Rebecca Peters: 'I'm not afraid of horrific grief'

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Rebecca Peters: 'I'm not afraid of horrific grief'

After the Port Arthur massacre, Rebecca Peters became one of the world's foremost gun-control experts. Then she moved to Guatemala, where she devotes her life to the victims of gun crime.

By Tim Elliott

More recently, Peters has been working with the survivors of gun violence, most notably in Guatemala, where she has lived since 2014.

More recently, Peters has been working with the survivors of gun violence, most notably in Guatemala, where she has lived since 2014. Credit: Kate Geraghty

Flory Teletor was 17 when she began living with her boyfriend, Santo, in a cramped apartment in Guatemala City. Santo, who was 20, worked as a security guard. He was violent and controlling. He gave Flory a daily allowance of 20 quetzals ($3.50). She had to account for every cent; when she failed to do so, he would beat her. Sometimes, he would brandish the pistol he used for work, even shooting above her head. Flory was terrified, but she had already fled an abusive father and had no other place to go. Then one evening, Santo came home in a rage. He had heard that Flory was cheating on him with the man in the apartment above. "He thought I had been writing this man letters," she says. "No matter what I told him, he didn't believe me."

Santo came at Flory; she thought he was going to hit her. Instead, he pulled out his pistol and fired. "I was so frightened that I didn't hear the shot," she says. "All I knew was that suddenly I was lying on my back, and I couldn't stand up. My legs seemed incredibly heavy, like my shoes were concrete blocks."

The bullet had severed Flory's spinal cord, instantly leaving her a paraplegic.

Santo called an ambulance and Flory was rushed to hospital, where she spent the next two days in an intensive-care unit. When the police questioned him, Santo said there had been a robbery at the local bakery, and that Flory had been shot in the crossfire. "He told me to say the same thing," Flory explains.

After her discharge, Flory went to live with her mother, father and grandmother. Santo also moved in. (He has never been charged with the shooting.) The father put her and Santo in a curtained-off space in one of the bedrooms. The mother, who worked as a cleaner, would change Flory's nappies and wash her using a bowl, tying her to a chair in the laundry so she didn't slump over. After a few months, one of her mother's clients bought Flory a wheelchair so she could move around the house. But her father continued to abuse her, complaining that she was a burden. He would get drunk, and beat her mother: when Flory tried to stop him, he beat her, too. "I had no control of my life," she tells me. "I was dying there."

Eventually, Flory's sister Olga and her husband Edgar intervened, moving her into their house, a tin-roofed besa-block building that clings like a limpet to the side of a cliff in the city's north. (Santo had long since left.) The house, where I meet Flory, now 40, one mild afternoon in March, is home to seven people. It has a long drop toilet that juts out over the ravine: through the chinks in the wood-slat floor you can see the rocks and rubble, 100 metres below. But Flory loves it: she has her own room, with a small television and a stereo. Edgar treats her like a daughter. When she needs to get out of the house, to go to church or a rehab session, he carries her in his arms, like a baby, up a series of steep, rickety wooden steps and ladders to the street above. "He's an angel," Flory tells me. "He saved my life."

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Flory Teletor, a victim of gun violence, needs to be carried up the steps to the street above her sister and brother-in-law’s house in Guatemala City.

Flory Teletor, a victim of gun violence, needs to be carried up the steps to the street above her sister and brother-in-law’s house in Guatemala City.Credit: Kate Geraghty

Olga and Edgar's intervention was the first bit of good fortune to come Flory's way. Her second piece of luck, no less life-changing, came a decade later, when she met a quietly spoken Australian woman named Rebecca Peters.

Peters, 56, has short, dark hair and blue eyes. The morning I meet her, in the old colonial city of Antigua, in southern Guatemala, she is wearing a pair of joggers, black baggy pants and a cherry-red T-shirt that is obviously
and unapologetically synthetic. She walks briskly, with a slight limp, the result of joint hypermobility, and she is very, very short – 155 centimetres – which, for those of you who can't picture it, is roughly the same height as the average 12-year-old. ("The most common thing people say when they meet me is, 'I thought you'd be taller,'" she says.)

