North Idaho victims have major advocate in Lyon

IN PERSON

COEUR d'ALENE — Eleanor Lyon moved to Coeur d'Alene four years ago after 35 years in Connecticut, where she established herself as one of the country's top sociologists.

She was drawn to the mountains, lakes and dry air of North Idaho. It's a great place to retire, she said.

But retirement for her doesn't mean she's done working. She's putting her experience working on the East Coast to work in North Idaho.

For starters, Lyon is serving on the board of directors of the North Idaho Violence Prevention Center, which just changed its name to Safe Passage. The center provides survivors of domestic and sexual violence with services and delivers prevention education to students in North Idaho.

Lyon is also on the grants committee for the Women's Gift Alliance in Kootenai County, which provides grants to local private nonprofits.

"One of the things that I love about Coeur d'Alene is just how generous and caring many people are," she said recently. "It's very different than the East Coast."

Lyon was born and raised in Northern California. Modesto was her home town, and she spent summers on a mountain lake. She wanted to return to that type of environment, but California is too crowded.

Now, living in Coeur d'Alene with her husband, Clint Sanders, she has a home which overlooks Fernan Lake and a little bit of Lake Coeur d'Alene.

She graduated with a bachelor's degree from the University of California, and attended graduate school at Northwestern University, north of Chicago. She studied sociology throughout college.

"I care about people," she said. "There are a lot of problems in the world, and I want to be a good citizen."

She wanted to help improve society.

"Sociology was really compatible with that (goal)," she said.

In August, she received the Distinguished Career Award for the Practice of Sociology from the American Sociological Association. Her research was in policies and programs about domestic violence, juvenile detention and families of homicide victims.

During her career on the East Coast, she worked with the Connecticut Coalition Against Domestic Violence. She was the director of the University of Connecticut's Institute for Violence Prevention and Reduction. She also taught courses on violence against women, and research methods.

While she does work locally, she is still plugged in nationally.

She remains a senior research advisor for the National Center on Domestic Violence, Trauma and Mental Health, located in Chicago. She also does consulting for the organization called Futures Without Violence, with offices in Boston, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco. She's a consultant for the National Resource Center on Domestic Violence, located in Harrisburg, Pa.

Places like Kootenai County are improving in the way they understand and help victims, she said. Society is more aware of domestic violence, especially with all the publicity in recent years because of the involvement of pro athletes.

"We're becoming more trauma informed," she said. "To the extent that the court system, and all the other community systems become more trauma informed, that makes life for victims a whole lot easier."

She wrote a book, published in 2014, that is called "Domestic Violence Advocacy: Complex Lives, Difficult Choices." It was written with Jill Davies, an attorney in Connecticut.

She is hopeful that all the prevention efforts are having some effect.

She said that since the passage of the Violence Against Women Act in 1995, rates of domestic violence homicides of women declined somewhat and then increased again, while domestic violence homicides of men declined a lot.

"That's nationwide," she said. "So, when women have more resources they're less likely to reach the point of desperation where they think killing their husband/partner is the only way to survive."