Mary Finn Interview - Part 1

MORNA GERRARD: The following interview was conducted as part of Georgia State University's Activist Women Oral History Project. I am Morna Gerrard and I am interviewing Mary Finn. It is May 22nd, 2012, and we are at Georgia State University. Mary, can you please tell me where you were born and when?

MARY FINN: I was born in Keane, Pennsylvania, August 8th, 1961.

GERRARD: And do you have any brothers or sisters?

FINN: Yes.

GERRARD: Can you tell me about them?

FINN: Yes. I have two older brothers and an older sister that are still alive, and I have two sisters that are deceased. My oldest brother is 10 years older than me. My oldest -- next oldest sister is four years older than me, and then my brother is three years older than me. I'm the baby. And my two sisters that are deceased were -- one was the eldest in the family, and then the other was in between my brother and sister. So a total of six in our family.

GERRARD: Can you tell me about your parents, what they did, where they came from, how they met?

FINN: Sure. Well, my mother and father both were born in Pennsylvania. My dad was involved with the military early on, started his career there. And then he, after fighting the war, Korean War, he stepped out and ended up becoming a truck driver, long-haul truck driver. My mother was born and raised on a farm that my grandmother and her mother and father owned. And then when my mother and father got married, we all moved onto the family farm. And so we ran the farm for a period of time, while my dad was kind of supplementing our income through truck 00:02:00driving. So how they met -- I believe that they met at a dance. My father was a musician as well, played guitar and sang and made musical instruments. So music was really how he defined his life, and what he really got enjoyment out of. So they met at probably a grange dance, which the grange was a farmer-based organization that kind of operated in rural America, and was really the social setting for farm families. So they met there and then started dating, and got married probably at the -- maybe at the -- in 1940s, I believe, is when they were married.

GERRARD: OK. Can you tell me about your relationship with your parents?

FINN: Yeah. Well, my father, he passed away when I was 12. So I didn't know him as an adult. And as a father, he was often absent. The death of my oldest sister was a tragic one; she drowned along with three other people in a drowning 00:03:00accident. So it was a family picnic that she was on that went horribly wrong. And so she and two other children and a husband drowned, and it was basically in a river, a swimming hole, kind of in rural America, that's kind of what you had. And after that, after her death, my parents had a, I think, a period of real self-blame, and seemed almost incapable forgiving each other for that tragedy. And it kind of really defined my childhood. There was al-- it seemed like there was always this cloud that kind of hung over their relationship. So my father spent a lot of time away from home. My mother really was the strong one, kind of piecing together our lives, financially, emotionally, in the like. So I had a much stronger relationship with her than with my father. But I loved my father and adored him, because, you know, he was dad, and fun and jovial, and 00:04:00outgoing. And my mother was not, was much more reserved and shy.

GERRARD: How did you get on with your sisters and your brothers?

FINN: Really well with my brothers. My sister and I have a strange relationship. She's -- it was always very competitive with us. And whether it was vying for my dad's attention, because after he lost Marjorie, my oldest sister, suddenly the daughters became really important to him. And once I came along, because Marjorie died when I was an infant, about six months old, he began to shift his attention to me, and it created a lot of resentment from my sister that I don't really think I fully understood until as an adult, you know, I've had conversations with her. But we've never really healed, and we don't really have a strong bond as sisters. I'm much closer with my brothers.

GERRARD: And was your family spiritual?

FINN: Not very, no. I was raised Roman Catholic. My father never quite practiced his faith, my mother did it religiously; largely because of my grandmother who was a -- she lived in our home until she passed. And she was, like, my best friend growing up, because she was there. And all my brothers and sisters had their friends, or they were at school, and grandma was there. So I was very close to her. So my mother, I would say, you know, her faith was very important to her. It was tested numerous times when I look back on her life, I think, of all the times I probably would have been angry at God for the things that He put on her plate. I think that once my grandmother passed, she began to drift away from the church more and more. And clearly after losing my sister, she really 00:06:00was -- it became more difficult for her, I think to reconcile the grief she had.

GERRARD: Yeah. Can you tell me about your childhood friends and the hobbies that you had, that you played at?

FINN: OK. Let's see, well, my mom used to say that there was at least one time a week when I would get a brown box and throw all my clothes into it, and say, "I'm running away from home," and I would declare it. And I'd run down into the woods, because we lived in about a 60-acre farm, and we had created a play area down there. And so I would run down there, and I'd last probably until lunchtime when I got hungry or thirsty, and then I'd come back home, and she would say, "Well, I see you're back." That's all she said, she never made a big deal about it. But so I used to play the game, running away a lot. But I also -- we had a lot of chores to do when I was younger, because a farm really was a family -- it wasn't a thriving farm, but everybody's muscle was 00:07:00needed. So I spent a lot of time with animals. So I think my -- the people, or the objects and the entities that I spent most time with were the myriad of cats and dogs and horses and cows. And if there was an-- if there was something with four legs around, I was near it. So my closest confidents, really, were animals. And that probably doesn't go well for human interaction, I don't know. But I did have some childhood friends that I made, mainly when I went into school. We didn't spend a lot of time with other families growing up, other than, you know, cousins that we would always have around when it was haying season, or when it was putting the roof on the barn, whatever kind of work details were going on. The kids were always around. But when I got into elementary school, that's when I made I would say, some of my strongest friends. The one young 00:08:00woman who lived probably -- our houses were fairly far apart. So she was probably one of my closest neighbors, that was about two miles away. And she and I would often meet once we got bikes and we were able to go on the roads and have permission. We would meet halfway and we'd go on adventures on our own. So Bonnie was her name. And we remained best friends from first grade through high school, and into college. And then we kind of -- we drifted apart after that.

GERRARD: All those days when you would like to go on your bike, like, take your bike out all day, and your parents didn't worry about you?

FINN: Didn't worry. Hum-um. I mean, I would go out on horses all day. And I have no clue when I left in the morning where I was going. And my mom would just -- you know, I'd have lunch and I'd have one of the dogs with me, and that was it.

GERRARD: Wow.

FINN: And there's some -- there were times later on, she said, you know, "I used to worry when it was dark." So it would be -- it wouldn't get dark until 9:00 in the summer. "And you weren't back, and you weren't back, and you weren't back, and I worried." And there were no cellphones, there were 00:09:00really no telephones. We didn't have a telephone until 1972.

GERRARD: Wow.

FINN: We shared the neighbor's telephone. If we needed to make a call, we would just go there and make a call. We were really isolated. Really isolate. So those are the kind of games I would play. Anything involving putting doll clothes on my kittens and putting them in the carriage and pushing them, pretending they were my babies. They hated it. They'd scratch me to pieces. I still would do it. I was just -- but that was kind of it. And then there were always -- I mean, there were a lot of chores, but there were -- it was fun to do some of them. Some of them were not so fun, but some of them were. They were wonderful skills to learn. Yeah.

GERRARD: When you were in school, what subjects interested you?

FINN: Math and science. Math, a lot. Science, a whole lot. Biology, really. And 00:10:00when I actually -- had an interest in biology. Always liked reading and I liked writing, so literature. I mean, there really wasn't a subject in school that I didn't like. And I think it was -- I read a lot as a kid growing up. And my mother always encouraged us to read. And she actually had this rule that if you -- once we got television, which wasn't until the early '70s, she said for every hour of TV that you watch, I need you to read for an hour. So we had to earn our television time. And she was always reading, so she was modeling exactly what she wanted us to do. And so I had a great love affair with books.

GERRARD: What books do you remember you loving the most?

FINN: I -- gosh, as a young child, we used to get the Highlights magazine, which was like a little paper put together with staples, Highlights children magazine, 00:11:00that would have little short stories, poems, crossword puzzles, things like that. We used to get that through the mail. And then through the library I always -- well, James Fenimore Cooper was one of my favorites, Nathaniel Hawthorne, so a lot of the -- you know, Emily Dickinson -- some of the traditional English or American writers. And then I had a period in high school and I really got into poetry; reading it, writing it. Just loved the language and the confines of it, the structure it takes. So I really liked writing a lot, and I used it a lot to deal with issues and things like that.

GERRARD: So did you journal a lot when you were a kid? FINN: I did. I did.

GERRARD: And do you still journal?

FINN: I pick it up in pieces of my life when I feel like I need to do more processing, when I'm feeling stressed, or I feel like I'm not connecting, in 00:12:00a way. And I've kind of developed an awareness of when I feel like my -- I'm becoming a little undone. And journaling helps me make sense of that, or makes me build in time to just take moments to reflect, which, I think, are really important. I know that they're important cognitively, psychologically, emotionally -- all of that. But life gets so busy that I forget to do it. So I actually started journaling when I became pregnant with my daughter as a way to kind of deal with -- my mother had just passed away and I was about four, five months' pregnant with my daughter, my first child. And I was trying to cope with why this happened, why had this loss at this time of this great gift? And so I started journaling about all of the emotions I had; the anger, the 00:13:00resentment, the anxiety, the joy. And so that really helped me. And since then I periodically go back whenever I'm facing kind of major hurdles or challenges, because I need that. I need my mind to process through all of that, and writing is the best way for me to do that.

GERRARD: When you were younger, were there any influential figures that you remember, either within your family, or within your community, or even on a much bigger sort of national kind of scale?

FINN: Yeah, well, when I think about growing up, there was an elderly couple that lived a few farms down from us. And they were not husband and wife, they were brother and sister, and they had grown up single together, and had lived on the family farm. Well, the woman, Mrs. Selli, was my fifth grade, or fourth 00:14:00grade, teacher. And she was such a giving and loving and nurturing person. And so I looked up to her a lot. And as they got older, they weren't able to care for themselves as much, and being in a rural area there were not a lot of resources, there weren't visiting nurses or anything that could periodically check on them. So my family, and a couple of other families, said that we would go ahead and do that, because it was a question of they -- one time Mrs. Selli had gotten really ill, and it was because she had eaten food that she didn't realize had been spoiled. So it's simple things like going in and making sure that the leftovers that they put in two weeks ago they don't eat, because they're just -- so she was a big influence on me. And then I had a biology teacher in high school, Mrs. Bryson, who, again, these were all educators, probably because school was such a great haven for me. Anyway, she was very 00:15:00instrumental. And when I first went into college, I majored in biology, largely encouraged by her. And she just fostered that love I had for science. And then on the national scale, I would say Rachel Carson, probably, the Silent Spring, all those books that came out about -- I think it was, well, I grew up kind of in what seemed to me at the time, and I'm not sure if historically this is correct, but it seemed like it was a period of time in which we began to finally recognize that human beings are just part of this broader fabric, and have this stewardship of the earth that they didn't acknowledge previously. And so for her to make, you know, to bring the oceans and water as this frontier that we needed to really be stewards of was really powerful for me. So she became -- and 00:16:00then I have this -- I still have an interest in science and biology and environment. So that just continued through Dian Fossey and Jane Goodall -- I mean, all of these women scientists that are doing these phenomenal things. So --

GERRARD: There was a nice time where you are, you were seeing women who were scientists. And, you know, that must have been kind of an interesting, wonderful thing for your teachers to see a young woman who wanted to go forward in science.

FINN: Yes. I mean, it was -- and actually, when I switched majors, I was more so concerned about how Mrs. Bryson would think, why was I leaving biology and not pursuing it? At the time, I remembered thinking, I don't know if the -- I knew that with a biology degree, just a bachelor's, I wasn't sure what more I could do. I knew I couldn't afford to do medical school, and I didn't really have an interest in that. Vet school, I heard, was almost impossible to get into. You'll never get into vet school unless you have connections -- I 00:17:00didn't have those. So I said, well, maybe I'll do something different. And I also began to care about people, probably through the wonderful experiences I had with college and the role models that I had met there, that made me kind of open my heart a little more to the plights of people than I heard earlier in my childhood. It was more --

GERRARD: Well, talk about then a little bit. First of all, you went to, is it Mercyhurst College?

FINN: Yes.

GERRARD: And in Erie, Pennsylvania. Why did you choose to go there?

FINN: It wasn't my first choice. I actually started at Thiel College in biology, and I was miserable. And it's nothing about the college; the college is a beautiful place. Pastoral, rural setting, very nice. And I had got a scholarship to go there, so that was helpful because financing my education was a challenge. But it wasn't a good fit for me. It was too much like -- there 00:18:00just wasn't enough art culture to make me excited about being there. So I left midway through the semester, and they were kind enough to take whatever scholarship money I had to pay off my loan, so I left debt-free. And I went home. And it was -- sat with my mom and said, you know, I feel like such a failure. I know I need to do more. I know that I can do more. I just don't know what to do. And so I met a young woman near a town where I grew up, that I had met in high school. And she was going to Mercyhurst. And she said, "You need to come up and see me on the weekend, see if" -- I think this, because Erie, as small a city as it is, it had theater, it had dance, I mean it had the things that I kind of wanted to get exposed to. And so I went up on a weekend and spent the weekend with her, and I fell in love with it, with -- it's a 00:19:00beautiful place. And so I put in -- I met with a couple of people on the faculty, applied and got accepted. And so that January I started in at Mercyhurst.

