A victim of family violence is running the distance of two marathons to help raise awareness for domestic violence and to support the Domestic Violence Centre Initiative Committee.
The Fear Within run fundraiser will be done by city police officer Const. Gareth Scott, who said that his experiences with domestic violence growing up in London, England, were the reasons he decided to do the run all these years later.
“I wanted to do something positive out of a negative situation,” he said. “You can either deal with it or get used to carrying it with you.”
The run will be a total of 90 kilometres and was mapped out so that Scott would hit all corners of the city to show domestic violence is something that can affect anyone.
Along with his sisters and his mother, Scott and his family received years of abuse from their father (also a police officer) and he said the family just went on a day-to-day basis with the abuse received.
“We were all in survival mode,” he said. “(My mother) took the brunt of it.”
Mauren Collins, co-chair of the initiative, said that Alberta had the highest proportion of women dealing with spousal violence in Canada in 2004, as well that out of the 40 homicides in Edmonton in 2005, 10 per cent were domestic homicides.
“It’s an issue that’s crying to be dealt with,” she said.
The Domestic Violence Centre Initiative is a community-based response that will connect new and already existing violence service agencies through various linking programs. All funds made by the run will go directly to the initiative.
The run will start Friday May 30 at 6.a.m and finish off at the same location between 5 p.m. and 6 p.m.