As she doesn't get many Australian visitors, the first thing Peters does is take me to her place, a rented, one-room rooftop bungalow which looks out over the sepulchral ruins of Las Capuchinas convent, abandoned after an earthquake in 1773, towards the perennially active Volcán del Fuego. Sitting drinking coffee, we watch as the volcano's picture-perfect A-frame periodically burps out colossal black clouds of pyroclastic ash.

Peters is, by general consensus, the world's foremost expert on gun control. She was the driving force behind tightening up Australia's gun laws after the Port Arthur massacre in 1996. (She was appointed an officer of the Order of Australia for her work in 2016.)

She has developed gun control strategies for billionaire philanthropist George Soros, and headed up the London-based International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA). When the UN needs advice on small arms trafficking, it calls Peters. When there's a conference in Argentina on guns and domestic violence, Peters hops on a plane. As the head of IANSA, she even consulted on the 2005 film, Lord of War, which starred Nicolas Cage as the lizardy, cigar-smoking arms dealer, Yuri Orlov.

More recently, Peters has been working with the survivors of gun violence, most notably in Guatemala, where she has lived since 2014.

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"Together with its neighbouring countries, Honduras and El Salvador, Guatemala is one of the most violent places on earth," she tells me. "Thousands of people get shot here every year. But what people don't realise is that for every fatality, roughly four people are wounded, many of them suffering catastrophic injuries."

Faced with an almost complete absence of government assistance for victims, Peters has for the past four years engaged in a campaign of broad-based activism, mobilising the media and anti-gun groups while lobbying politicians to address the country's notoriously lax gun laws.

She also raises funds, mainly for a local charity called Asociación Transiciones de Guatemala, which makes wheelchairs for people disabled by gun violence – the Australian government has funded 177 such chairs since 2014.

The rest of her time is taken up with what might best be described as simple, grassroots social work; a kind of ad hoc pastoral care whereby she visits gunshot victims, delivers medicines and food to their families, and, on occasion, stands by their bedside while they die. "I have a high tolerance for tragedy," she explains. "I am not afraid of horrific grief."

One of Peters' regulars is Flory Teletor. The day we visit, Peters takes Flory and her family a bucket of fried chicken, the arrival of which elicits a loaves-and-fishes level of gratitude. A couple of years ago, Peters got Flory a new wheelchair via Transiciones. Perhaps more importantly, she has always made sure to involve Flory in media opportunities and advocacy training. The impact of this cannot be overestimated. Balancing a plate of drumsticks on her lap, Flory says that on her worst days, when she sat in her room, alone and staring at the wall, she often asked herself, "What use am I?" The training has given her a sense of worth and purpose. "Rebecca makes me feel like I am needed, like I am important, like I matter," Flory says. Then, glancing at Peters, she smiles effortfully, and starts crying.

On her worst days, Flory Teletor would sit in her room, alone and staring at the wall, asking herself, "What use am I?"

On her worst days, Flory Teletor would sit in her room, alone and staring at the wall, asking herself, "What use am I?"Credit: Kate Geraghty

Despite her success and the fact that there are thousands of people walking around today who would be dead if not for her work, Peters has next to no financial security. "She does it all on the smell of an oily rag," says the Australian social activist, Eva Cox, who has known Peters for 25 years. "She doesn't own a car, or a house, or shares, or superannuation. She is not motivated by that sort of thing, which makes it hard for people to understand her."

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Peters earned less than $5000 last year, mostly from writing, editing or translating reports for human rights organisations. The year before that, the figure was a princely $20,000. Most of her money is spent on flights, sometimes to California, where her brother lives, or to see friends in Australia, where she sleeps in spare rooms or granny flats.

"She is not of this world," says her friend, Fairfax Media cartoonist Cathy Wilcox. "She'll turn up in a T-shirt, shorts and sandals. Clothes, food, all that stuff, it's all functional for her. They serve a purpose but beyond that, they're not worth worrying about."

