizens Committee for Victim Assistance. The IRS said. Quick make up a name and that's what I came up with. We refer to it as Kva. I went half time with the foundation because I didn't have any money. I had never fundraised for this group before and I needed health insurance, so I wasn't frankly confident that I could fundraise, even though as a foundation person, because nobody wanted to touch these areas. I'll tell you one thing all they did was want to fund the no offense to the groups, the YWCA and the Girl Scouts, and that's it. That was their end of their obligation for women's and girls' programs. So a bunch of us in the foundation world, women from Sears Corporation, you name it, there's a lot of money in Chicago to all the private foundations, the few that had women in good positions. We got together and we produce a slideshow and we got all the at the we got Eleanor Peterson bless her heart to agree, to give us one of the monthly foundation meetings. And we did. We had triple screens and everything, and we filmed it ourselves of ourselves, and we did a whole thing to encourage large corporations and foundations to start putting money into other kinds of women's and girls' groups.

Speaker2:
It took a while, but it did have an effect. I mean, most of the power, most of the foundation and corporate people were male and they held the big money, so they held the purse strings and it wasn't loosening up. And so and most and today, frankly, the same situation exists, except there's women and foundations slash corporate philanthropy, which we all this group of women help start. It came from Chicago, by the way, that organization and we hooked up with the National Council on Foundations. And there are there is a growing number of women in the field, thank heavens. But most of it is still with men and they didn't. They didn't get it. They didn't understand. And I understand because that was my dad's generation. So they didn't under-. You didn't say the word rape, OK, not in public and not in private. You didn't say in those days, incest. Now we call it child sexual abuse. You didn't say, talk about that stuff. So the money wasn't going there. It went to all the major medical research hospitals into the symphonies and to the arts and stuff, which is great because I support that too. But there was not much left over for alternative type funding, and it left out the domestic violence in the sexual assault and the kids, and it just left out this whole group of people. So at any rate, I'm kind of getting off the subject a little bit. You might want to refresh me on the question you originally asked.

Speaker1:
Well, actually, you're not getting off the subject at all. The good description of the context of the era as you became engaged in what was a very nascent victim assistance field. What was it like? Who? Who was involved? What were they doing in the in the eighties as a oh, in the 80s, you know, when it was starting to become a bit more of a field?

Speaker2:
Oh, I've got to tell you. Well, first of all, there wasn't much of anything and there were individual people, and I have to hand it. It was really started by individual people who were all living in different states doing their own thing, whether it was somebody whose child had been shot. And they said, and you know, a lot of it was to help with their grief, and a lot was they were just angry and they didn't know how to channel that anger. So they in their little community or then middle size, or maybe a large city, they all by themselves would sit there and talk to their spouse or their friends or coworkers and say, I've got to do something, what am I going to do? And it really started out with envelopes and pieces of letterhead and handwriting because people didn't. There weren't computers, really. Most people didn't have computers then, or they'd have an old typewriter, and they type out to their legislator, Dear dear senator, so-and-so, my son. I kill and I need some help, and we got to do something about this issue. Can I meet with you? Well, many times that wasn't paid any attention to. Maybe the legislator never saw it in the staff kind of, you know, threw it in the basket. Whatever it was, it wasn't an issue when there wasn't any real publicity on it. Now the women's movement, I will say, if you want some change made you better, make some noise.

Speaker2:
Ok, so that's what they did. I may disagree with how certain things were addressed in terms of solving the problem, but you do have to have that that element and then you can pave the way for other people to come in and sit down. And do, you know, separate the politics. I didn't have any Cindy didn't have any about the issue. Separate the politics from the actual. What is it that you want to accomplish? Do you want to create positive change and creating positive change where the three words that I and my staff and Cindy always made sure was our motto Create positive change, do not contribute to the problem, contribute to the solution. So if I'm in Chicago working on this rape thing and then eventually in seventy eight moving into child sexual abuse, then there's somebody in California and there's somebody in Florida and there's somebody in New York and there's somebody in North Dakota and there's somebody in Iowa. How did you hook up? Well, originally well through the the Council on Foundations. I mean, I was able to kind of meet other people who could put me in touch with people. But the the Nova conferences, jeepers, I think I was a member for 17 or so years and it was just a scraggly group. It was so small. It was like this. It was so small. It was like thirty five people, 40 tops and we would get together, mainly women, and we would get together from around the country.