GERRARD: Doing biology?

FINN: I started in biology, and then I switched probably within a year. And that was largely an influence of, I'd taken a class in parole, probation and corrections, I believe, as an elective, because it fit with my schedule.

GERRARD: Really?

FINN: Really. I'm, like -- some of the students are, like, "I have this elective, what should I take?"

GERRARD: So you didn't have an epiphany, like that --

FINN: I didn't have an epiphany. I took it, and I thought, this is really interesting. And I met probably one of the most important and influential people in my career, when I look back on the path I've walked, which was Peter Benekos. He was a faculty member there, kind, gentle, had this really approach 00:20:00to life was just like this calm in a storm. And he had taught the course, and we, you know, had conversation. He was, like, "You should really think about majoring." And I was, like, "Oh, I don't know." And then I had formed a strong relationship with -- because English was the other, writing was a big part of my life. And I took a couple of English classes, literary analysis. And we had creative writing. And one of the instructors, it's some of the Sisters of Mercy who founded the college were still on faculty. So Sister Lisa Mary McCartney, she pulls me aside one day and she says, "I really want you to think about becoming a writer." And I was, like, "Oh, no." I mean, this was -- you know, the few things I had written, few just creative writing assignments, she pulled me and one other student aside, and we're both looking at each other going, "No way. We're not writers." Writers are 00:21:00cantankerous, and smokers, drinkers, living on the edge -- that certainly wasn't me. But she and I really -- she and I became very close friends. Actually, we're still friends to this day. And she kept always trying to push us, "Whatever you do, I want you to be a" -- you know, "You need to write. You need to use the written word, because you've got a wonderful grasp of language." And I never thought I'd become a technical writer, like I feel like most of what I do today is. But it was a good blend of the science, math, empirical side of me, along with creative side that comes about asking the questions, designing the study to answer the questions, and doing all of that. So I think it's a good blend, but...So overall, those two people had a huge influence on me, at Mercyhurst. And Mercyhurst really is where I feel like I 00:22:00found out who I was. Not in the shadow of my parents, and not in the shadow of rural Pennsylvania. But it was a place where I could just say, wow, there's all this information I didn't know anything about. And it was a wonderful time. It really was.

GERRARD: What was going on at the campus at the time?

FINN: Not a lot, I mean, it was a pretty conservative campus, you can imagine. It was Catholic affiliated, but not Catholic based. Then the Sisters of Mercy, there were still a number of them on faculty, and involved in the staff support of the library, and things like that. Now today I now that there's no longer any Sisters of Mercy on faculty. So it's gone into a different chapter. It started as a women's college, and I guess admitted its first males in the late -- it would have been 1972 or so. So I came in shortly after it was beginning to make that transition.

GERRARD: What year did you start there?

FINN: I started in -- it would have been '80, 1980. Yeah, because I graduated 00:23:00in '79. So -- from high school.

GERRARD: Just going back, just a little bit before we go on to graduate work, what were your parents' expectations for you?

FINN: They weren't -- I mean my mother had always valued education. She told me it was important to do my best. But I don't think there was any expectation that I would go on to college. I did it because it was something I wanted to do. And my mom -- at that time, my father had passed, so financially -- I mean, things were always financially difficult. They became even more so once he passed, because she had three children that were under the age of 18 that she had to raise. So she started working, actually, as a custodian. And I guess in addition to that, and then Social Security survivor benefits, we managed to kind of piece together an existence of some sort. And so she -- but she was not -- 00:24:00she never said, "You shouldn't do it," or, "We can't afford it." She always kind of said, "Well, apply and let's see what we can do." And at that point in time, Pell grants were available. And I qualified for those, though Mercyhurst was a private school, so I had to borrow money in addition to that, which I wouldn't have had to do if I had gone to a larger state school, or a state college. But I knew I wouldn't make it -- I just didn't think I'd make it at the state school. I needed a small place -- I needed to be in a place where it mattered that I was there to somebody other than me. And so once I connected with a couple of the faculty and the students, it worked out pretty well. Neither of my parents graduated high school. They both quit. My father, I think, to get -- he actually, it's kind of ironic, but he tried to get into 00:25:00military at the age of 16, and then when they found out he was only 16, they sent him back. And then he tried again when he was 17, and they finally said, "OK, you can stay, because you're close enough." So that was his pathway. And then my mother quit, probably because of the war and just never -- I think it was the one thing that she regretted. I was always trying to encourage her to get her GED, because she was, like, smart. I mean she really was. And very capable. And she always, I think, felt like she just didn't measure up because she didn't have that. But I think to this day don't think she fully understood what I was doing when I -- you know, she was saying, "You're getting your PhD in what?" And said, "What are you going to do with that?" And said, "I guess I'll teach or do research, I don't know." But it was easier just to tell them I'm going to be a lawyer than anything else, because they could understand that. But no, I mean, I knew that it was important to them. But it wasn't like I had any role models in my immediate family. None of my brothers or sisters have gone to college. They've all gone different 00:26:00routes. My oldest brother worked in the paper mill which was in the local town, and had a career doing that, and is retired. My brother, Bob, who is closest to me in age went into the military, into the Marines. And then after he left there, he started his own business. And my sister was married and had children and raised a family, but none of them ever went on to college. So I'm kind of an anomaly. My mother's not quite sure what to make of me. But they know, they can ground me too, so, which is good.

GERRARD: And you had -- your sisters and brothers, were the girls treated any differently from the boys in your high school?

FINN: I think so, yeah. I mean, I was always frustrated that there were things my brothers could do that I couldn't do. Going out for sports was one thing that my mother, you know, finally I just defied her and I went out for sports 00:27:00anyway. And then once I did it, it was OK. But she wasn't pleased that I was doing it. But it was -- I think the combination of the time I grew up, there were so many changes going on in the broader society. My mother was fairly conservative, and her -- and many of her beliefs, though she was a registered Democrat all her life, but she definitely -- she and I today would not agree on a lot of things. And I think her experiences and kind of growing up in poverty and pulling herself out of it is that she had a sense that that's what everyone should have to do. And I don't have that sense. To me if it's about if people need help, and I have the ability to help them, I'm going to give what I can to help them, rather than it be this kind of survivalist mentality. I mean, she had a lot of compassion, but you had to earn that compassion in many 00:28:00ways. It wasn't just at the ready. And I know my father was very similar to that. I mean, we -- in all the times that we struggled financially, my mother would never ask for help. She would never go down to the Welfare office and apply for food stamps or aid, and I know we qualified. But she would not. Her pride would just not allow her to do that. And I mean, there were times when I joke with my husband that when I see canned cream of corn -- those were meals for us some days. Sometimes weeks on end, that's what we ate. And I just said to this day, I can't even look at it and not kind of flash back to those times. But we made it. I mean, we made it with the help of family and friends. But I don't think that should be how -- no one should have to experience that. You should be able to have nutritious food when you're a kid. So, and that's being on a farm. So if we hadn't been on a farm, it would have been a lot worse.

GERRARD: Did you have any expectations for yourself? Did you think, well, when I grow up, this is what I want to be?

FINN: What I wanted most, I think the experiences -- oh, I wanted to be self-sufficient. That was so important to me. And even to this day I get frustrated when I can't do something. You know? And this is something as simple as getting a lid off of a jar. It's, like, I've got to be able to do this. I won't ask for help. I mean, I'll get whatever tool I need. And I'll have a jackhammer to open it if I have to, but I will not ask for help. So self-sufficiency is really important to me. It's almost -- I'm almost neurotic about it. And I hate asking for help. As much as I know that it doesn't mean I'm less valued, and I probably often need to ask for help and I don't, and I run into trouble because of that, but being self-sufficient. Economically, to some degree even emotionally, to know that I have people in my life I love and I value. But I will -- I am going -- whatever happens, I am 00:30:00going to wake up the next day and I'm going to trudge on. And I think I get that from my mom. When I think of the experiences and losses she had, that she was able -- and it didn't color her view of life in any way. I mean, she didn't carry -- you didn't see her burden that she carried. And that's kind of the -- and that's a tough role model. I'll never life up to the way my mom did, and thank goodness in my life I've not had to face the adversities that she had. But I -- every time I think about when something comes my way, how am I going to weather it? I just think of her. And I just -- I move forward.

GERRARD: If she can do it, so can you.

FINN: Yeah. I put my shoes on every morning and I get out of that bed, and I face it. And I don't know how else to be.

GERRARD: That's a great lesson, though, to have.

FINN: Yes. Yeah, it was -- it's great. And I almost wish my kids had known her, because they've had it so easy. Now I think -- I worry sometimes that I haven't prepared them for the adversities that I know they'll face, large or 00:31:00small, and how they'll cope with it. But we'll see.

GERRARD: Do you remember any, while you were younger, any major world events or national events that were sort of prominent for you?

FINN: Well, I think the assassinations. I have remembrance of the Kennedy assassinations, the two Kennedys, and Martin Luther King. The Vietnam War, watching the reports on that. My mother was a real key watching Walter Cronkite every night, or the news every night on television, when we had -- when we finally got television. And watching the, just the counts of the dead and the loss. So I think those big events around that, probably the most powerful ones 00:32:00on a national scale.

GERRARD: Did they make you think about the way that you wanted to see the world?

FINN: It did. It did. I mean, I didn't understand a lot of the reasons why we were involved with Vietnam. I do know, besides the '60s culture and the hippie movement and all of that, and I certainly knew my mother's perspective of those long-haired college students who were protesting, and what cowards they were. I mean, this is her view of them. And it certainly isn't the view I have today in understanding that time. But I definitely was shaped by that. I know my brothers were all very shaped by that. So it was, like, there was this educational elite that had a different view and conversation about the war that my parents were not sympathetic to. Though I have to admit, as my mother got 00:33:00older and could see us involved as a nation in other conflicts that she wasn't necessarily as certain, and maybe it was the experience of going through the Vietnam War, I remember her saying to me, especially once the draft was eliminated and we moved to an all-volunteer Army, she said, "Well, basically it's going to be the kids in our town that die for these wars, because they're the ones that don't have the economic advantage. And this is a pathway for them into middle class life." And they're going to keep taking it, whether it means that half of them die as a result of our nation's decisions about what countries it needs to protect and what rights. I mean, she was just -- so it really bothered her that we -- and it's ironic that, you know, I talk with people about the whole draft issue. And they said it was the largest victory of the left and the worst victory of the left to move to an all-volunteer Army, because there is that sense that it becomes easier when this 00:34:00is not your own children that you're putting in the line of fire. So she had very strong feelings. So I think as she got older, she got wiser, I think probably growing, as we did as a nation, about what is it that we really want to accomplish? And she was by no means a protectionist, saying we don't need to keep an eye on or care about the harms that others are experiencing. But she certainly was wiser, I think, as we all are, about where we should be involved, and under what kind of context. Anyway, so those events. I think the war was a huge one. Yeah.

GERRARD: Now let's go back to -- so you're graduating from Mercyhurst. And did you, at that point, decide, well, Criminal Justice is the way to go, I want my career to be in this?

FINN: Yeah, I had a -- I minored in psychology, and I remember talking with some 00:35:00folks in the Criminal Justice department, and I was talking with Sister Lisa as well. And I said, "I don't know if I should do law school, or if I should go on for Criminal Justice." My psychology professor, he was funny, he said, "I don't know what you're going to do with a PhD in Criminal Justice." So he was, like, trying to push me into psychology. But I said I think I'm just going to apply to a few places, different places. And I did take the LSAT, and I did get into Notre Dame Law School. That's where Sister Lisa wanted me to go, because she wanted me to maintain this kind of Catholic influence in education. And, you know, I got -- and I applied to -- well, I applied to SUNY Albany, State University of New York at Albany. I did a couple of other places as well. I didn't apply to any psychology programs, I just was not -- that was not the field I wanted to move into. And I got accepted at Albany and they offered me a 00:36:00fellowship of some sort, that was a tuition pay and a stipend, that maybe was $3,000, $4,000 a year. I thought I got offered the world. I was, like, oh my gosh, I don't have to pay for tuition, and I have money to live on! It was -- you know, it sounded great, because I had worked through undergrad. I got a job at the McDonald's Corporate America. And I did really well at it, because I worked at a Tastee-Freeze growing up, to kind of help my mom out. And so I did that. I worked full time and went to school full time. And so I thought, gosh, if I could just get tuition paid, maybe I won't have to work full time. And so my first year in graduate school, this is the first time probably since I was 15 that I didn't have a full time job, and didn't quite know what to do with myself. Like, what do I do with all of this free time? I didn't use it wisely, actually. I didn't think I did. I didn't need it. I felt really lazy, and 00:37:00that didn't suit me well. So the second year I got on a grant project, and said I want to work. I have to work, because otherwise, I'm going to work somewhere. So I may as well work building some sort of skill. So I did that.