Peters' main assets appear to be insomnia (it gives her more time to think), her independence (she has no partner, and no children) and what she calls a "perpetual state of outrage". "It's unacceptable to me that the people who most need help are the ones who are least likely to get it," she says.

Peters was born in 1961, in Maryland, near Washington DC, the second of six children. The family moved to Panama when she was three, then to Costa Rica when she was seven. (She speaks fluent Spanish.) Her father, who ran a car repair business, was cruel and abusive, physically and emotionally, "a charming, sinister man", as she puts it, who delighted in humiliating his children.

"Our father was a tyrant," says Peters' younger brother, Tim, who lives in San Francisco. "We were all overwhelmed by insecurity and adapted in our own ways. Rebecca took shelter at the homes of friends and teachers, or the school library."

Tim says Rebecca's "sensitivity to injustice was evident early on". At 15, she organised a blood drive for Costa Rica's National Blood Bank, with donors bussed in to her school; she even faked her age so that she could donate. Desperate to escape home, she left, at 18, to go travelling, first to Europe and then to Egypt, where she met an Australian who convinced her to move to Sydney, where she decided to settle. "I was struck by the gorgeous beaches and the egalitarian feel of the place," she says. "At the shops, the customers didn't talk down to the shop assistants." (Peters and the boyfriend split, amicably, shortly after arrival; in 1992, she became a citizen.)

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After a year studying mechanical engineering in the late 1980s, Peters moved into journalism, working as a producer on Andrew Olle's radio program, and then for John Doyle's. She favoured social justice stories: homelessness, HIV, disability, domestic violence. "The criminal justice system was toxic as well," she says. "I thought, 'Who changes these things? People with law degrees!' And so I went to law school."

Peters enrolled at UNSW, but she had been studying for only a matter of months when, in August 1991, a 33-year-old taxi driver named Wade Frankum stabbed to death a teenage girl before using a semi-automatic rifle to shoot and kill another seven people, including himself, in a shopping mall in Strathfield, Sydney.

The killings, known as the Strathfield Massacre, attracted huge media attention and prompted Peters to look into the gun laws. "They were shocking," she says. "It was ridiculously easy to get a gun, including an assault weapon. Anyone without a serious criminal record could buy any number of rifles and shotguns legally, without providing a reason. And because there was no registration – that is, no record of ownership – there was nothing to stop that person from selling the guns on to someone who did have a serious criminal record."

She decided to write an article about it, in the process of which she got in touch with the National Coalition for Gun Control (NCGC). Peters began volunteering for the group, in the first instance by preparing a comparative analysis of Australia's different state gun laws. "The more I looked at the whole area, the more it interested me," she says. (The analysis eventually became part of her degree thesis.)

As Peters discovered, there was a long list of things wrong with the laws. "Journalists on deadlines were never going to get it," she says. And so she put together an explanatory cheat sheet. "We said what was needed were national uniform laws based on three things: registration of all guns, a ban on semi-automatics, and proof of reason for owning a gun."

At the same time, she recruited the public health professor and tobacco reform advocate, Simon Chapman. "Rebecca said that all the people in the gun reform area were women, and that they needed a male voice in there," he says. Together with their colleagues, Chapman and Peters began "power-mapping" – lobbying the groups that had the authority to influence public opinion, from unions and medical colleges to women's organisations, legal centres, and welfare agencies. (Peters eventually established a coalition of 350 such groups.)

They also decided to frame gun violence less as a crime issue and more as a public health problem. "We broke it down into the classic epidemiological model of agent, host, vector and environment," says Chapman. "With malaria, for instance, the agent is the Plasmodium parasite, the vector is the carrier mosquito, the host is the person who gets bitten, and so on. With gun reform, the agent was the gun, the host was the victim, the vector was the gun lobby, and the environment is the public and political climate around the issue."

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Their messaging became clearer. "We register cars, boats and dogs," Chapman told the media. "So why don't we register guns?" He and Peters also began lurking around internet chat rooms used by shooters. "We'd use pseudonyms and write things like, 'Hey fellas, I actually don't think a little regulation is a bad idea,' " Chapman says. "We'd then see how people responded, and that would help us shape our arguments in future."