Speaker2:
And of course, we weren't well funded, so we kind of stayed in dives. Pardon me. It's not bad enough that you don't get paid hardly anything. You got to stay in the worst motel in the city, but we did it and then it grows and along. Nothing happens independently as you start making contacts and you start developing a project and become known for it. The media now starts catching up, and gee, it isn't so taboo, you can actually write about this stuff. So the media nationally started to write and they would hear of this person in that person and so forth, and they would bring you in an interview. And it was a major education program for the media. You had to educate the media. They don't know anything. They didn't even know what the legal definition in their state was for rape or sodomy or incest. And you had to educate them at some point. I might as well have brought in a tape recorder because, you know, it's saying the same things all over again to every reporter. But I will tell you something about the media. I always found them to be very good, and they tried hard. They wanted to get their facts straight. The more they got educated, the more interested they were in not just writing for sensational purposes to sell newspapers or get TV advertising.

Speaker2:
So Cindy and I one day here's one of the you want to know how bad it was out there. One day we picked up the and I think it was the Chicago Tribune or the Sun-Times and and Tribune. It was a Tribune. And there was this big article in it said last night. A blond haired twenty three twenty five year old waitress at the blank, who lived on the block. Twenty three hundred block of blank got raped. I nearly lost my mind. I called Cindy and I said, Can you get out? Excuse me, can you get off from school early and we've got to meet with these people? So we walked again to, I'm telling you, we walked into the Tribune. We wanted to meet with the editor and we did. Well, of course, rape scared them and say, rape, and they go, Oh, we better see what this is. And we had this whole staff in there and we sat down and we were very calm and we said, This is why we're having a problem. Here's what the article said, but we didn't say the name. I said, Listen to me. Twenty three year old blond waitress at the end, you named her place in the twenty three hundred block of which was right around the corner from. So all I had to do is walk up to that restaurant, I know it was, you know, when she came to work and I said, you just gave it.

Speaker2:
It wouldn't matter if you gave her name now. And they they first. They were very defensive and I got to tell you, they never did it again. They apologize. They never did it again. Chicago greeting company Same thing. Greeting cards, everybody seen them. It happened to have been based in Chicago, so here's the card. One of my board members brought it in and was freaking out. And I said, Ruth, what's the matter? And she said, Read this and it said, help stop rape on the front of the card. Open it up. And it says, Say yes, I just cannot tell you these were in the hallmark stores. Pardon me. So I sat down and I wrote a letter to the company and I didn't threaten a lawsuit. I didn't call them names. I just said, Look, this is really offensive and do you? I'd like to meet with you. Do you understand what's happening? You guys, I'm sure, think it's funny, but it's not funny. And I got the best letter back you'd ever believe. One by one. Do you see how long this can take? You're talking about one one incident by one incident by one incident. It took forever. Imagine how many years it took us to go. State's attorney to state's attorney to cop, to detective, to deputy, to doctor to pediatrician, to nurse, to nurse practitioner. It took forever and by the times.

Speaker2:
At the end of seven years, when we finally decided our mission was completed, we decided to shut down the board and I decided to shut down the group and we had trained, I think sixty five hundred hand trained our small little staff, six thousand five hundred law enforcement hospital and prosecutors in the state of Illinois. And by the end of that seven year, the rape kit, which we started developing in seventy six, we put it together ourselves. And I want to tell you how desperate we were. B. I. What is it done? And Bradstreet would not give me credit. I mean, who would, you know, give credit to the Citizens Committee for Victim Assistance putting together a rape kit? I needed to put them. Nobody would give me the components, the combs and the slides and the swabs and the male folders and the paper bags and the printing materials and the box and the evidence tape. They wouldn't give it to me and I didn't have any money, so not enough to fund that up front. So I didn't know what to do. And one of my best friends from the foundation world was Margaret Standish. Bless her heart, who ran the Playboy Foundation at the time. Now, Christy Hefner's pretty much done a lot of work in the area and carried on, but Christy wasn't there then. And Margaret and I decided we had to put our side aside our feelings for objectivity of women in the magazine.

Speaker2:
And I said, Margaret, I'm in trouble here and I can't get this product manufactured. Nobody will send me anything. So here's what she did. She called Dun Bradstreet and said, We're going to order these components. Give us credit. You're going to use it through the foundation. So the corporation gave us the credit. Wow. And you're not going to believe this. I didn't have enough staff to put these together. We had to put together out the first ten thousand to test them around the state before we did anything else. So first, the city of Chicago and then Cook County and then the rest of the state, county by county, there are a hundred and two counties. So she said, I've got this great idea, Marty. You're not going to believe this. I said, What is it? She said, Well, everybody just loves the Playboy Bunny and they just all we have all these older women who are volunteers, women and men, and they senior citizens, and they want to do something. So we're going to provide the sandwiches and the coffee and the juice, and we're going to invite them up to the Playboy offices. And we're going to give you a huge room with all these assembly tables, you know, folding tables and we're going to get your we're going to have the components ship to Playboy and we're going to set everything out and you come in and decide how you want it done.