GERRARD: What did you put -- were you doing in the grant project?

FINN: We did a pro-- it was with Hans Toch, who was actually a psychologist, funny how that worked out there. I ended up back working with psychologists again. A wonderful man. And he was doing -- he's one of the reasons I applied to Albany, because he was doing research on the violent disturbed offenders. So looking at offenders who not only have criminal behavior tendencies, but also have mental health issues, and the whole question of whether or not their violence actual emanates from a really cognitive and rational decision to be violent, or whether it's compelled by their underlying mental health problems. And so we -- some of the research we had done was looking at -- especially at the adjustment of individuals in prison, and recognizing that those who had the most difficult time adjusting were those that had these underlying mental health 00:38:00issues. So the project involved -- oh gosh, it was painful now that I look back on it -- going into the records of the mental health units that exist in New York State prisons -- the prison system itself operates, well, it's best described as really a mental health service delivery system within it. It's overseen by, at that time, it was the Office of Mental Hygiene in the State of New York. And it was a pretty much independent-operating, like a community-based mental health system, as well as secure mental health hospitals. Those all operated within this community of the prison. And so these records about the behavior of inmates, both their symptoms, their disciplinary behavior, was all captured in log books that had to be coded. So we went through and we did -- oh, God, it had to be thousands of inmates. So we had to look at both those with 00:39:00mental health issues, as well as the normal, those without any kind of mental health problems, and kind of code their behavior during their course of their incarceration period. So we were looking at their incarceration career. So for some of them, it was 20 years, 30 years, 40 years. Some it was just a few years. And so I ended up -- that spawned in me an interest in working -- in looking at those who had developmental disabilities. So I was looking among this group, because there are those that have mental health problems, have criminal behavior problems, and they also have limited intelligence. So with those three kind of limitations, or propensities, what is the adjustment of this population? And that actually ended up being my dissertation. So I kind of worked on that project most of -- I was there for six years. I worked on that project for three or four years.

GERRARD: Wow.

FINN: It was very eye-opening. I got to see a lot, read a lot. See a side of 00:40:00people and the system's response to them. That was really kind of shocking, the degree to which we relied on psychopharmacological treatment to address what sometimes wasn't really emanating from a mental health place. So it's -- yeah, it was an interesting project. I learned a lot. And I loved working with Toch. He is just tremendously bright, and very paternalistic, though, I would say. Very paternalistic. In many ways, it bothered me. There's a point at which sex bothers you, or your gender bothers you. It's when you're working with more traditional men, and they tend to want to protect you from everything, and not allow you to achieve your potential because they see you as a woman. And 00:41:00that was kind of frustrating, and more frustrating as I got older. But at the time, I was just thrilled to be able to work with him and his team, and learn as much as I could. But I think there's so much more I could have learned if I had been let into that inner circle. But I wasn't. And so I didn't.

GERRARD: Did you see any sexism on campus? Outside of that?

FINN: Oh gosh, yes. There was, well, there was a lot of -- well, not a lot -- there were some incidents what I would call improper sexual relations between faculty and students. Some of it not always initiated by the faculty member, but clearly, in my perspective, they should have known better because of the difference between -- the power differential that exists between faculty and students. But, you know, pregnancies, marriages, prostitution -- I mean it was all there. It was, like -- my husband said there's, like, a soap opera going 00:42:00on at this place.

GERRARD: So there was prostitution at the school?

FINN: Yeah. There was -- yeah. There was a faculty member who had started a relationship with a woman who was a prostitute, and had got her knitted into the program to study with us, which isn't a problem, I mean, if she has -- but then all of that history came out, and it was a train wreck for the poor young woman, because you know graduate students can be very petty.

GERRARD: Yes, they can.

FINN: And I thought at some point she was going to have a nervous breakdown, just from what she perceived to be the gossip that was going on about her and this faculty member. And it was very petty and unfair, and unfortunate. But those were the life experiences I think of, unfortunate ones that you go through whenever you have people who were not as mature, even as adults, to be able to 00:43:00deal with people from different walks of life, that they never were exposed to before. I mean, in a program like Criminal Justice, you think, how in the world could that happen? Or, what did we think we're studying, and how different do we think these individuals really are from us? But we didn't deal with it very well. It was not one of the highlights of my career there. Watching that unfold.

GERRARD: But at least did you recognize that at the time?

FINN: I did. I felt really bad for the young woman that was going through, and she and I and another woman had actually formed a study group on ground statistics to try to -- because she had come into the program with not a lot of background. She wasn't walking out of an undergrad program directly into doctoral work, which a number of the students had been. So she was a little rusty. But she was very smart, very capable. It's just that there was this cloud, this barrier, that no matter what she did, I didn't think it was going 00:44:00to work out, because of the way she was perceived by -- not only just by the students, but by some of the faculty in the program. It just wasn't going to work.

GERRARD: That's a shame.

FINN: Yeah. Yeah. And --

GERRARD: So what year did you graduate?

FINN: I graduated in '80-- from Mercyhurst I graduated in '83, and from Albany I graduated in '89. So I spent six years there.

GERRARD: Where did you meet your husband?

FINN: I met him in graduate school.

GERRARD: So he was there. What was he doing?

FINN: He was getting his master's in Public Administration. And we met at the bus stop, believe it or not. So it's kind of fun. I run a joke with my kids that we met at the bus stop, and I flirted with him, and he totally ignored me. And so we got on the bus, and the SUNY campus is, there's a downtown campus that has -- really, is the old teacher's college. And on the north campus is what's called the Quad, which is like a space-aged design kind of place, very 00:45:00new, very old. So but there was a bus that connected the students around this area, it was probably a six or eight mile loop. And so it was pouring rain. I was coming out of class, and he was coming out of class, and I thought, well, I don't want to -- usually I would walk, because my apartment wasn't that far. But I said, "I'm just going to take the bus." And then I happened to meet him. And then he totally forgot about me. And I was always looking for him. And then we ended up taking a class together, probably about a year and a half later. And then he noticed me more. And then we started dating after that.

GERRARD: What's his name?

FINN: Alan.

GERRARD: And what did he end up doing?

FINN: Well, he graduated, and he started out his career with the New York State Assembly. They have a -- the Assembly in New York is a full time Assembly, it's not part time. So they're -- the Senators are empaneled, and it works -- basically they operate all year long. And so he worked as a fiscal analyst 00:46:00for one of the Senators, Senator Halperin, who was -- what was he on? Ways and Means, or Budget Committee of the Senate. And he worked there with about a dozen other people, so large, you know, large state, large staff. When we moved to Georgia, he started working with the Department of Labor, doing work on job training programs, because he had an interest in employment policy. Then he has had a myriad of jobs; some of them with the Senate, some of them -- all, though, government and policy related. What he does now is, he's the executive director of the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute here in Atlanta, that's been operating for six years or so. And it's a nonprofit that looks at the 00:47:00impact of state fiscal and economic tax policy and its impact on working Georgians. So largely women and children, and the unemployed -- all of those individuals who sometimes, unfortunately, bear the brunt of what are not necessarily fair and equitable distributions of tax burden, and things like that.

GERRARD: Wow. So you got mar-- did you get married --

FINN: We got married a year before I graduated, in 1988.

GERRARD: So you moved down here because you got the job?

FINN: I got the job, yeah. And he followed me.

GERRARD: Why did you choose to come down to Atlanta?

FINN: Well, because of his background in government. I was kind of limited in my job search to state capitals, or Washington, D.C. And both of us, well, we maybe had aspirations to work in Washington, because I would love to work in America, for instance. It wasn't -- the time was not right for either of us, that stage 00:48:00of our career. So I applied here, I applied at Boston, at Northeastern, and I applied at Rand, because I wasn't sure -- I wasn't certain when I finished my doctoral education if I wanted to do simply do research, and not get involved in academia. I had real -- I had seen a lot of things happen, both undergraduate and graduate, that were really positive. And not only that, but I also saw the underbelly. And I just said, you know, I'm not sure -- when I think about what tenure means, and it means that every day for the next 20 years you're going to work with these same eight people -- I don't know of any other work environment that is like that, where there's not some sort of -- I mean, it just seems so foreign to me. So I got a little anxious about that. So I thought maybe I'll just do the research think tank, and I'll just -- because I 00:49:00hadn't spent a lot of time in the classroom, at Albany. I did -- I taught for a year, I observed other people teaching. But it wasn't something that I -- I'm a pretty shy person. So to kind of be out there performing, which is how I see teaching, I still see it that way today. It takes a certain risk and a vulnerability, to do it well. I think you have to be open. And at that point in my life, was not nearly as open as I am now. I'm far more comfortable with who I am. So at the time I was very nervous about it. But I interviewed here. At Northeastern I looked at the pay scale and I looked at the housing costs, and I thought we could maybe live four hours away and drive in, but there's no way we could have afforded, on one salary, to live in Boston. So I withdrew from 00:50:00that search before. But it wasn't going to happen. So I came here and I kind of fell in love with the city. I had a -- there was a young woman, Lisa Reed, who was in the program with me at Albany who had come back to Georgia. She was from Georgia originally, and she got her master's, and she came back here. And she started working for -- at that time it was the Criminal Justice Coordinating Council. And I think it's still in operation today. So I touched base with her, and I said, well, you know, what is doing research like here? Are agencies open? Because I at that point was very interested in policy and the impact of what we do on people's lives. And she was very positive about the potentials, and the thought of moving someplace and already knowing someone seemed less scary. And so I really liked it. And I went back and I told my husband, I said, 00:51:00"I really liked it. I think I did well. I might get the offer." And so we flew down so he could see the city, and he really liked it, too. And at that time, Atlanta was much smaller than it is now, it was 24 years ago. And it seemed like it was a livable city, and the climate was wonderful. So there were a lot of things that helped. And Alan had a couple of connections through some work he had done with one of the labor committees in New York had a couple of connections down here. So he was able to network and talk with some people at the Department of Labor, and there was a potential to work on some projects. So when I got the offer, we said yes, and we moved.

GERRARD: How was the culture different in the South, and what you'd come from?

FINN: It was enormously different. Very different. And I don't forget, I mean, I now I think of myself more -- I think of myself that this is my home, and so 00:52:00this is a culture that I understand and I know. There are elements of it that I still don't like, but I'm not sure if it's an element of the culture, or if it's -- the experiences I've had at the stage of my life that I'm in, and that it is, perhaps, that in other regions of the country, I would have had the same experiences. So I don't know how to judge those things. But the degree of openness, and this is still the case, when I do research that I'll have agencies, like Corrections and Parole, even most recently the District Attorney's office, who calls and says, "Come on down and talk with us, and at least see what kind of research we can do together." And I think, "Oh my 00:53:00goodness," I've got to pinch myself, because in the North, it would take almost an Act of God to get an agency to say, "Let's have a conversation about what academics are wondering," or, "Hey, I have a question that I think is really important to answer. How effective is this?" And they want help answering that. That's typically not how -- I didn't find that door open in New York. There's a level of skepticism and a degree of protection that agencies kind of place on themselves. And whether it's because the politics are different, you know, there's a risk in opening up your doors to researchers, to ask questions, because they may not come up with the answer that is going to be politically easy for you to deal with. But there's far more openness here, and I still think this is the case today than there was, you 00:54:00know, even when I started 25 years ago.

GERRARD: Do you think that's because it's Georgia State, which is -- it's a real urban -- it's a university that really is a big part of the community itself, rather than just an academic -- FINN: Right. Right. Yeah.

GERRARD: -- sort of hub on its own somewhere else, it's judging everything around it?

FINN: Right.

GERRARD: Like that?

