The National Initiative
The Silent Witness National Initiative was a not-for-profit grassroots organization begun in 1990 in Minnesota. A group of artists and writers who were distressed by a rash of domestic violence homicides decided to do something to draw attention to and begin to help stop the carnage. They created twenty-seven life-sized red wooden figures representing all the women who were killed in acts of domestic violence in Minnesota in 1990. They called them the Silent Witnesses. After a march to the state capitol in 1991, attended by 500 people, the Witnesses appeared in 60 locations across the state in just two years. Something was happening! In 1993 the Minnesota Witnesses traveled to Washington DC to help pass the first Violence Against Women Act.
The National Initiative—events of the first decade
Inspired by the impact of the Exhibit on many lives, a few of the project supporters came together with Janet Hagberg and Jane Zeller in 1994 with the determination to create a larger goal, namely the formation of a national initiative dedicated to the elimination of domestic murders. It included a national march in Washington DC in 1997 calling for a healing of domestic violence in the US. It was then that a five-part process model evolved starting with the creation of Silent Witnesses Exhibits in all 50 states.
Within one year, as of September 1995, a total of 800 Silent Witnesses had been created representing women who were killed because of domestic violence in seventeen states. By February of 1996 twenty-four states were involved. By the time of the March to End the Silence in October 1997 all fifty states were involved along with eight other countries. Organizers from all the states and other countries brought 1500 Silent Witnesses to Washington to march from the Washington monument to the national capitol. Senator Paul and Sheila Wellstone, Minnesota’s Senator and his wife were host and hostess for the event. A few years later Nancy Rafi, by now a seasoned Silent Witness leader, led a second march, in Rhode Island, attended by the Rhode Island attorney general.
In 2000 Janet Hagberg and the Silent Witness board chair, Susan Mundale, wrote a book called Results 2000, chronicling how each state was involved in special projects that had been suggested in the five-part process, as well as measuring their homicide rates for domestic violence over a three-year period. That report was sent to all the attorneys general in the United States.