Speaker2:
Train them and they'll do it. And that's what they did. Well, they were so excited. They did this as a volunteer. We there were so many people up there. They were like members of RSVP, the retired service persons. And once the word got around, guess where we got to go today and they give us the stuff to eat and everything. And we're. And while everybody wanted to come downtown Chicago. Then after they heard that and I took a lot of flack from the women's movement, but too bad, and they gave me ten thousand dollars. I had to have a huge. Out a huge amount in those days, and boy, was I roasted for that, but I got to tell you what I said, if it was Pan, I was a hustler. No, but playboy, please give me a break. So that's what we did. And then I was able to contract out with Becton, Dickinson and Go Pro. And do the whole thing. And then all. You are just in 19. By that time, I had phased out of phased out Citizen's Committee for Victim Assistance, which, by the way, if you're familiar at all with nonprofits, hardly anybody phases themself out voluntarily. We had raised a ton of money every year, so that wasn't an issue. It's just a we accomplished our our stuff, so I moved on and I'll tell you about that in a second.

Speaker1:
Marty, you were you were telling us about getting all the volunteers to put together the rape kit and phasing your organization out, right?

Speaker2:
So we phased out Kva and exactly at that time, the newly elected attorney general of Illinois, Neil Hartigan. Appointed found out that I was available and appointed me as chief of the Crime Victims Division for the state of Illinois, so that basically was overseeing statutes and the particular statute was the crime victims compensation program

Speaker1:
In the Eighties

Speaker2:
Was this this was in the 80s. As a matter of fact, this was nineteen eighty three. About six months after we closed our group and. So I went there and nobody I mean, he hadn't been AG before he was lieutenant governor, but he wasn't real involved in the victim assistance movement or victim's movement. And so he just said, Look, go up there and find out what's going on because we're getting criticized for this and my predecessor was criticized. Tell me what the program is about. What are the problems? And then tell me what you would devise to solve the problems? Well, I went up there. Holy Moly. I went up there. And of course, most of the people are holdovers from the prior administration, which wasn't the same political party is as my boss. So they were just furious. I mean, I got the cold shoulder in the minute. I walked in the door and was introduced by one of the assistant attorney generals. It was like some people actually turned their back to me. It was simply unbelievable. So I asked them we had an attorney there and I asked her. I said, Look, would you? I need to be educated about this program. I've been criticizing it as an outsider for seven years now. I'm here and I need to know what's been going on. Would you show me your case logs, what kind of cases you're getting, how many you've had? It was barely 10 years old. They had hardly given away any money and I knew there was a problem.

Speaker2:
And so many of the rape victims, the few who had had the guts to report and then pursue some reimbursement weren't getting their money. And I just thought something is wrong up there. So. They got me the files, and I spent so much time I would work at night alone, I got used to get scared. I'd hear all these creaking noises. We were in an old building then and I heard all these creaking noises and not getting scared reading these files, but I thought, just stick with it and find out. I finally realized they had accumulated, and I'm not even going to go there as to why this happened, because it doesn't matter anymore for the prior eight years. They had a ninety seven percent case backlog when we got there. There were, I think our oldest case was eight and a half years never been processed. And I, I I just was so upset and I and they were barely processing. They were way under. They were at twenty five thirty five percent of their current intake, so it was hopeless because they couldn't keep up with their current, much less address the back. So each one behind closed doors, I interviewed every person and I said, No, I know, you know, let's put any politics aside and let's find out what's going on here because this isn't good for you and your career. This is certainly not good for any attorney general who comes into this office, and it's really bad for the victims.

Speaker1:
Was that one of your challenges? Just the fact that although you were starting a program, what were some of the challenges? You had a backlog?

Speaker2:
We had a terrible backlog. And I found out here was one of the reasons they never those positions. Of course, I was one to, I'm sure, but those positions were so political they were all so politically appointed that the person who took them didn't know what they were doing. And I was the first person who had a background ever to come in there in victim assistance, particularly sexual assault. The child cases, who who knew the players in the state who had some idea of what you were supposed to be doing. So I did the interview process and I found out that, you know, you couldn't really blame most of you. I couldn't. And the reason is, is because nobody had trained them on how to write an investigative report. They just didn't know they could do the easy ones, like with a robbery victim or somebody who was hit on the head and needed some stitches and we needed to pay for it or something. But they couldn't handle the rapes and the child sexual abuse and the more complicated domestic disturbances because domestic violence had not back in those days been brought to the forefront either. So people didn't know enough about the subject. It wasn't just the police and the prosecutors and hospital, it was the people in the state level and in the governor's office do.