FINN: Yeah. I think so. I think for -- that is, to some degree, true, because we are embedded in this urban environment, and we do a lot as a university to partner with solutions. I mean I think the history of the faculty here, I'm very proud of, and the degree to which many have just kind of gone out and embraced and helped that kind of inform and make the community and the state a better place to be. So I think that partnership is definitely part of the 00:55:00history of Georgia State. And so you don't get the same level of scrutiny. And part of it is, to me it's how you approach building partnerships, that it really is not simply about this one project, but it's about, I'm a resource. I have time, I have skill that I can bring to helping you do something more effectively. If you want to do it more effectively, and not just do the status quo, if you want to take risks, because I know there are risks involved, then I'm a great partner for you. So some of it is the approach. But one of the things that, I guess, frustrates me about academics in some ways is that they often don't manage and maintain the partnerships. It does become about the one project, and the getting what I need to build my vita, and not about the giving back of, OK, well, now I have this information and I can inform my colleagues 00:56:00about it. But what does that mean for the agency itself? And so my approach in doing projects is always about, I have a self-interest in it, no doubt. But it's also you, agency, can also bring to the table what it is that you would like answered, and we'll make that part of this project so that you get something in return. And that way I don't get doors slammed on me. But I have -- I mean in all honesty, when I go out and talk, they're, like, "You know, we tried to partner with so-and-so from Georgia State." And when that happens, I've got to try to do the, "Well, but I'm different. And here's people that you can talk to at these agencies that have worked with me, and I think they can speak for this. And feel free. Here's my vita, contact any of these places I've worked with, and they'll give you an honest assessment." It's not always -- it's rocky sometimes. It doesn't always go smoothly. 00:57:00But I think I try to have a sense of -- there's a commitment in the work that I do, and I don't want to -- I don't want any agency to have a bad experience with me, that makes them shy away from having more positive impact with whatever it is they're trying to do.

GERRARD: Good for you . Before we go on to talk about more [inaudible] stuff at Georgia State, please tell me a little bit about your children.

FINN: My daughter, Hillary, is 21. And she is actually a student here at Georgia State. She will be graduating next year. She is an English major and a biology minor. Does that not sound like history revisiting itself here? Yes. She was always strong in biology throughout her high school, but she didn't want to major in biology. When she came here, though, I encouraged her to. And instead 00:58:00she decided to major in English, which is a wonderful degree. And I think within the past year, she's said, "You know, I really think I want to do biology, and I may want to do marine biology, or a vet school." I said, "That's fine." So she's actually going to take another semester to finish. She wouldn't -- if she had stayed an English major, she would graduate this year. But she's interning at the zoo and at the aquarium. So she's doing the animal thing. I'm very happy especially. So I hope that works -- I hope that that path works for her. My son is 18, Corey. He's going to be graduating from high school this year, actually, this Friday. And he is my son that has tremendous work ethic. He loves doing work that requires almost physical 00:59:00exhaustion; I don't know how else to describe it. He works in a restaurant, and he does wait staff, and he's the youngest employee they have, and it's a very well-respected restaurant. And the chef there has kind of looked out for him, and taken him under his wing. And so he's learning about the restaurant business. I don't know if that's the path he wants to go, but he's going to start college this fall, and we'll see. But, yeah, I'm proud of both of them. They're very different children. They have different strengths.

GERRARD: Did you take time off to have them?

FINN: Oh, no. Oh yeah, that's my -- yeah, the one, I think, if there is any legacy that I hope Georgia State has from my presence here is that we finally passed, and approved, a family leave policy that allows for young families and any faculty member that has to care for an elderly parent, someone that's in 01:00:00their family that has an illness that requires attention. But no, when I started -- I started in the fall of '89. I discovered that I was pregnant in November of '89, and it was not a planned pregnancy. My daughter knows this whole story. And when I got the news, I was both joy -- you know, very thrilled and also devastated, because I didn't have any role models of women who had successfully made it through the tenure process having young children. There was one female faculty member at the University of Albany when I was there, one single woman. And she had raised her children, was a grandmother. And that was it. All the rest were men. And so I wasn't quite sure what it meant. And I 01:01:00remember taking my husband to Taco Mac in Virginia Highlands, and sitting there and going, "My career is over. I'm done. I may as well just bail now, because I haven't" -- and you know, my husband's a very calm and reasonable man, and I certainly wasn't calm or reasonable then. I couldn't see a way out of it. And I knew I wasn't going to have an abortion, though I knew I had a right to that, and that was a choice. With my Catholic upbringing and, you know, for another person it may have been the right decision, but for me it wasn't. I just said, you know, I don't know why this has happened, but I just have to trust that it is going to be OK. And then I went home for the holiday, and was able to share that with my mother. And then my mother passed away in January. And then it was, like, oh, now I know why I'm pregnant. I needed something to make me -- help me move forward, to recover from the loss of her. And my daughter is very much the -- has many of the mannerisms of my 01:02:00mother. It makes me laugh. She even runs like my mother used to run. Which really bothers her. But I just see her in her. But so I had -- and then after that, I had a faculty member in my department say, because I was in a department of all men, and I wasn't sure how they were going to respond to this. And I had one of them say that, "Well, you know what I told the chair was that you probably going to become more productive once you had children, and he shouldn't worry." And I thought, wow, is that the sentiment of all of you? And it ended up, I was successful in my tenure application process, got tenure promotion on time. I actually had my second child, Corey, in that time frame. So I had two children before I went up for promotion.

GERRARD: Where did they go to day care?

FINN: Well, the way that the university child care center worked here at that time, the students had priority because it was originally established because of our commitment to serving the non-traditional student. A lot of them were adults with children. So the center was designed to meet their needs, and faculty were kind of on a waiting list. So I didn't get into the center here. Plus the center was only operational during the academic year, and so there were gaps. When classes weren't in session, there was no center. Well, that's when I did most of my work, was when I'm not teaching class. So that wasn't going to work at all. So I had this grand notion -- this is how naïve I was going into parenthood -- you know, the child probably will sleep a lot, so I'll just 01:04:00get my teaching schedule so that I'm teaching in the evening and I'll have plenty of time during the day while she's -- it was -- within three weeks, my husband said I was just, like, frantic. But I had managed to write one paragraph, and it was three weeks into the semester. So we wandered down to Central Presbyterian Church, down here. And I think I was a wreck, because I remember this woman looking at me, and she's just, like, you know, talking to me in her southern tone. "Sweetie," you know, "It's all going to be OK." And they had a nursing room, and I could come. I mean, she was doing everything she could to help me not feel so guilty about putting my children into care. But it was a wonderful environment. And my daughter went there, and she never went into the center here at all. And my son, by that time we had bought a home about 30 miles outside of Atlanta, because we couldn't afford 01:05:00anything within the city of Atlanta at that time. And ended up -- when he was born, I actually -- my daughter was going to a Montessori school. It also had a child care center affiliated with it. The school, unfortunately, closed, and so the child care staff were all looking for positions. So I hired a woman to come and take care of -- be there with Hillary after school and Corey for the first two years. And then after that, I ended up putting him into some sort of child care. But no, I mean, it was -- I hadn't planned for it -- well, I hadn't even thought about it, really. And I think those years, when I talk with young women, there's a number of them now in my department, we're now half female. And a lot of them are either thinking about having a family, or have young 01:06:00children. It is that struggled. That balance at how you obtain it, and how you are at work and don't feel so guilty that you can't get anything done, and how you can be with your children and not feel the anxiety about not getting anything done. And I think it's just the struggle about being a working parent, and how you balance those things. And there's not a -- there's, you know, what's right for me doesn't necessarily work for others. But I can remember my work time beginning at 11:00, midnight and running until 3:00 in the morning, because it would be the only time I'd have those three-hour chunks of time to really do anything. And I'm not sure it was always that good. But I took it. And one of the things that I think parenting does, or having children, or having to care for someone else and realizing that your time is not your own anymore makes you work differently. It made me work differently, to where now I 01:07:00don't look for long chunks of time to do any kind of writing. If I've got 15 minutes, I'm writing. You know, even if it's just a thought. I even got to a point where I had a recorder, where I would just say, "Here, ba ba ba," because sometimes that's the only minutes you get. And you piece them together. And it's just -- it's -- yeah. I mean, it's a very odd way to work. But I think it fits well with the way our students are thinking today, right? I mean, it helps me to understand. I have that, and you can say, how come they don't take two hours to just sit and think about something? And I'm, like, who has two hours to sit and think about something? That's a luxury that we haven't -- I don't think do a good job building in to higher educational experiences any more. And I'm not sure that students, the way they're kind of educated today, even has those chunks of times. So they're wired to even think that way.

GERRARD: Now you said that the other faculty members in your department were pretty supportive of you, and --

FINN: Some of them were, some of them weren't. I mean some of them -- I mean, I had the -- I was fortunate enough to be able to double up on classes. We were on a quarter system, so I could take on an additional class, and then I ended up having, like, spring semester off with my son. My daughter was born in August. So I had her -- I was teaching, walking over to teach and my water broke. And so that was the end -- it was, like, the final week of class, so it was, like, OK, that's that. So I got in the car and I went home, and then we went to the hospital. But then I started back in -- it was September. So I maybe had five weeks off with her, before I started back teaching. And my son I had the longest time, because I had off March, probably, and I didn't work that summer. But I 01:09:00have since then it's always been I'm either doing a summer class or doing research, or, yeah, so somehow figuring out a way to balance it. But, you know, women entering into the academy, especially in Criminal Justice, when I -- I didn't realize, I guess, how much of a trailblazer I was, until I got going to conferences and looking around and going, wow. I mean, it's very different today. Actually, our student boy is probably half women.

GERRARD: That's in Criminal Justice?

FINN: In Criminal Justice. Even our doctoral program is predominantly women. We have a -- I mean, we've only entered three cohorts, but we have maybe out of those 20 people maybe four men. Maybe.

GERRARD: How did this change, then? What happened?

FINN: I mean, I think it's a trend we're seeing in higher education in general, is that women are recognizing that their pathway, I think both to -- if 01:10:00it's self-sufficiency they're seeking like I was, that education is one of the -- a door that is open based on ability, right? Because we're not looking for fit. And we're not looking for who can I play golf with on Saturday. We're looking for the brightest and most capable, and the most committed. And if that happens to be women, then they're it. So I think it's -- I mean, it's -- I wonder how it will reshape the academy. I mean I had a colleague the other day who told me that she had just -- she had learned that she was pregnant, and she wasn't sure what to do. And she's young, early in her 01:11:00career. And she said, "You know, I went to one of the senior women in the department and they were not very supportive. They were naysaying, and, why did you do that? That's not" -- and I just thought, you know, this really isn't an issue so much about women as it is about wanting to have children. But I think if you, as a woman, want to forego that and make a choice to do that, which is fine, your pathway's a very different one from the young woman, or even the young man who says family is going to be something that's going to be a part of my life, and I'm going to value it, and I'm going to spend time nurturing it, just like I nurture my career. I don't think we do well like that.

GERRARD: No, I don't.

FINN: And that is a big concern that I have.

GERRARD: I think that's really prevalent in academia.

FINN: Yes. And I don't quite understand it, because we set the -- we kind of set the rules. It's not like there's a corporate structure that imposes it. We're the ones that set those standards. And so why are we -- why can't we 01:12:00kind if just agree that if there's a place that you should be able to achieve work-life balance and model that for students, it should be the academy. I don't know when we decided we had to be the corporate model. I mean, it's there, and it's not -- and maybe it's being at a research university is different from being within a teaching college system, I don't know. But boy, it's -- you forego so much in stepping into the academy, because you forego salary, you forego -- I mean, there's benefits, but really the minds that you have here, if they had walked a different path, would have a lot more financial success. So you give that up for a reason. And part of it's supposed to be that you can have this different kind of life. But I'm finding that you really -- it's really more and more difficult to even have those conversations 01:13:00without being looked at like, you know, you're just not competitive enough. It's not really about that. I don't think it's about that. I'm as competitive as anyone else. But I know how to balance it. But --

GERRARD: Now, how long had you been there before they started having -- like, there's the Student Committee in the Advancement of Women? Because there's a faculty-student committee, and there's a staff one.

FINN: Yes. That came out of some work that Mary -- I want to say -- the College of Law faculty member Mary Rader, and some -- and the Gear Project that was funded by National Science Foundation -- was looking at Georgia Tech. And they had done a study of women in the STEM disciplines. And as part of that project, 01:14:00Georgia State somehow got involved. I don't know if it was through Diane [Volks?] and the whole women's studies movement here, but the steering committee was actually recommended, came out of the university Senate, I believe. And it was a way to try to address to have some sort of faculty input into issues that women were facing. And some of them had to do with salary, some of them had to do with issues of child care. And some of them had to do with promotion and tenure. There was, appeared to be, a pattern of putting women into service silos, where once a woman was tenured within a department, she became the person that did the service work for the department, so that the men could do the important work of the field. And so the answer for women, the first 01:15:00person that got involved in that, I believe, was, or the first chair was Susan Talbot.

GERRARD: Oh, was it?