It was time-consuming, emotionally taxing work. It was also unpaid. To get by, Peters took on freelance writing jobs. She shuffled her law lectures to make time, and would regularly study all night. "Rebecca was so broke we would pay her phone bills," says her friend Rosemary Quinn, who lived with Peters in a share house in Glebe.

In late 1995, however, Peters got a call from a man named Alan Corbett. Idealistic and softly spoken, Corbett had just been elected to NSW Parliament as the leader of A Better Future for Our Children Party. Peters was initially wary: "I thought he might be some crackpot, right-wing, family-values guy," she says. "In fact, he was this fabulous single-dad primary school teacher who just happened to think that every policy should be evaluated on its likely impact on children."

Corbett wanted Peters to help him prepare a bill to tighten up gun legislation. "Rebecca had the knowledge and the commitment," Corbett tells me. "I was really guided by what she thought was necessary."

Peters drew on her thesis work, cherry-picking the most useful pieces of legislation from all over the world. The bill, which proposed, among other things, mandatory gun registration of all firearms, was supported by the church, police and the media. But before it could even get to parliament, both major parties had effectively rejected it. In February 1996, John Tingle, then-leader of the Shooters' Party, went so far as to describe it as "a pathetic piece of publicity-seeking nonsense".

Tingle's comments were spectacularly ill-timed. On April 28, a 28-year-old Hobart man named Martin Bryant used two semi-automatic rifles to kill 35 people and injure 23 more at Port Arthur, in Tasmania. It remains the deadliest mass shooting in Australian history.

Port Arthur killer Martin Bryant.

Port Arthur killer Martin Bryant. Credit: Archive

Peters was aghast: "I remember listening on the radio as the death toll went higher and higher." And yet the response was, she says, "exactly what we thought would happen". The media called for immediate action, citing Peters' three-point plan, as did politicians, backed by the broad coalition of community and professional organisations that Peters and the NCGC had so effectively mobilised. Within 12 days, prime minister John Howard produced the National Firearms Agreement (NFA), the 11 key points of which closely mirrored everything the NCGC had been pressing for, including uniform gun registration, a ban on civilian ownership of semi-automatic weapons, and a removal of self-defence as a reason to hold a firearm licence.

"As soon as the NFA came out, the state and territory parliaments scrambled to draft legislation," Peters says, "which is when the NSW Parliamentary Counsel pulled out the bill Alan and I had done and said, 'Here's one we prepared earlier!'"

Guns in Sydney to be destroyed under the post-Port Arthur buy-back scheme.

Guns in Sydney to be destroyed under the post-Port Arthur buy-back scheme.Credit: Reuters

NSW was the first state to pass a new law; most of the other states followed within the year. Peters was in the media every day for the next 13 weeks, and spent months travelling the country, persuading state legislatures to implement the NFA in full. By mid-year, she was running on empty. "You could tell she was exhausted," says Walter Mikac, who lost his wife and two young daughters at Port Arthur. "When I met her, it was actually an effort for her to walk."

Peters received not so much as a cent for her efforts. But the laws she helped create were soon being heralded by gun-reform activists as world's best practice. "Rebecca's campaign was a remarkable piece of social mobilisation," says Professor Simon Rice, an expert in law reform and social justice at the University of Sydney. "It set a new benchmark for community empowerment in Australia."

The 1991 Strathfield massacre prompted Peters to look into Australia's gun laws. "It was ridiculously easy to get a gun, including an assault weapon," she says.

The 1991 Strathfield massacre prompted Peters to look into Australia's gun laws. "It was ridiculously easy to get a gun, including an assault weapon," she says.Credit: Kate Geraghty

When Peters was young, one of her sisters occasionally wet the bed. Rather than comfort her, Peters' father would humiliate her in public. "He actually got pleasure out of doing that," Peters says. He would routinely belittle his children and dismiss their opinions, or go away and not say when he was coming back. "It was his way of exerting control," Peters says. "What we had then was this guy who was bigger and stronger and had more power, using that to control the whole household. And that's the problem with guns, right? The person with a gun acquires a disproportionate amount of power over those around them." Guns are, at their very core, weaponised bullying, which makes confronting the gun lobby particularly daunting.