Speaker2:
So all of the players are so many different players and advocates really were kind of like, Oh, go away, you know, you have no power, you have no clout. Get go. We've got more important things to address. So until that time, there was no real advocate who knew what needed to be done. And I don't mean to sound egotistical, but I saw right away. I mean, I like solving problems like that, and I saw right away what needed to be done. So we started training and we and within twelve and a half, almost thirteen months, we had reduced the entire backlog. There wasn't one open case and I got the staff. We got the staff to 50 percent of their current load, so they'd they'd never be more than that behind. And those cases I wanted them handled in 90 days. Sixty 30 create an emergency fund, OK and get out there and train the hospitals, train the police because they didn't know what to do. Sometimes they try to help you out and write things on the report, which were just found, found marijuana, cigarette and rape victims pocket claim denied.

Speaker1:
So you were also in developing training. I think one of the things you're known for, Marty, you develop protocols for people. Yes, very rigid protocols. Well, I

Speaker2:
Don't know about rigid, but

Speaker1:
Well, but I guess where I'm leading you is that you develop them for Illinois. And then others started hearing about Marty and your team and what the state was doing. So what were some of the strategies you use in those early days? And I really want to lead you to this conversation, if I may, of being so helpful to so many other people outside of Chicago, outside of Springfield, in Illinois. Ok. With with the movement early days. No one. Everything you're talking about, how would you do it? What were some of the things you did that that made you who people remember you as today?

Speaker2:
I'm not saying this is the right thing to do because I have some pretty strong feelings about how victim assistance and direct service workers, including all the professions, particularly advocates. They don't take care of themselves and I was one of those people. All right. I worked holidays. Yeah, I worked Saturdays and Sundays. I lived close to the office. I was in there seven days a week and at some point, you can't take that anymore, OK? But I felt I'm a Type-A personality anyway. And I mean to the core and I felt driven. I felt that after seeing all the kids and and the adults and other experiences in my life, I felt absolutely driven. I felt I had to save the world and I was going to start with Chicago. And move to Cook County and move to the rest of the state, and there was something in the back of my mind that said, Gee, maybe the circumstances will be such that at some time I can go beyond the borders of Illinois, and I would say that, you know, I didn't not taking care of yourself and thinking you can save the world is absolutely nonsense, you know? And believe it or not, I was so type A. I joined paid all this money. Hundreds of dollars to join a health club never went in the door. So, you know, what is that about? But at any rate, because there was too much to do and I had to do it.

Speaker2:
What happened was while I was at the AG's office, Oh, I want to backtrack a little bit. You asked about a strategy. I would say the most important strategy is don't name call. But along with that is be nice, have a little class and keep one foot in with the institutions and one foot out and then you can move anywhere you want. That's great. Left, right up, down, backward, forward. And but keep one in and keep one out so you're not bought people. And I never took a dime. They wanted to fund me. I said, I don't want any police department money. I don't want any hospital council money. And I do not want any state's attorney's money. It will all be private and it was from foundations and corporations. And the reason is is because I knew then I couldn't keep a foot and a foot out. So separate out. Don't be a slave. Then pretty soon people would tell me how to do this and do that. I'm too much of a free spirit. There is no way I was going to do that. That control issue can be pretty bad. Ok, so that's one thing in nineteen eighty four. Actually, she's Californian right here now. A judge, Judge Lois Haight Harrington at the time, Judge Lois Haight now invited about 80 people to spend five or six days at Quantico in Virginia, at the Academy and FBI Academy.

Speaker2:
And it was divided up between law enforcement and forensics and advocates of which I was one, and prosecutors and judges and hospital people. And the point was to sit down, find out what was going on in this country, what people have done. And I've got to tell you this story. You won't believe it. Well, I didn't have. We had already developed our little kit and we had developed a training slideshow. Obviously, we trained those people. So I didn't bring it because I wasn't asked to do anything. I was supposed to be an audience member. And I remember Judge Haight sitting up there with her Department of Justice people, and they're the 80 of us are here. And then certain people had been asked to do presentations. Pretty much, guys. So this one man gets up. He's a professor. Which is fine. He gets up and he has done something on evidence collection for sex sex crimes victims. He was primarily adult victim, so he gives his slides. And I thought, well, gee, you know, I didn't know anybody else was doing that. So I'm looking in the slide comes on and it's the body. It's a these are all deceased victims. They're all naked, real people who got killed, raped and killed. And all they did was put a little black band over the eye. The eyes there are laying out and obviously before the autopsy. And, you know, I mean, from head to toe, you saw their toes in the bottom of their feet and their breasts and everything.