FINN: I think so. And at that point she was involved in education. She was a faculty member in the College of Education. And she served in that position a couple of years. And Ron Henry, a former provost, was a very strong advocate for women, and wanted the university to kind of -- he was supportive of this involvement of faculty and staff. So on the staff side, Linda Nelson, Kerry Heyward, who's still our attorney -- I'm trying to think who are some of the other founding people -- a couple of folks who have since left and moved on to other positions were involved with, and have always been strong advocates 01:16:00for staff advancement, and creating promotion tracks for women at the university. And so that Advancement of Women steering group thought of bringing -- identifying the common issues of cross-faculty and staff that women faced here, and begin to build different programs and initiatives and policies that would help. I think the success of that has varied over time, a lot dependent upon just how much the person in that position wanted to kind of take the ball and run. I was always the kind of person that if you give me an opportunity and you tell me I can do something, then I'm going to do it. And I'm not going to wait for you tell me what to do, I'm going to bring to you what I think needs to be done. And so I was -- oh, I guess in my work experiences, even 01:17:00through graduate school and other jobs I've done, I always had -- I had one supervisor tell me, "Do not bring me problems, bring me solutions." And I have kind of -- that's been my credo ever since, because what I've found is that -- and it's not that management doesn't care about making things better, it's just that if you bring them a problem, they have to figure out how to make it better. So if you raise an issue and you say, and by the way, I think we have a way we can solve this, or address this, then you've done their work for them. And if it's an issue that impacts you, or people like you, you're probably in a far better position to propose a solution than that manager who may have experienced what you experienced, or never experienced what you experienced if it's a woman's issue, and wouldn't know necessarily the first way to go about addressing it. So the Advancement of Women -- I'm trying 01:18:00to think of the year that it started. Probably it would have been 2000, early 2000s, I would say.

GERRARD: OK. Because you were chair 2004?

FINN: Two thousand four. And I replaced Susan. I think, don't know if there was anyone before her in that position.

GERRARD: You were chair when I was on that committee.

FINN: Yes. Right.

GERRARD: And our focus, a lot of our focus was on --

FINN: On mentoring.

GERRARD: Mentoring.

FINN: Grants. Yes. And that grew out of some survey that was done, it may have grew out of that Senate committee survey that identified that one of the main barriers that women had identified, moving from associate to full, because what I have observed in the academy is that the transition from assistant to 01:19:00associate, because of the time constraints, you know, you have a limited amount of time that you can do it, is not the biggest hurdle to pass. There are life circumstances that can make it more difficult, because those often coincide with when if you're going to have a family, that's your primary child bearing years. But once you're on -- once you've been awarded that, you are still at a rank below professor. And the crawl that you've got to make, the kicking and scratching, the climb from associate to professor, I found more difficult to do. And I remember reading a book that was written by a clinical psychology professor, I think it was called, The Unquiet Mind. And she had, in addition to being highly intelligent, she also had a mental illness, a clinical depression 01:20:00that she was struggling with. And she had written a memoire about her progress through the academy. And in her memoir, she shared that she had gone to a reception that was celebrating hers and other faculty members' accomplishments of moving to associate. And one of her -- one of the male colleagues said, "Well, you know, this is fine, but you know professor is the male's club. Basically we'll give any woman associate professor. But moving into professor, you're really trying to break into a crowd that may not" -- and if you look at the way we've set up this system, the criteria far more nebulous, not that they're clear at the lower rank. But, you know, the timeframe is, you determine, you know? You're eligible after five, but you can go up whenever you want, right? And so the actual -- what's required to make that next leap 01:21:00is always contextual. And the context is very different, depending on the number of years, and depending -- I mean, so there's a lot of wiggle room. Yeah. So one of the recommendations, getting back to the survey, one of the findings was that women were finding that they could not find necessarily senior collaborators to help them advance their research, and that they weren't being necessarily mentored to move from associate to full, in the way that they felt their male peers were. And so one of the -- I said, well, let's create a way to kind of sponsor this mentorship, and hook associate women up with people they identify, could be a male or female senior member of the academy here or 01:22:00elsewhere, to help them land that grant, federal grant proposal that they need to finish the book, if it's in the humanities, so that they can make that leap. And I think that we had really good success with that, actually. We operated for three years, and I was tracking kind of what -- did the women do what they said they were going to do, and was it -- now I know that they had -- that more than half of them had success in finishing the book, or getting the grant, or but -- but I think to me, the real success was, did they then go up for promotion or not? And that's what I didn't keep as good records of. But I think of the -- we probably did 18 women, I think more than half of them -- well, they all completed their projects. But whether or not it was the jumping point for them, did it really advance them and give them the credentials that they felt that they needed? And that's the other -- my big frustration with 01:23:00women overall is that we always wait to be asked. When are we going to stop asking permission to be here? I don't understand it. And I know that I was that way early in my career. But boy, once I saw how this game is played, I quit asking. Because if you wait around for someone to give you the nod, you're going to be waiting around forever. There's no incentive to give you the nod. You have to want it. And you have to have confidence that you have done what you need to do, and then you go for it, and have them deny you. It's been my mantra to women that ever come through [inaudible], it's, like, you know, you have to be confident that you have done what you need to do. If you are confident, then don't even bother. But don't sit around waiting for Professor Smith to knock on your door and say, "Margaret, it's now time." 01:24:00It's just not going to happen. It just sounds so ridiculous --

GERRARD: When you say it out loud, it does.

FINN: Right. But we sit and we wait, because I just think we have this sense that we're somehow inferior in this place, and we do it sometimes to ourselves. I mean, not all women. Some women, you know, they -- but still, it's a goodness, can we not do this self-assessment and say, I'm ready. And if you don't think I'm ready, I want you to tell me why. That's all you're doing. You know, somehow they think, well, I shouldn't ask before I'm ready, it's going to hurt me. No. It says that you have set this as a goal, and you want to pursue it, and you want to know what more you need to -- even annual reviews. It's, like, why are we sitting around and talking about what I've done? What do I need to be doing in order to advance? That's what the conversation needs to be about. You can't change the past. It's -- so, 01:25:00yeah. So Advancement of Women I think was -- I really enjoyed being a part of that. It made me feel I was at a point in my career where I was a little frustrated that the stoppage of the tenure clock policy got stalled, and we got push-back from the regents, who said, "Oh, well, it's board of regent's policy, you have to take a leave of absence," or, "You have to take sick leave in order to qualify for a leave of absence." And I'm, like, you know, if a woman, in my case, has her baby on May 31st, why does she have to take sick leave in order to qualify for a stoppage? The child doesn't go away in September when she steps back into the classroom. It's still there. And I think we still have this runaround, and it's still the issue that you have to take some form of sick leave in order for this to -- and I just said I don't understand that.

GERRARD: There's often this well, if this is what the board of regents says, so it has to be. Well, does it really have to be?

FINN: Yeah. And what I ended up doing is, I kept monitoring the University of Georgia and Georgia Tech, because they -- I've had faculty from there keep telling me no, we have a policy. We do it. And I said, "Well, can you send it to me? Can you forward it to me?" And finally I got a copy of it, and they were in violation of board of regent's policy, because they were allowing it without any kind of leave. And so I trod over to the provost, and I said, "Now here, I don't get it. How come all of these -- why are we playing by the rules here? Do it and ask for permission. Ask for forgiveness. Don't wait. Don't send it up the pipeline. This is our community. Let's just do it."

GERRARD: It doesn't hurt anyone.

FINN: No. And then I had -- you know, one of the other pieces of that whole experience here was that there were some deans, and there were some female 01:27:00deans, who weren't supportive of the policy because they felt it was creating an unequal playing field. And I'm, like, what are you talking about? How, how is that? Men or women can take it. How is it an unequal playing field? It just -- so and I could never -- and they would never publicly say that. But in their private conversations with the provost, that's what they would report. And it's, like, why can't -- I can't manage that. You know, give me the -- articulate more than that to me, and I'll bring you evidence that it doesn't. But, you know, to send up those kind of balloons and then -- yeah. It was a frustrating stage. And I had people tell me, "Well, you've already had your kids. Why do you care about this?" And it's, like, "Because I want this place to be better. I don't want people to have to struggle with it the 01:28:00way I did." That's part of being in a community, is that you want to make it better for the people who come after you. It's just -- I still get calls about it! It's funny. It's like, I haven't done that position for -- but they're, like, "Mary, you need to know about this." It's, like, "No, I don't need to know about it. I am not doing that anymore." You know, I just, like, some of the younger women are just like, you've got to step up here. You can't be -- you know. You need to get knowledgeable about this. You need to be more knowledgeable than I was. But for goodness sakes, don't expect that this path is going to be always smooth. And I said I think sometimes people really hate seeing me come, because I just am, like, what about it? How can we do this? And I think they need to hear it from other people.

GERRARD: Yeah. Now you were here at the time that they were finally gearing up to having a Women's Studies Institute fully functioning and approved. Was there -- do you remember on campus there being much push-back around that?

FINN: I didn't remember much campus-wide. Diane Volks, I think, was the -- and she and I had worked together with Denise Donnelly, and Susan Kelly even at the time. We had come together as this small group of women that was interested in doing research on women's issues, with children and women's issues. And it was through that that I met Diane. And then she had subsequently retired. But the initial proposal had gone through. I don't remember there being a lot of push-back. I think, though, one topic of debate was where it would be housed. You know, would it be this independent institute reporting to the provost? Would it be an institute within a college? That whole definitional game that gets 01:30:00played. I do think there was some concern about enrollment size; how large a demand is there for women's studies? I think it's the same issues whenever you create African American studies, or any of these that wanted to find the study of a particular group outside of a broader foundation in a field or discipline. You always get people who say that that might not be the best thing, it should be integrated into the study. So I think there is always that debate. And I think it -- you know, the Women's Studies Institute did have some challenges. But I don't -- I wasn't involved, and didn't really have my ear to the ground on a lot of them. I know there was an early academic program review that was called for, for the Women's Studies Institute, so it was reviewed earlier on in the process than other new programs which, you know, why would that be? So I have a feeling that there was a group that was not real 01:31:00positive in support of it. But I honestly didn't -- I don't think I was involved in the Senate that that time, either. I was probably just kind of tucked away in my department, trying to figure out my own path. But, I mean, I think I'm real pleased with where it is now. And I think that there have been times when in my role in ESFA for Advancement of Women, knowing that the Women's Studies Institute was there, and had this group of women committed involved connected has really made a difference. It's one of the things that I was talking with a colleague in another department about, I'm concerned about the Senate at this stage of our institutional history, because it used to be, or I perceived it, and it could be my perceptions are off, as really being the 01:32:00voice of the larger community, the faculty, the staff, and to some degree even the students that it was the kind of -- it would give voice to things that we might not hear of otherwise. And I feel it's losing that, that in some ways it may be co-opted by the current administration to where it's losing a lot of its vocal-ness and its ability to raise important issues. So I think that I was talking with a colleague about perhaps what we need is -- and it's been largely somewhat about women's issues, and that we need a women's caucus. And it could cut across staff-student-faculty lines. But I feel like because we don't have currently a senior faculty associate for Advancement of Women that that position's remained unfilled, that there's a silence about issues that 01:33:00are affecting women on campus, that needs to be filled. Now the response I get sometimes is, well, then you're marginalized. And I'm, like, yeah, well, maybe so. But there needs to be a place where those conversations can take place. And I'm not sure that they're happening to the degree -- and maybe things are just so much better that I -- that it's not needed.

GERRARD: Well, they have some other places. I know the president's wife is very interested in that starting up.

FINN: Oh, good. Good.

GERRARD: Yeah, she's very interested in that.

FINN: Good. So I think it would be a good idea.

GERRARD: Yes. Well let's talk a little bit about some of your research, because you've written a lot over the years. You've written a great deal about domestic violence.

FINN: Yes.

GERRARD: I want to talk about that for a while.

FINN: OK.

GERRARD: How did you become interested in issues -- in domestic violence around Criminal Justice?

