FACTS: One in 4 women will experience domestic violence during her lifetime. Every year, 1 in 3 women who is a victim of homicide is murdered by her current or former partner.

“Now when I look in the mirror, I feel like I’ve changed, like I´m another person. I feel more confident. My self-esteem has grown enormously”.

So says Adela, who is attending a domestic violence workshop being held in the Riverdale area of Maryland.

The “Pursuing Our Dreams” workshops, directed by community outreach facilitator Ana González have been meeting regularly for weeks. In the first sessions, the women let everything out, tearfully sharing their most stressful experiences with six or seven fellow workshop attendees. They talked about their insecurities, their fear, and their unhealthy dependence on their partners, problems that plague many traumatized victims of domestic violence.

The workshop session I attended had moved on to a second phase. Under the guidance of Ms. González, the group talked about self-esteem: what it is, whether they had it, whether it had grown over the course of the workshop. They all agreed that it had.

While bolstering self-esteem is an important step for women who are trying to recover from domestic violence, Ms. Gonzalez says that the workshops have a greater long-term goal:

“The workshops are really all about creating women leaders. I would like these women to eventually set up their own workshops, and then go one step further: create an organization of their own for the protection of women”.

Ana González began and currently carries out these workshops on a volunteer basis. She previously worked in a similar capacity at Casa de Maryland. She is now looking for funding to expand this initiative. She says that while she knows the women have grown a lot through the workshops, she has also learned a lot from them:

“The women who come here have suffered a lot, but are also very strong. I admire their ability to solve their own problems and move forward. They are an inspiration.”