Speaker2:
I went nuts. He not only had one slide, he had several slides. I'm holding on to the chairs and the chair arms, and I'm saying to myself, Calm down, don't say anything, don't embarrass Lois. Don't do anything. So this went on, and frankly, it wasn't a very good presentation because he did it from a different kind of view. He just didn't have anything like the way you should interview and you shouldn't use the word interrogation. You can interrogate which everybody had done, by the way. And you can interrogate a suspect but don't have a sign on the room saying. Interrogation room and being the victim of any crime in there. And that's what every police department in this country had. Ok. He was still in that mode and interrogate the victim and do this and do that. And he he didn't understand anything about medical forms that you, you know, so forth. So I after it was over, I was pretty upset and I went to loss and I said, Something's wrong here and I really object. Can I FedEx my slide show in which you set up a room for me? She did. They liked it. People saw it. They I wrote a grant. Whatever an application for it got, it went national. That's what they wanted. They got a national advisory board of FBI and everybody. I tried to get everybody I could across the country representing all the different disciplines.

Speaker2:
Got this? Twenty six person advisory board got up to speed on DNA, HIV as much as one could back then arrange to go half time with the Attorney General's Office so I can keep my insurance notice. This pops up and went on a Department of Justice grant and thank you, Lois, because if it hadn't been for you and for VOCA and for, you know, the The Office for Victims of Crime, this would never have happened. This would never have happened. Each state would. Each county, state and the city would just keep developing their own little thing from one little packet to 20 items and they wouldn't be coordinated. So what their goal was was pretty cool. Their goal wasn't just to develop something and let it sit on the shelf and then tell everybody in response to President Reagan's task force on on crime victims. But he. But they wanted a product developed in a training program, which I felt had to be both visual and written, developed. And then they would fund somebody to travel around the country, pick their people, pick their states and get a good group together before you even got off the plane and train them so that you train the trainers so that they could go throughout their state. And there was nothing proprietary Terry about this. In other words. I wasn't out to make money off of a rape kit.

Speaker2:
I would never do that. The federal government certainly couldn't. So what you do is you take, excuse me, you take your product and your training protocol, which tells the hospitals and the police. We went beyond hospitals. Hospitals, prosecutors. Police. The forensic for what you need to do. How you need to do it. And for kids and for adults. And then you say to them, we're going to give you the slideshow, the tape, the training manual, we're going to give you everything and I'm being paid for by the federal government. So here's my number. I will give you three visits in a year beginning medium and with larger and larger groups of people, so that at the end of that year, you take this kit. And if you can disagree with me on a component, you can disagree with our committee on on any number of issues in there. But take it as your jumping off spot so that you can develop something that will conform to your state laws your city in. Only state laws, you may have to change a few things. You go out and get the money to fund those because they have to be paid for by somebody. You develop all the paperwork. We've given you the basics and cover it everything we could and you change them to fit in. You change the name of it and make it the Indiana. I make it, the Texas make it the New York sexual assault kit.

Speaker2:
And you do it. So it's now tailor made. It doesn't matter if Marty Goddard was here or not. Ok. Because in a few years, you aren't going to be there and nobody will know it doesn't matter how it started. What matters is that you get something done, get these guys. You know, when you've got them, convict them on the evidence, but make sure you're collecting the right evidence, you're preserving it correctly, and that the all the disciplines involved are trained enough to understand, such as the crime crime labs in this country. Every crime lab I went to DA's would say, No, I've never been there. They never even met the people. They call up the night before and say, Work that case, the guys are going, What work? That case? So it, you know, you just don't pop off some DNA stuff now. You just don't do that overnight and you don't even the clothing and everything, they've got to go find it. Sometimes it's some warehouse way off the property. So that was a big thing. Ok, communicate. If you need this for court, you better find out. Train the medical people and get them to do what you what you need. And you better go down and do a little tour of the crime lab. And then you guys, before you get on the stand better talk to the DA's to find out what it is you're supposed to say.