FINN: Well part of it is, I had met some people through my life that were impacted by domestic violence. My mother was. My father was abusive to her. And it was never -- it never landed her in the hospital with injuries, but there was verbal and physical abuse that took place. And so part if it's that, wanting to understand that phenomenon. And as a child, to have witnessed a lot of that, I think it left some scars that I realized, as I had my own children, that I had issues I needed to deal with around that. And then a woman that I worked with, was close to in college, who is a staff person in the office that I worked, I 01:35:00did a work study position at Mercyhurst -- her husband, former husband, had almost beat her to the point where she was dead. I mean, she was a mess. And so you couldn't quite understand this independent, spirited, strong woman who had this happen to her, how could this happen? And she had a daughter who was eight or nine, as well. You know, part of her decision to leave had to do with the fact that the abuser then started abusing her daughter. And at that point she said, you know, it's one thing for me to make a decision to endure this, but to put her in harm's way is unacceptable to me as a mom, and so she left. And 01:36:00so there was all that, helping her through that. So for some reason in my life, I've had -- I don't know if it's an ability or an awareness or a sense of when people have struggled with or are going through -- my husband said, "You kind of draw people like that." I am a pretty good listener, and I can empathize and not pass judgment on that experience on either side, but kind of know what to do to help them, or facilitate them getting the help that they need and be willing to do that. Just maybe a rescue complex (inaudible). And a part of it, I think, is, you know, as a child seeing my mother go through that and not really being powerful enough to do anything other than go to her afterwards, and try to comfort her. I just felt so weak and just defeated in so many ways, 01:37:00that I just figured when I get to the point where I can say something or intervene, or do something, I'm going to do it. And sometimes it's at the point where you always try to preface things, well, maybe I'm not understanding what's going on here, but I have this feeling. And I'll give you an example. My daughter, when she was in elementary school, she had a friend that used to come over and play, you know, for play dates. And the mother would drop her off. Her mother would stand, you know, we have a cement stoop that was maybe four by four, but she would stand away from the door. She'd ring the doorbell and she'd step back. And she wouldn't get -- you know, her body buffer zone was four feet or so. And she would never make eye contact with you. And you know, I was just, like, watching, and then there's times when I would 01:38:00see she would have her hair brushed over. And then I -- the grandmother of this little girl lived in the community next to ours, and so there's some days when the little girl would be there, and I'd drop Hillary off at the grandmother's. And the grandmother had them, this young girl and her brother quite regularly. And that, to me, is also kind of another sign. Not in predictable ways, it's just that, well, she's going to be over here today. And it's, like, OK. You know. And so one day she -- I just stopped the mother as she dropped her off, and I just said, "You know, is everything OK?" And she just started crying. And she said, she just, "No, it's not OK. But I'm going to be fine. It's fine. Nothing's wrong with Rachel, Rachel's fine." And I said, "No, I'm not concerned about Rachel. I just want to make sure that everything's OK with you." You know, if you -- and I always had, I always picked up partnership (inaudible). I always had cards for health services, you know. I go, "I'm going to give you this, and I'm not making 01:39:00any assumptions that this is what's going on. But if you need help, you can call." And I said, "And feel free to call me. If you need someplace safe," because I said, "I really am concerned that you just don't feel safe. And you need to fix it." And she just kind of in a fluster, and she, well, anyway -- so I'm kind of watching and watching. And then it ends very tragically. The woman decides that she's going to kill herself. And she asphyxiates herself in the garage. And she's got these two beautiful children, she's got a mother who's watching all this unfold. She's got me watching it unfold. And I just thought -- I felt awful. And it's, like, and my husband would go, "Well, what are you going to do? What do you think you could have done?" I said, "I don't know. I just don't feel like I did enough." And so she wasn't very old. She was maybe in her thirties. And this relationship just got to the point where... And so I told him, I was saying I know that I risk a lot, and sometimes I'm sure I offend people, and I don't mean to, and I hope that they 01:40:00understand. But if I see something, or if I suspect something, I'm just going to ask. And I would hope someone would ask me. I mean, it's, like, you know, I just can't not -- you know, I know too much. I observe too much to know that something just doesn't sit right. And I know that they might not be ready, and I know that it's, like, a card doesn't hurt.

GERRARD: And somebody just aware. Just saying there is -- there are things that can be done, as a support.

FINN: Yes. I had a friend from -- who I went to graduate school with who was in a -- I thought it was, you know, my husband says, "You always make (inaudible)." There was behavior between her and the guy she was dating, that I just wasn't comfortable with. And so we had moved down here to Atlanta, and she was -- she called me on the phone crying. And she was describing this behavior of her partner, and I said, "You know, do you feel safe? Does he make 01:41:00you feel afraid? I mean, those are the things that you have a right to be with someone who doesn't make you feel afraid. I don't care if he's angry and he's not angry at you, he's just angry -- you don't have to exist like that." And you know, it's giving, I think, voicing what people won't voice themselves, and say you are right to be afraid. It is OK to feel afraid. You don't have to feel that way. You can make changes. What can I do to help you make those changes? Just offering, you know? And it just -- you lose more friends that way. And I just say, you know -- because I was just, like, it didn't ruin the friendship, but it's just, like, I knew -- she confirmed a side of their relationship that I had suspected, and it became harder to be -- to watch that unfold, you know? So I just -- I'm still her friend, and she's still my friend. But it's, like, I'm always watching. I'm always --

GERRARD: She's still with him?

FINN: She's still with him. They have three children. Yeah, I mean, it just -- 01:42:00yeah. It's strange.

GERRARD: So was it emotionally painful, then, for you to start doing research on this subject?

FINN: Yeah, I had to be sure that I wasn't losing my objectivity to whatever degree -- I mean, whatever that means, that it wasn't taking more from me emotionally than I could handle. So I never myself was in an abusive relationship. So it's more seeing people I care about, which sometimes makes -- rallies me more to action than something I experienced myself. But it was hard to initially get involved in it. And I think some of my first work was looking at how the system responded to it, because some of what the experiences that these women had had was that they didn't -- they would call the police and it would be, like, what? You know, you're living with him. His name's on 01:43:00the deed. What do you want us to do? Work this out. You made your bed, lie in it. I mean, all the wrong things to say to somebody who already feels that they're -- that they don't have options. And that by maintaining that relationship, that they're condoning this kind of treatment. And so it was, well, what -- you know, looking at the policies and the laws and the awareness that came about in the '80s and then into the '90s was that we have an obligation to try to provide minimal equal protection of the law. You know, why should -- if this assault was going on in public, you'd arrest. But because it's going on behind closed doors, you're not going to? What's that about? Why this double standard? And the whole status of women in not being recognized as full citizens. So I mean, all of it kind of just got my feminist ires up, and 01:44:00I said, well, I'm going to start looking at this. And then, so I did some work looking at how police make decisions that have to do with what assessments and inferences are they making about the women who's in this situation? What are their predispositions to the appropriateness and the use of violence in intimate relationships? I mean, all of those kinds of things. And then looking at, you know, our state has a primary aggressor statute, that instructs police, forgives them the things that they should be looking for when they come into a situation where there's intimate partner violence, or family violence to determine who is the primary aggressor here, because sometimes people use defensive action. And that defensive action results in injury. But that's not -- you know, you can't expect people to stand and take it. So you have to be able to investigate and sort through competing claims about who initiated the violence, 01:45:00and who used violence before, and what's the purpose of that violence? And so that research helped kind of foster some additional questions, right? OK, now how do prosecutors interact with victims that come forward? Because if this all about deterring the actions they take, if they say we're not going to move this forward because she's not going to be willing to testify, that stops the deterrent message. If they tell her what she has to do and decrease her empowerment from calling the police -- I mean, all of those things. So there's a linkage in these stages of the process where I think our interventions can actually be a pathway for women to safety, that there's also so many ways in which that door can be slammed shut, sometimes because prosecutors think they're doing the best thing for her. There's that paternalism that airs its head again. And it's, like, what makes you think that you know better than 01:46:00this person? Granted, she's been traumatized. But listen to her. Her concerns are real. She's got to care for her children. He has the only vehicle. She doesn't want to end this relationship; she wants a relationship with him that is not violent. What can you do to help that happen? Instead, it's, like, just need to leave him. It's so easy! It's, like, nothing about the role women play in our lives makes leaving any relationship easy for us. It just isn't. It's facing --

GERRARD: Did you, in doing this research, did you irritate any agencies, or --

FINN: No, I don't --

GERRARD: I mean, you're looking at what doesn't work as well as what does work. And are people sensitive to that?

FINN: They are. But I think one of the things that's impressed me about working with both police and prosecutors is that, especially prosecutors, I 01:47:00think they're really in difficult situations in many ways, because there's a tremendous pressure for them to pursue every incident, no matter what. If you have legal sufficiency to charge that person, you charge them. You don't listen to the victim. If she wants it dropped, you don't listen to her, even if she has reasons why she thinks that doing that prosecution is going to endanger her further, and here's why. So I think these -- you know, they're kind of damned if they do and damned if they don't. If they listen to the victim and her concerns are real, and there may be past demonstrations of those concerns that have been followed through on, those threats or intimidation, or further harm, then they're seen as not sending a strong message. And they're allowing the victim to drive this. And if you allow the victim to drive this, then it's the batterer who's driving it, not her, right? I mean, there's 01:48:00all this -- again, women, the victims in this, predominantly women, become just pawns, you know, so that they don't have an independent voice. So I sympathize with them in some ways, because there's this push to go full-out and pursue, and sometimes that has harm on the victim that we don't necessarily foresee. But we want this general deterrence, we want to know that we're bringing the full force of the law to these incidents, at any cost. It doesn't matter who's harmed by them. For recurrence of violence in the future. So I think -- but they know that sometimes they will admit the futility of the actions they're taking. I mean, these relationships between men and women, where power dynamics and coercion becomes a part, they're damaging relationships. And to work with those couples, to get it to the point where it can exist in a way, 01:49:00that there is not violence, and there's mutual respect, takes a tremendous amount of unlearning and relearning and reevaluating and recommitment. And I'm not certain that -- I'm not certain that we are necessarily that successful when those patterns are longstanding patterns that maybe developed in dating relationships and continued on into cohabitation or marital relationships. So I think it's a long road to hoe. But I think we expect great things by -- you know, and my work with the prosecutors has always been, you know, if you -- what my research has shown is that if you partner with that victim, you listen and you bring additional resources that she might need to become less dependent upon that abuser, if that means housing, employment, you know, simply assistance getting to and from work -- whatever that is, those tangible things, you will 01:50:00have done more to help her escape violence, because she's beginning that pathway of independence than, you know, this issue of did we put him in jail or not, which may actually do more harm to her economically than not. So it's, like, you know, there's not -- you can't handle every one of these cases routinely. And so you've got to be able to take that time to listen and partner with that victim, and empower her. And at some point -- it may not be with that incident -- but at some point in your contact with her, she is doing to have the ability to end that relationship if she wants, or that relationship will move to a point where she'll have enough power to negotiate nonviolence as a part of it. But you know, not listening to her doesn't do that.

GERRARD: But this is a society that likes quick fixes as well.

FINN: Yes.

GERRARD: It's not one where we really want to take the time to really 01:51:00understand the underlying issues that need to be addressed, in order to move forward.

FINN: Yeah, we want to fix it. And we also diminish -- I think we see the trauma, we don't see the person. And the minute we forget that there's an individual underneath that traumatized being that's sitting there, then they're not going to be empowered by the interaction with us in any way, shape or form. If we can't move beyond that. Because we have to be able to envision them as being self-sufficient, independent, capable decision-makers. And if we operate from the standpoint where they're not that, we're not going to have any kind of therapeutic effect on that individual. So -- yeah. And I think it's -- I think more and more prosecutors are understanding that. And some of -- you know, but it's hard. It's hard to see these cases.

GERRARD: One of the things you wrote about, I believe, was the difference between the people who are dealing with situations with domestic violence, or if it's a man or a woman that's actually -- like a police officer, let's say. Can you talk about what you discovered with your research?