After the Australian gun reforms were introduced, Peters' home address was published on an internet bulletin board. She had a brick thrown through her window, received multiple death threats, and had to move house. "The gun debate tends to be very gendered," she says. "My voicemail filled up with all these weird messages, saying things like, 'You wouldn't know a gun if I put my .303 up your c… and pulled the trigger.' "

She was later accused in the Queensland Parliament of having had a sex change, and of wanting to sell crack, heroin and speed to children. A televised debate about guns and domestic violence with the then-vice-president of the Firearm Owners' Association, Ian McNiven, turned ugly: at the end of the broadcast, McNiven was caught in an off-camera aside saying, "If I was married to Rebecca I'd probably commit domestic violence, too." Most bizarrely, it was later suggested that she may have had something to do with the Port Arthur shootings, as a way to further her anti-gun agenda.

Peters has long been regarded by the gun lobby as a Svengali-like figure, part of a global cabal of neo-Marxist zealots plotting, under the aegis of the UN, to rob law-abiding patriots of their ability to defend themselves. She became a particular target after she travelled to the US in 1997, where she worked with George Soros's Open Society Institute (now Open Society Foundations). Peters' job was to make strategic grants, from a fund of $US15 million, to groups working to prevent gun violence, mostly in the US. She used Soros's money to support gun research in universities, and to fund litigation against the gun industry.

She was also the first backer of the Million Mom March, a gun reform rally held in 2000 in Washington DC, which was until this year the largest mass movement against gun violence in America. "Rebecca was there at the very beginning," says march founder Donna Dees-Thomases. "When you look at all the activists in the movement now, many of them have come in since that first march. That wouldn't have happened if not for her."

The Million Mom March in Washington DC in 2000. Peters was one of the rally's first backers, and is still active in US gun reform.

The Million Mom March in Washington DC in 2000. Peters was one of the rally's first backers, and is still active in US gun reform.Credit: AP

Even though she lives in Guatemala, Peters still devotes much of her time to US gun reform. She is regularly consulted by state legislators looking to improve their gun laws by, for example, regulating the sale of ammunition, which in some places can be sold over the counter at a corner store or petrol station. "They often want to know what happens in Australia," says Peters. Background checks are another problem. "In the US, when police decide whether someone can have a gun, they rely on what their computer databases say about that person's criminal record. But the majority of people are not in these databases, because most crime is never reported, and most of the crime that is reported is not prosecuted and most of those prosecuted are not convicted. So if you just rely on that criminal justice system to decide if someone should have a gun, then it's hopelessly inadequate."

Efforts to improve vetting procedures have long been blocked by the National Rifle Association (NRA), which has more than five million members, and is among the most powerful lobbying groups in Washington. (The NRA sees itself as the first defender of the US Constitution's Second Amendment – the oft-cited "right to bear arms".) "There are other factors as well," Peters says, "such as the private prison companies that have an interest in maintaining high levels of violence." But the fundamental problem is cultural, based in large part on the deeply ingrained ethos of American individualism. "In Australia and Europe, police have the discretion to make in-depth inquiries before a person can buy a gun, because the overriding purpose is to protect public safety. In the US, though, public safety is trumped by the individual rights of the person who wants to buy the gun. It's like a nation of toddlers saying, 'I want it, I want it!'"

This creates a bizarre, not to say dangerous, kind of reality-distortion field. In 2004, during a debate with NRA chief executive Wayne LaPierre, Peters claimed that, when it came to international agreements on weapons and human rights, "Americans are people like everyone else on earth. They should abide by the same rules as everyone else." LaPierre found the line shocking. "He used it all the time, like, 'Rebecca Peters says that Americans are just like everyone else!' Other people you'd talk to would be like, 'Yeah, what's the problem with that?' But he just thought it was outrageous."