Speaker1:
Marty, looking back over as and especially the early days, but you know, really the field now is over 30 years, 30 years old. Can you just tell me what was one of the failures that you see in crime victim assistance field

Speaker2:
In general in general? I've got to tell you the political, the political bickering between victim service groups and then within the broad category of of victim service, your domestic violence within domestic violence, within rape, within child, the egos, their major legal problem. So just because you're doing good for the world doesn't eliminate that problem. It's a corporate. It's just a human problem. It's a corporate. It's everything. So the same things, everybody's trying to get the same pot of money. There isn't much money. Everybody's fighting over it, and there's way too much backstabbing going on. I would say that in those days, the biggest failing, the biggest well, it's today to. The biggest failure overall is that people who provide what I consider to be the basic human services to other fellow human beings are not recognized appropriately. They are paid if they're paid at all. They are paid on such a low scale that hardly anybody can believe it. One of the states I worked with was North Dakota, and I was addressing everyone from the state who worked in in rape victim services and afterwards, as we were all just kind of talking and seeing what the next meeting would hold. I don't know how it came up, but I said, Well, how much do you make? And she said nine thousand and she had a child. And I found out that that was not abnormal, particularly in a state that historically doesn't have much money for too many services anyway, much less this type of service, you know. And as I went around the country, Kentucky, Buffalo, New York, it was people were making nothing. You can't raise you can't support yourself. Much less a child on that. Ok, so you either have to marry a rich guy or you have to inherit some money or you have to win the lottery. Good luck. Because now things are different and there are some people in the field who are paid extremely well. But the vast majority of the the people in the trenches and I keep saying women because most of them are in these types of areas. What can I say?

Speaker1:
One greatest accomplishment that is promoted victims' rights and needs, if you can think of one.

Speaker2:
Oh, I, that's easy. And I have to hand this to President Reagan. The Victims of Crime Act and along with the creation of the Victims of Crime Act, the creation of the through the Department of Justice of the Office for Victims of Crime. And the reason that I picked that out is because it ties right into just what I was saying before that act and that office was created. There is no prestige, no recognition, and I'm not even forget the word prestige. There was no recognition. I mean that in a good way of the area, much less of the people. And you know, you can only volunteer just so long and you can only work on three thousand budget a year. Some of the groups, parents of murdered children. I remember they would come to us and say, Could we have $500? That was our all yearly budget. Can we have five hundred dollars because we can't afford to make copies? Oh, please. So it gave recognition. And then of course, it gave money and we were this country. I am very grateful personally and professionally to have to have really worked for under the tutelage of two great women. What was he and Jane Byrne see? I'm telling you right now if it hadn't been for those two people, both of whom were super qualified, we're not talking the political stuff here. These women knew what they were doing. Again, we would not be here today talking. All right.

Speaker1:
What is needed, Marty today to continue the growth and professionalism of our field? Or can you think of anything that's missing?

Speaker2:
We have to continue to work together through our differences. We need to I think we're doing a good job, but we need to be better organized. We need more numbers and we need to develop some type of a mentoring situation because very frankly, you know, I'm 60 something and a lot of us. Well, you can smile, but a lot of us are going to be up there soon, OK? And 10 years, five years, 15, 20 years. What are we going to do? We were so rushed and so poor and so overburdened. Back in the old days that we didn't have time to mentor anybody, we were lucky we could eat, you know, one meal a day. So that mentoring somebody is a luxury and being able to be mentored is a luxury. So what we need to do is figure out a way that we can set up something that will encourage people to come in and say, Look, you won't have to live on three thousand a year. There there is federal legislation in state and city legislation now, and a number of various things aren't so bad. The way has been paved. Please come into the field. We need smart, energetic people who really want to do this. And of course, money can't be their goal in life because it ain't going to come.

Speaker2:
So not in this field, but it does. It's not as destitute as it used to be. Thank heavens. And we need to get that going. We and this political bickering, which I think is settle down a bit, but you know, we need to have a stronger lobbying group because I'll tell you what a fear of mine is. I watched it happen in the seventies, eighties and nineties. There are other groups not affiliated with victim assistance issues who as soon as they see a pot of money possibly available, want to get into it? I don't. They'll tack on something at the end of the bill of another bill. They will lobby. They have the money, they have the offices set up in Washington, and many attempts have been made to take the victims money when they finally got some and to siphon it off. And in Illinois, I'll tell you, the police training academies wanted it. Bless their hearts. They still they had funding from the state. Ok, you can't take victims money. That's where I how I feel. The highway people wanted it to fill up how to build a new wide and highway, fill a potholes. I'm not kidding you. We had to be down in that State House, constantly working both sides of the aisles to and then reading.