FINN: Yeah, I mean, one of the aspects that we looked at, and it's one of the ramifications of -- I mean, feminist scholars argue that there has been a backlash against women, as we have been able to obtain equal protection under the law. So in instances of domestic violence, when there are injuries to both parties, there's a tendency for police officers to just say, well, then both of you hit someone, and hence, both of you will be arrested. And so they don't do any attempt to identify who really initiated and is using control, or the aim 01:53:00of the violence was to actually control the other person's behavior, and nothing else. So what we've tried to look at is, how gender, sex really, differentiates the attributes that officers place on the motives for behavior, and whether or not there are clear -- there are distinct motives we're willing to attribute to behavior because a woman engaged in it, versus a male engaging in it. And what's happened, I think, with our -- and I don't know if this is answering your question or not -- but one of the things that I've noticed in studying kind of changes in domestic violence law and intimate partner violence, there are laws to address that, is there's almost a gender neutrality that we want to apply to this kind of violence that occurs within couples. And there's even been some research that suggests that not -- you know, there's what's called "common couple violence," which is where violence simply erupts 01:54:00because, or someone acts violently because they can't control their emotion. So they're just -- it's kind of an explosion, kind of, you know, you shake a soda can and you lift it and it explodes -- but then it's done. And it's not a pattern within that relationship, it's simply isolated incidents, and that men and women are equally likely, because of their lack of ability to cope with frustration and anger, to use violence in that way, whereas the kind of the violence for which, the intimate partner violence and the battery, which where most of our domestic violence laws and intimate partner violence laws and our policies are directed at dealing with this latter form, is what they call terrorism, intimate terrorism, where the purpose of violence is not this release of pent-up emotion, but it's to control that other person. What they think, 01:55:00what they do, how they behave, how they see themselves. And our laws are directed towards battering. But what we catch up in our police responses is all of it. So we get the -- you know, we get the individual who -- or the neighbor who calls because they happened to see something through the window, right? Or the woman who calls and says "I'm pissed off that he hit me, so I'm going to phone the police and have them come," when the reality is, that may not be about control at all, but police see it all the same way, because the law says it's about injury, or it's about the initiation of violence. It doesn't say anything about what's the motive for that violence. And so our laws tend to catch a lot more people in, and so what we're finding is that we're having men and women come in in somewhat equal numbers. But all our response is, the minute she steps into the court, or probably even the minute the police 01:56:00come, they see a batterer. They don't see somebody who just went off the deep end once. They see -- they look at her and him and say, oh my goodness, there's a pattern. I mean, it's so engrained, right, that every time someone uses violence against another, it has to be because they want to control them. And so we haven't been able to differentiate in our law how men and -- and but the research shows that men are more likely to use violence to control, women are not. So when we look at that group of those who engage in intimate terror, the victims are, 95% percent of the time, women. And only 5% percent with daddy. And often times, it's within same sex couples where you'll find women who might use violence to control their partner. So it's an interesting phenomenon to see that this juncture between the phenomenon itself, and then we've created this kind of response that use it all as lumping it as the same. And what it ends up happening is, women are referred to batterer intervention 01:57:00programs that try to talk them out of, and convince them, that they shouldn't use violence for control. The reality is, she's not using it for that, anyway. So they're totally ineffective for women. So it's a strange kind of phenomenon. So gender, sex in this case because that's what we're largely dealing with when we talk about how the police view things, and prosecutors, is it defines our expectations for what's acceptable and unacceptable for women to engage in. And unfortunately, we maybe have been too successful in some ways. And as feminists, and getting a recognition of the use of violence as a means of control, that we now have to spread the cloth so wide. And that's not to say that I, you know, as a person, I would never use violence, even in an explosion. 01:58:00But I think I have a little better coping abilities and emotion, a little more mature than other people, to some degree. But it's a strange place to be in, to be trying to get differentiation along those lines.

GERRARD: You in, it's '97, you were on the protocol committee of the Georgia Sexual Assault Task Force.

FINN: Yes.

GERRARD: So did you come up with a protocol for dealing with sexual assault?

FINN: Yeah, it was largely what they needed was somebody who could prepare for the task force and educate them about the pathways that sexual assault cases came into the Criminal Justice system, and how charging decisions were made.

GERRARD: OK.

FINN: So I had to lay out both the misdemeanor path and the felony path, because 01:59:00most people -- I mean, you always think of sexual assault as felony level, you know, and if it's a rape in our state, you know, which we're not -- our different -- our levels of sexual assault are very narrow in our state, unfortunately. But at the misdemeanor level, there's the ability to -- I mean, most people think all crime is somehow police initiated, so that any charges that come to the prosecutor's office must come from a police call for service, or police witnessing something. But in cases of misdemeanor violence, and probably in the case of felony as well, a citizen can go out and swear out a warrant on someone for a crime that's been committed. And so especially in family violence cases, in cases of sexual assault that may occur within the context of intimate partnerships, oftentimes this may be a pathway that women use. So how -- you know, what's the level -- how do those cases work through, and what's required, was partly what I had done for that. And it was an 02:00:00interesting -- it was an interesting task force to be involved in.

GERRARD: Who were you on it with?

FINN: It was operated through the Department of Human Resources at the time. There were a couple of faculty from sociology, a couple of medical doctors from Emory, so it was kind of a cross-university group of people, along with folks in DHR, because they were involved with the sexual assault nurse examiner's programs that were operating throughout the state. And at that point, we were trying to get a network of sexual assault centers placed, and training people on the protocol of what to do, and yes. So, I mean, there was quite a bit of attention to it at that time.

GERRARD: It seems like sexual assault as an issue came after domestic violence, as an awareness of it.

FINN: Oh, yes.

GERRARD: And they have a lot of similar entities, but there are very clear 02:01:00differences. And talking with folks in the community, I think in that community, I think they sometimes get frustrated that they are lumped together by the general public, or by politicians, or whoever is making budget decisions, things like that. I think there are definitely some differences between them.

FINN: Yeah, I mean I think that -- well, from what I know, and sexual assault is, especially of adults is not -- I mean, we deal mainly with children, which is odd. But sexual -- what we know about most sexual assaults is that they occur -- the perpetrator typically knows the victim, whether it's an acquaintance, a neighbor, an intimate relationship with dating, or a marriage relationship. So the majority of sexual assaults, the victims and the perpetrators are in some sort of relationship with each other, so that the true what we call stranger on stranger rate has a very different typology. And I think -- I always think of 02:02:00Susan Estrich's book, Real Rape, that she was a political advisor for Michael Dukakis, and she's also a law faculty member, I believe, at one of the ivies, Harvard or Yale. But she's also a sexual assault survivor. And she wrote a memoir about her experience, and said kind of her experiences, both as a -- I guess she worked as a prosecutor as well -- was that prosecutors and police view sexual assaults that occur between strangers and those that occur between known parties very differently. And there is a certainly level of skepticism that comes to sexual assault between intimates that is not there. And her experience as a survivor was that her treatment was, because this was a stranger who assaulted her in a parking lot, that she was kind of given a green go pass, 02:03:00clearly this is. But what she witnessed with all the others who, you know, became this scrutiny of the victim's behavior -- what were you wearing? Who was with you? Why were you there after dark? I mean, all these questions that you know that poor victim has probably played in her mind over and over again, that now gets asked by someone outside, and makes her feel responsible for her own victimization. It doesn't happen necessarily with the stranger rape at all. So she -- so I can understand why the community might not want to see the direct connections between it. And oftentimes when we study domestic violence, we often equate it simply to physical violence. And we leave sexual violence out. But it is a fundamental part, often, of those kinds of poor relationships that exist between intimates.

GERRARD: So then later on, 2004, you collaborated with the Georgia Commission on Family Violence, and the Georgia Coalition Against Domestic Violence to work on their domestic violence fatality review. Tell me about -- they're very depressing.

FINN: We have a whole run of them here.

GERRARD: Yes, because we have the commission's records and the coalition's records. But tell me about the fatality review.

FINN: OK. Well, my involvement with that started with -- I guess I got a call from the commission. And I had been friends with a couple of the former directors of the commission who had since left and gone onto other things. But the fatality review was a project -- it had a couple of graduate students, masters' students, who were interested in doing some work on family violence. And I was involved with the very first year of the fatality review. And what 02:05:00they wanted was a creation of an instrument that would allow them to go and look at these closed cases and really do -- I guess what I would describe as a forensic autopsy. So they wanted to kind of start at the point of the fatality and review backwards the context that this victim had with multiple systems. And so we traced back getting hold of -- bringing to the table social service agencies, health agencies, education -- any place that that victim might have touched in that community that had an opportunity to identify, acknowledge or investigate the violent experiences that she might have been having. And so I pulled together, oh, probably 10 or 12 different fatality review instruments 02:06:00from other states, and created this monster document of, you know, you want everything? Let's build something so we can get everything. I believe I modeled it after the one in West Virginia, which was a phenomenal work. I mean, just the degree -- if they had children, we were figuring out who they might have had contact with that might have, you know, that they could have disclosed to, for instance. So we created that in that first year. And then the two students that I had working on the project ended up kind of helping staff, the fatality reviews in the communities that were identified. And then at the end of it, as you know, and they still do this to this day, they go back and they debrief those agencies, and identify all of the places where opportunities were missed, that there were signs, and agencies could have intervened, or provided 02:07:00resources that may have moved this case off the path. And it wasn't about blaming agencies, and that was clear to set forward from the outset. It was meant to be a learning exercise. We all touched this victim, we all kind of share the burden of the fact that there's this fatality. But let's investigate our protocols. Let's look at if there's screening questions we could have asked. What were the warning signs? If we look at this backwards, and now we have the benefit of hindsight to see this cluster of things going on, if we see this in a case today, might we intervene more aggressively, or somehow change so that we could prevent this particular new case from going through that pathway? And so it was an exciting project to be involved in. It was a depressing project to be involved in. Entered all the data, analyzed it for them.

GERRARD: Did they contact you and ask you to work on this for them?

FINN: They did. They did from the outset, because they weren't sure how to kind of -- what data they wanted or needed, or -- and so I set up a longitudinal, you know, this hierarchal database in SPSS. They had collected -- my students had coded all of the report, you know, for each case, identified the information. I entered it into a spreadsheet and analyzed and gave them a findings report. And then the second year, moving forward, they had decided some information. I basically built the instrument, with the assumption that if the information is there, then we'll get it all. But what they identified were, as I identified later on especial with social services agency, educational, there's really spotty information. And so some of it you would never get, not in a million years. But it would be -- if those agencies ever were inclined to 02:09:00build stronger data collection, we tried to include variables that were considered to be kind of precursors or warning signs to potential fatality. So to build those instruments, hoping to educate the agents to say, well, you know, we don't really collect any in that way. But if we did, this might be an important thing to do because it would be a red flag for us. So we did a presentation on the data at the end of that year, and then the second year, a couple of my students stayed involved in it. But I moved on to some other things, because it was extremely labor-intensive. And I told them -- I didn't get funding to do that project. So I said, you know, if you want to continue with this, I mean, I need to have some sort of compensation to be able to pay the students, or something, because it was just way too labor-intensive. And I have since gotten a little demoralized with the whole fatality review process in 02:10:00some ways, because it's meant to be a jumping off point for agencies to revisit and revise, and to learn. And what's happened is that each year, they select a certain number of jurisdictions that are going to undergo that. But I think as a community, we're not looking across those common experiences. So if we've done this for six years, and we've looked at five different communities each year, there have got to be some common themes erupting here; common places where we're really dropping the ball, and other places where this is really an effective way, right? And we're not learning that. And it's not just Georgia where I feel that's happened. I think it's probably nationwide, that we need to say, OK, this is a wonderful experience for these local communities to do, and they build networks and they begin to talk about 02:11:00this. And there's that sense of connectedness and collaboration around this issue that's wonderful. But we -- what's the next step now? And that's where I don't -- and even the national -- Neil Websdale, that's kind of a national expert on this, I think he's kind of at a crossroads for, where do we go? What is the big lesson here, rather than this kind of community wellspring of good sentiment, where do we go with it?

GERRARD: Yeah, you're going to use it.

FINN: Yes. And that's -- you know. So if there is a next step for that, that's what I'd -- I actually thought of doing a content analysis, you know, or even a metadata analysis of all of the -- because every state, or almost every state, has these domestic violence brutality reviews. It's, like, what are we learning as a nation from these different jurisdictions? I think that would be a very worthwhile exercise to do, so maybe a student will do it as their dissertation, I don't know.

GERRARD: You can mentor them through that.

FINN: Oh, you'd have to, because it would be so -- actually, just having -- be able to debrief on this stuff and pull your head out of that dark place and say, oh, the sun is shining, and it -- because it can be dark. And it's hard.

GERRARD: Yeah. Absolutely, for sure. And all of this, the writing that you've done, all the research that you've done around domestic violence, violence against women, what's been most powerful?

FINN: Powerful, it's impact on me?

GERRARD: Yeah.

FINN: I think it's the interviews that I've done, the primary data collection, because most of the projects I've been have been almost all of them primary data, where I've had to go and recruit and interview. The women, with the work that I did with the prosecutor's office in Gwinnett and DeKalb 02:13:00County, we did some interviews with women and we stayed involved in their lives anywhere from six months to eighteen months, as their case came into the court and processed through. And their courage, I think, their -- you know, when I think back of how we stereotype these women who experience this kind of violence, and we have all these negative images about them. And I just see survivors. I see women who have beat the odds, and have managed when they had some children to provide environments where those kids are going to school every day, and they do have, you know, hot food in their stomach for break-- I mean, what they have been able to accomplish, despite the odds, I just say gosh, they're powerful role models. You know, they're not -- and I always think of my mom then. I think of what she was able to create for us, even though my 02:14:00mom's environment didn't mirror most of these women's environment. And it's just -- wow. You know what? And I think giving a voice to their stories, I think, is really important. And to hopefully try to shift the focus that people won't foresee the trauma and they'll see the person. You know, that's probably the biggest thing, is when we approach these women, it was, like, you know, we're approaching because of this experience. But we want to understand your life and what, you know, what's this experience been, not the victimization, but now that that's done, how is your contact -- how did you feel the police treated you? What about the advocates of the court? You know, are they hearing you? Did you get a protective order? Tell me what that was like. You know? And they, you know, to recognize that -- you know, we don't make it easy to leave these relationships. It can be very confusing. And they somehow -- they successfully navigate it, for themselves and their children, and 02:15:00people that they care about. So that's been powerful. I did a study on -- and probably one of the first works I got involved in was looking at children who witness violence between their parents, or mother-boyfriend. And that was really tough. And that was probably the -- that's when I think I only did one study, we didn't get that. And I have said, this is hitting a little too close to home. And I was OK with the boys, the boys really -- you know, they, especially the ages we were looking at was, like, 12 to 16, not real emotional-laden kind of responses. You know, they were pretty tough, and they would describe what 02:16:00they had done, but they never really got a real connection with them. But the girls were, you know, they're identifying with their mom, and I mean there's a lot of -- and the boys sometimes, especially as they got older, you could begin to see, and it's probably the saddest part about this phenomenon, is that among the younger boys there's a lot of identification with the mom and a real dislike for the way that the abuser was treating her. But the older they got, the more they began to see that it was about power, and they began to identify more with the abuser and began to blame the mom. It's like you were hearing the abuser's language through them which, to me, was just -- and I wasn't quite sure what to do with that. It's, like, what do you recommend in those situations? Because there's clearly a transition that takes place as boys age, and probably critical junctures at which intervening is really important to prevent them from going down the pathway of either accepting 02:17:00violence or being willing to perpetrate it as a way to relate to a partner in their life. So those were tough. But we didn't do a lot of those. I mean, there were -- it was a small study. But I decided at that point I wasn't going to pursue that work. And I actually probably didn't do justice to getting the results of that stuff out. We've done a couple of presentations at the family violence conference in New Hampshire on that. But yeah, it was a little too close to home. So there --

GERRARD: It's a good lesson. There are a number of organizations that are in Georgia that deal with family violence. Are there some that stand out to you as just being kind of wonderful that worked with you?