Rebecca Peters in 2014, lobbying a UN meeting on behalf of the International Action Network on Small Arms.

Rebecca Peters in 2014, lobbying a UN meeting on behalf of the International Action Network on Small Arms.

In 2002, Peters left for London, where she became the first director of the International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA). Formed in 1999, IANSA is a global movement against gun violence, a network of some 900 civil society organisations, including human rights campaigners, aid agencies and public health groups, that now operates in 120 countries. "It was a huge job, with not enough resources," Peters says. It was also her first experience with what she calls the "international humanitarian industrial complex". While IANSA was more thrifty than most, Peters was nonetheless dismayed by the profligacy and egotism that typified the sector. "There were giant amounts being spent on travel budgets and airlines and big hotels in Geneva and New York. Faced with the amount of stuff that needs doing in poor countries, for people to be focused on themselves seemed wrong to me."

IANSA has had its victories: together with Amnesty International and Oxfam, it campaigned for the Arms Trade Treaty, which came into effect in 2014. Along with other groups, IANSA also successfully lobbied postmilitary governments in Latin America, Asia and the Middle East to ensure that civil society – and not just the military – had a role in debating weapons policy. But Peters' role at IANSA felt increasingly remote. "Public health is like that," she says. "Very global, big-picture. You never know who you're helping, which is part of the reason I'm in Guatemala. Here I can see exactly whose lives I'm making a difference in."

Peters with Alex Gálvez, one of the founders of Asociación Transiciones, a grassroots charity that salvages wheelchairs and gives them to the victims of gun violence.

Peters with Alex Gálvez, one of the founders of Asociación Transiciones, a grassroots charity that salvages wheelchairs and gives them to the victims of gun violence. Credit: Kate Geraghty

Transiciones was founded in 1996 by local man Alex Gálvez, who is himself in a wheelchair, and an American doctor named John Bell. (Bell has since moved on.) Peters first came across the group in the late 1990s when she was invited to Guatemala to lead a workshop on gun violence. Transiciones was unique, she says, "in that out of the many hundreds of NGOs in this area, it was the only one bringing the perspective of people whose bodies had actually been entered by bullets".

Based in a Mission-style building on the outskirts of Antigua, the charity operates a workshop where a handful of technicians, most of them disabled, repair wheelchairs or build new ones using parts that have either been salvaged or donated, usually from the US. The charity has given away a thousand wheelchairs so far.

In my naivety, I had assumed that all wheelchairs were the same. "No, no!" Gálvez says. Wheelchairs made for pushing patients along a tiled hospital corridor are different to wheelchairs designed for people to get themselves about. And then, which wheelchair you need depends on whether you live in a village with dirt roads or one with pavements, and also varies according to your height, weight, disability and factors like arm strength. "Because [the technicians] are in wheelchairs," says Gálvez, "they understand these kinds of things."

He talks of Peters with something approaching awe. "She has a lot of other big responsibilities with the UN and in other countries, but she has decided to invest her effort in Transiciones. She's made a huge difference – she's raised most of the funds for us."

Some weeks after returning to Australia, I call Peters with some follow-up questions. She is in New York with Gálvez, who had spoken the day before at the UN about the need for better regulation of ammunition. There were 600 people in the audience, from almost every nation on earth, and he was very nervous. He spoke about the bullet that paralysed him – a .38 – and how there are still fragments of it in his body.

After the address, Peters and Gálvez went outside the UN headquarters and posed beside Non-Violence, the bronze sculpture by late Swedish artist Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd of a revolver with a knotted barrel. Inspired by the fatal shooting of John Lennon in 1980, the artwork has become a global symbol of peace. "I love that sculpture," Peters says. "It's so simple and powerful. So much of the conversation about gun violence is about geopolitics and lofty ideals. But really, when it comes down to it, it's about the gun. That's what makes people die."

To read more from Good Weekend magazine, visit our page at The Sydney Morning Herald or The Age.

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