Speaker2:
I had to set up a committee, pull off valuable staff just to read every bill and make sure something wasn't slipped in at the end. And it was all the time and we'd stop it. We had some Republicans and Democrats who were so interested that they'd say they call me up in the middle of the night and say, You're not going to believe what's in this bill. Get down here tomorrow. So I would. Ok, so there are all kinds of games that lobbyists can play in the and the, you know, that's where the money is. We're not going to have the money for that for the big time stuff. We can't take people on boat cruises and, you know, trips around the world. We can't do that. So we have to appeal to their basic human nature, their kindness and their consideration for others. And and hopefully they have will have minds open enough or do have minds open enough to realize that as much as I'm for the defendant and rights, it's we've got to even up the score and we had a chance. And now don't please take it, try to take it away. Not a good thing.

Speaker1:
Marty, what advice can you give to professionals and volunteers who have more recently joined our field?

Speaker2:
I think I would like to reiterate a couple of things. One is take care of yourself. Take time out. Go on the vacation. Do something nice for yourself. Don't feel you have to save the world. You do not have to work 80 hours a week. Nobody really has to work 80 hours a week and learn to delegate, which is real hard for the Taipei's amongst us. Learn to delegate and put your false ego aside. It's OK to give credit to other people. It's OK to to give them responsibility and not have to lay awake at nights. Worrying. Is it going to get done? Get done right?

Speaker1:
Good advice. Do you have a vision for the future of our field?

Speaker2:
I don't know if it's a vision, if I would use that, that terminology. What I would like to see is the victims' movement grow to a much larger size and much more influential size than it exists today. It's only been in terms of one's life, a very short period of time from the days when we had nothing until today two thousand three. We had no money and now we're at least doing pretty well in that area if we can keep it going. I'd like to see the politicking be reduced. I would like to see a much more cohesive organization of people assembly of people. I would like to see more of a mixing of issues instead of the sexual assault. People just fighting, doing everything and being by themselves and the domestic violence and the and the parents of murdered children and the court based services and the police training. Everybody is very divided up and kind of fractionalized. So somehow we've got to through more conferences through much more communication. We need to spread our knowledge and our our feelings to other people and get them more involved. We're just too separated. And again, I'm concerned about bringing in the next generation. Where are they going to come from? Who's going to teach them? What are they going to be taught? I mean. Because we lack glamour. We're not celebrities. We don't make tons of money. It's not a field. I don't think that most kids say, Gee, when I grow up, I want to become a rape victim advocate or I want to deal with domestic violence. Unless something happens to you in your own life, you basically are like everyone else and there's no blame here. You don't think much about that kind of stuff unless it's a member of your family who is harmed or a coworker or a friend.

Speaker2:
And then all of a sudden your eyes start opening up and you say, Gee, this hit home. You know, it would help a lot, too, if people would open up if everybody just gave who can give gave five dollars a year. Do you realize what that would do? And I'm speaking also to the legislators of this country. I know it's a tough time for us. We have budget problems. We've got a possible war effort going on. It's tough and everybody has to make deep cuts. But I'll tell you what. Please, please do not use the victims money as a place to go. There is so much pork barrel stuff going on in this country. It's published in the papers every year. I just read about some of the most atrocious projects I've ever heard of. It's absolutely stupid. I'm not. I'm not. I wasn't born yesterday. Obviously, the fact is, I understand that everybody in the Senate and House wants to bring home to their constituents a million for this and a million for that. But this is ridiculous. If you take that list and the names of some of these projects are sin and compare it to to the value that that million, 10 million, 50 million, a hundred million, which in terms of our government is practically nothing anyway we can do. The number of people see victim services is exponential. It's it. It goes on and it's one person training who trains others who then helps 50 people who then help two hundred people. It doesn't just stay in its little little circle here. Go ahead.

Speaker1:
What's your greatest fear for the field

Speaker2:
That people are going to like they did in the old days? They're going to try to a cap the money, be make sure they don't have to pay out any more than they have. They feel they have to, depending on political pressures, and see that they're going to just cut into it and take it for highways and whatever else you name the issue. You know somebody's going to want to be to take it. And it's not. I won't even say fear, because that sounds whiny. But the fact of the matter is it really isn't fair. It isn't fair. And why don't we just take a look at one of the biggest businesses in this country? And what is it? It's the criminal justice system. It isn't the victims justice system. It's the criminal justice system. The number of jobs, the billions of dollars collectively that goes to the prison system system that goes for medical treatment, that goes for lawyers, that goes for courthouses, that goes for all of this stuff. And I'm I'm all for defendants rights. So let me assure you. But you add up what the victims get. Add up all the compensation programs in this country. Add up all the victim services and it will be an appalling gap like that. Now, victims, are you and me in the past and the present or in the future. Regular people go about their business and something happens to them.

