When Yvrose Douge moved with her family from Port-au-Prince, Haiti, to Miami 20 years ago, she left her husband almost as soon as they arrived in the United States.  He was physically abusing her.  Douge said she would be a single mother forever if it meant no man would ever hit her again.

Three years ago, her daughter, then 25, was almost murdered by her boyfriend.

Douge came home from work one evening and found Charline and boyfriend, who everyone calls “Tiboy,” fighting in the living room.  Douge said it seemed like a normal fight and went on to make dinner for her other three children and her mother.

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“They speak English fast,” Douge said of her daughter’s fight.  “I didn’t understand everything they said.  I understood that she said she was no longer going to be with him because she didn’t like men who talk behind her back.”

Tiboy, who was 21 at the time and is currently in jail, is from the Bahamas and was living in the United States illegally.  Charline said she would marry him to help with his immigrant papers and legal status in the United States.  When she broke up with him that evening, he tried to kill her.

Douge heard her daughter say she was going to the bathroom, and the boyfriend followed her.

“They were still fighting a lot,” Douge said.  “Then after, I didn’t hear her voice no more.  When I tried to go in the bathroom, the door was locked.  I called my daughter’s name, but she didn’t say nothing.  My mind told me to just call the police and tell them that he killed my daughter.  Then I did exactly what my mind told me to do.”

Douge’s son, whose name she prefers to keep private for fear of Tiboy’s retribution, broke down the door, looked behind Charline’s boyfriend and saw his sister lying on her stomach on the floor with blood around her head.

The doctors at Jackson Memorial Hospital told her that her daughter had a 5 percent chance to live, a diagnosis Douge refused to believe.

“God blew on my daughter, and she is still with me today,” Douge said.

Charline is now in a wheelchair.

Marliene Bastien is the founder and executive director of Fanm Ayisyen Nan Miyami/Haitian Women of Miami, a center founded in Little Haiti in 1991 to help low-income Haitian families in Miami, targeting women as a core service.

Bastien said domestic abuse is a problem in Haitian culture that women can help to eradicate.  Her organization is making the first steps to do so.

“It is up to us to change the culture of violence against these women,” Bastien said. “There should be an outrage right now among Haitian women.  We are the ones that raise these men.”

Solange Avreliene is a coordinator of Fanm Ayisyen Nan Miyami’s domestic violence education classes where she and other members of the community are planning an education program to stop violence in the Haitian home.

“I don’t usually cry,” Avreliene said.  “But I always cry after hearing stories like the one Yvrose told me when she called and asked to join the group.”

Douge called Avreliene when she heard about Fanm Ayisyen Nan Miyami on a Sunday radio program.  She said she wanted to share her story, so more people did not end up like her daughter.

Bastien said that domestic abuse in the male-centric Haitian culture could worsen during the current economic recession if women do not try to put an end to it.

“Stopping [domestic violence] begins when men are little boys,” Bastien said.  “The more men feel powerless in the workplace, the more they try to gain that power somewhere else.  Men who cannot get a job, men who cannot get immigration papers, these are the men that hit their wives and children.”

Douge, who also has another daughter, 16, and a younger son, 19, recently had to deal with such situation at home.

“My son’s girlfriend called me and told me, ‘Your son slapped me.’  I almost died,” she said.  “I told my son, ‘Look at your sister.  If you do that, you don’t live in my house no more.’  He never did it again.”