FINN: Well again, I have not had as much contact with them recently. But the 02:18:00Chair Key Family Violence shelter up in Canton, they were phenomenal. And their commitment to the women and the kids was good. The Women's Resource Center in DeKalb County -- oh my gosh, what a jewel. That place is, for a host of reasons. The outreach they do, the educational community -- they're always willing to partner. I recently -- some of my colleagues are involved in a victimization survey, the state. And they're trying to locate individuals who have experienced victimization, intimate partner violence victimization. And they were working with a bunch of organizations trying to find it, and I just said you need to call DeKalb, because you, know, they've got so much going on. And they were, like, sure. No problem. So they opened their doors -- so those kinds of partnerships, you know, when a place is willing to allow you to come in and you know that their heart is in the right place, they're assuming they're doing everything right. But you know, you have a level of trust in them that's 02:19:00just beyond what I have with most organizations. So they were really good. Yeah, I have not -- I'm trying to think of -- I've kind of moved away from looking at intimate partner violence, at least at the vantage point of victims' experiences at that level, of trying to get access through the community. So...

GERRARD: One last question about family violence, I don't know if it's -- are we to answer this, what do you think is at the root of this violence?

FINN: Well, I do think that there is an element of -- I guess I see the roots as being part of the need for dominance of one individual over another. If you have a -- and some of it's (inaudible) how we socialize around gender roles, how we raise our boys, the expectations we have. The role of women and girls, and how their behavior reflects on men. I think there's still this sense of ownership and privilege that comes with being male. And as much as we -- I mean, I have a son, which has made me begin to look and re-examine and watch how he treats women, young women; his sister, me. And I think we have a level of tolerance for 02:21:00use of harsh words and actions in intimate relationships that can only be damaging. And I think it starts young. I think it's modeled in the home, and I think it can be reinforced in schools through bullying. I don't see much of a distinction between the motives of bullies and the motives of batterers. I think they're simply bullies grown up. And it is about, you know, there are tons of typologies out there of the batterer, and how ineffectual they are, and the overcompensa-- I mean, all of those things. And I just think, you know, at the end of the day they just have to -- we have to be willing, outside of the legal 02:22:00system, to be willing to step in and to acknowledge that behavior, and to just state it's not acceptable. It makes me uncomfortable. I don't want to be around you when you engage in it. And that kind of pushing away of social networks may actually do more to bring about a change in that behavior than anything that we might do in the legal system. I just think we can't tolerate it. And we have to take responsibility for that, and be willing to say I don't -- you know, I talk with my students, also. I do a piece on bystander intervention in my class on domestic violence. And I say, OK, well, let's role play. What would you do? You're at the baseball game and your good friend of yours, especially the guys they put in this, and he's talking to his girl like that. What do you do? Do you just say, hey, that's not my issue, that's none 02:23:00of my business, and walk away? Or do you step in? When we allow it to go on, we're condoning it.

GERRARD: We're [inaudible].

FINN: Yeah. It's, like -- and you may say, well, it's not my business, and it's, like, this is a friend of yours, and your care about this friend. And maybe you even care about the girl he's with. But even not, that's someone's sister, daughter. Maybe your sister. Would you want someone then to step in? It's, like, don't allow this to go on and then wonder why it happens, and why do men think they can do this, you know? I kind of have a feeling I know why. It's because we just -- you know? I remember my son coming home from school one day and he was in middle school, and he said, "Mom, we're not allowed to say the word, "ho" anymore." And I said, "You mean, "hoe" like a garden instrument, a hoe? You know, a spade?" He goes, 02:24:00"No, mom, I mean a ho!" And I said, "Well, my goodness, I hope you never have a reason to use that word in school! And if I ever hear it coming out of your month" -- you know, it's, like, "In what context would you ever use it?" I mean, he was, like, "Mom, I get it. OK. It's one of those words I'm not supposed to say." But it's, like, it's that kind of stuff. "I think it's ridiculous I can't say that." I say, "No, it's not ridiculous at all." I mean, you can only use that word in a hurtful way. It's never meant to build anyone up. So there's no reason to use it. You shouldn't be about that negative energy. You should be about the positive.

GERRARD: Has your work affected how you raised your children in around this --

FINN: Well, my husband laughs because when I was doing the study on the witnessing -- interviewing the children about the witnessing of violence, I pilot tested it on my children.

GERRARD: Did you really?

FINN: He said, "Mary, we don't -- do you think you should ask that?" I mean, if I'm going to have the courage to ask and to have other parents allow me to ask their children, I need to be -- you know, I need to trust that my 02:25:00daughter can understand what I'm saying, and that there's nothing here that's going to make her uncomfortable. And so he laughed. But it definitely has. I mean, they have far greater awareness of these issues. It's not just what I researched, but even my own experiences in the academy, you know? When I come home and this has happened, or I've had to intervene because of this inappropriate thing here, and I just say, you know, this is just crazy that this goes on. So they do, they have an awareness that's -- it's just heightened. I think my son's -- I'm very, very proud of him on how he -- because I think it's hard to be a young male these days. I think we send tremendously mixed messages.

GERRARD: They're bombarded.

FINN: They are. They are. And I think they're at an -- this generation is a very interesting generation, because I think we're at this kind of nexus of 02:26:00transitioning and defining what it means to be male. And women, or females, are dominant in many social institutions, and they reshaped what's acceptable behavior, right, in many ways. And I think boys are brushing up against that and figuring out where do they fit in? And so it's a challenge. My hat's off to him if he can figure it out, because I just -- you know. But I think at the core it's about having fundamental respect for people and for yourself. And to always behave in a way that demonstrates that. And if you can follow that credo, I think you're going to do OK. There'll be some missteps and miscues, and you'll be misinterpreted and all of those things. But I think, you know, I think if you start at that place, rather than a place of manipulation or playing 02:27:00people, that you'll have better success.

GERRARD: What do you think of the role of online bullying? Because I mean, that's really prevalent. It's opened up a whole new level of abuse. I think that it's somehow become acceptable, to many people. And what message is that giving us?

FINN: Well, I think it's tremendously dangerous in many ways, because it is occurring in a cyber world that there's limited access to. So it is hidden beyond hidden. It's hidden underneath the hidden, which means that our awareness of it and our acknowledgement of it and our ability to respond to it 02:28:00is deterred in so many ways. I do think we have to take it seriously. I think one of the keys is probably to harden, in some ways, the targets of it, the victims of it. In a generation of kids that online relationships have just as much importance, and maybe even more importance to them socially than real-world relationships. I think we have to prepare children to figure out a way to become desensitized to that bullying in some way, that doesn't result in them having to withdraw from that world that matters so much in the social status of kids. And I don't know how we do all of that. But I am thankful that I'm not raising my children in -- that they're old enough now, and I think that 02:29:00they're -- I hope capable of navigating that kind of behavior, if it's inflicted on them. I certainly hope they would never be on the instigating side of it. But you know, with girls especially, there has always been this, you know, I think Peggy Orenstein's done a lot of work on kind of the ways in which girls can be particularly hurtful, because we're talking about a verbal, you know, a communication style that I think likely is very natural for girls in a way that it's not for boys, right, when we think about bullying. So I think the risk that girls are going to -- if they're prone to bullying, really prosper in this environment; it's much greater than for boys. But yeah, it's 02:30:00-- I don't think we can -- I don't think we should take it lightly. And I don't think we should ignore it. It's much like bullying on the playground. And I think bullying anywhere just can't -- we just can't tolerate it.

GERRARD: But what's very disturbing to me about this kind of bullying is you don't take responsibility for it because it's faceless.

FINN: Right.

GERRARD: And think what I see throughout our nation, though, is that when you -- people are no longer truly responsible for what they're seeing. There is this acceptance that you can say anything you want about someone, even if it's not true. And usually it's not true. And somehow, you're not responsible for that. And it does a great deal of damage.

FINN: Well, I think it's -- I mean, part of that, I wonder -- and this was a case that happened here at Georgia State when I was on the student discipline committee. There was a -- and this was in the early days of when I think the university had started sponsoring some sort of a posting for students. We 02:31:00didn't even have online messaging at that time. But students could post to a bulletin board, and it was -- I think it was a University of Philly -- somehow the university was sponsoring it, but it wasn't directly in control of its content. Anyway, young man got on there and started talking about different ways in which to sexually assault young women, prostitutes, yeah, and all kinds of things. And the women's organization on campus found it very offensive. And it was incredibly offensive. And so they brought up charges against this individual. So the context was that they brought in students who had taken on these different avatar, these different identities online, that were nothing like who they were, or they claimed, as people, right, as human beings, their own personal identity. And it really frightened me, the degree to which a person 02:32:00could sit there and say, well, of course I said that, because I was so-and-so, this avatar, who's not me, who's this character. It's like it's a character in a film. But it's not a character in a film. You're not acting out some drama. You are saying and talking about hurtful -- how to hurt someone in a very graphic way. Other people are reading about that. So why are you -- what's the value? At the end of it, I couldn't, you know, it's just -- this is free speech? OK, well, you're not inciting a riot, you're not advocating for this kind of behavior, and you're not describing -- you're not videotaping behavior that's actually occurring. So yeah, I mean there's not any real harmful violation of law here. But it's pretty distasteful, 02:33:00right? You know, so to me it's that kind of, when we begin to detach ourselves from our own words and say, well, it's not Mary Finn's words, it's my avatar, Evelyn's words, then we've somehow severed responsibility for that statement.

GERRARD: Too easy.

FINN: It doesn't make sense to me. And I can't -- it's frightening to me, then, what path that takes us down. Not only just in bullying, but in a lot of things. I mean, you saw the results of the sentencing of the individual in the Rutgers case, who had videotaped his roommate having sex, and then the roommate saw the posting and then decided to commit suicide. Then they gave him 30 days. And he may not even end up in jail; it's going to be 30 days' probation. And I thought, OK, oh, boy. Hmm. What message does that say about invasion of privacy?

GERRARD: I feel very fortunate that I'm the generation that I am.

FINN: Yes. I have a feeling our parents felt the same way, that every new technology and advancement -- but to me, the solution is through that technology and advancement. So, I mean, Pandora's Box is open. These kinds of relationships, online communities, all of it is there, and that community is going to have to figure out a way to make it a livable one, right?

GERRARD: Yes. It's a good point.

MF: Because I tell my children all the time, that's my not my world, and that's not a way I feel connected, so I'm not going to partake in that. That's your generation. And your generation's going to have to figure out what the rules are, and you have to make sure that people aren't harmed by it. The same way we have to do that here in this community, you're going to have to do it there. And you're going to have to balance those issues of free 02:35:00speech and privacy, and all of that in that new world. It's not my world. And I don't want to play a role in it at all. I don't get it. It scares me. It just scares me.

GERRARD: I don't have time for it, like.

FINN: Yeah.

GERRARD: We're at -- we're over two and a half hours.

FINN: OK.

GERRARD: And I have a lot to talk to you about child sex trafficking.

FINN: OK.

GERRARD: So I suggest we stop here for today, and then we focus on all of that the next time we meet.

FINN: OK. That sounds good.

GERRARD: Thank you so much --

FINN: Oh, you're welcome. This was fun.

GERRARD: -- for participating.