Speaker2:
And if they are lucky enough to survive, in my opinion and the opinion, I hope of the majority of the citizens of this country. They deserve to have the services available and services cannot be done for free like they were in the old days. They can't. People have to get paid, they have to get trained. They have to have the right kind of smarts to do this. It can't just be any person who says, I think I'll do this because not everybody can speak in public. Not everybody can design a program. Not everybody can write a brochure. Not everybody can conduct a training session. So it has to be. You have to have some filtering systems there. And, you know, I wanted to go back quickly to something in terms of in terms of Illinois, I didn't mention how important it is for the legislative process. I talked briefly about working both sides of the aisle, but there is a he's now retired, but a gentleman named Aaron Jaffe in a. Administrative assistant Francine Stein, who really set up and design the Illinois Rape Study Committee out of the House and it was because of those original 12, I think we did them in nineteen seventy six. It was published original 12 pieces of legislation. It's because of those 12 initial pieces of legislation, all of which passed that people throughout the rest of the country began to model there.

Speaker2:
Take a look at their legislation or lack thereof and model their packages in and many examples on the Illinois Legislative Package Rape Study Committee. And I'll tell you, so that's real. I think that's what people need to do. One of the things people need to do, they need to go back, take a look at what they've got on the books, make sure it got changed the way they want it. Start tackling some new things that people never got done before. And the other thing in regards to police, and I'll really compliment except Superintendent Richard Brozak of the Chicago Police Department, if it had not been for that man who created a special sex crimes unit for the first time in the department's history, he mandated training that my staff and I come in and do training for all nine hundred detectives who most of whom had never had anything in this area before he mandated the use of anatomical dolls, which we brought in and every department had it. Every precinct had those styles so that the kids could be properly interviewed and he actually accepted, believe it or not, training bulletins written by advocates. So that was their technical bulletins were put in their training books, and that was the end of that on how to handle cases. So I think those are necessary things that everybody can do really starting tomorrow.

Speaker1:
Thank you for bringing up, you know, the names of people. Are there any other people who very briefly just impacted you early on or impacted the field?

Speaker2:
Yes. Well, there are a lot of people and I've mentioned a few, but I would have to say that Anne Seymour is definitely one of the top people. And I met Angie, I think, back in nineteen eighty four and I didn't know who she was. I had never heard of her before. And she has a a dynamic personality, and so I was automatically drawn to her. She seemed she was very bright and seemed to know a bit about the field and was getting herself educated like most of us had to do self education. And she became, in my opinion, probably the top catalyst in the victims movement in this country. And the reason I say that is because if you don't have somebody who's got all those special talents who acts as a as first and foremost a catalyst, and that's what she is. They're are the ones who are coming up with the bright ideas. They're the ones who know everybody in all the states and beyond the United States borders. They're the ones who bring unlikely, in many cases, unlikely parties together. They're the ones who make the contacts between A and B, so B can go to sea and seek and go to D.

Speaker2:
And if you don't have that, that's been kind of our undercurrent of the movement for the past 20 years, because if you don't have that, it's real, real hard. It's very fractionalized. And so and has done that. She's also a program innovator. I can tell you that by by working with her and and she's got great ideas. Obviously, she had a dynamite education somewhere and she can come up with this stuff. And she's a great writer and probably one of the best I used to think I was so great. Forget it. She's one of the best trainers I have ever seen in any field in my life. The other one is David Lloyd, working with all his kids. He's worked for so many organizations. He and I even worked briefly together in Alabama, the Child Advocacy Center. Carolyn Hightower, whom I adore Carolyn, was my grant monitor at OVC, and I didn't know her before either. Fantastic person kept me on the straight and narrow as much as one can do that. And she was just wonderful, and she even came to a couple of training sessions with me to check things out, and she really was very supportive of me. So I'm appreciative.

Speaker1:
Well, now that you brought up David Lloyd, Marty, you're famous in our field for one line, I've been asked by many people who knew I was going to be visiting with you today to ask you for the oral history of the victims rights movement in this field. Could you please repeat that line?

Speaker2:
You don't have to pluck one hundred head hairs and 50 pubic hairs from every single sexual assault victim who walks through the emergency room door. Period. Zip nada. End of it. Finney.

Sonix is the world’s most advanced automated transcription, translation, and subtitling platform. Fast, accurate, and affordable.

Automatically convert your mp4 files to text (txt file), Microsoft Word (docx file), and SubRip Subtitle (srt file) in minutes.

Sonix has many features that you'd love including powerful integrations and APIs, collaboration tools, secure transcription and file storage, upload many different filetypes, and easily transcribe your Zoom meetings. Try Sonix for free today.