Rachel Mummey, a FIrst-year photojournalism graduate student at Ohio University, was dropping off some photographs at a mental health clinic in Athens, Ohio, when she happened to meet a young woman named Caeshel Sue Rae Allen. They started talking, and Allen explained that at 18, she had just aged out of the foster care system and was homeless.

"Right away I realized it was a story, and a much bigger story than her," Mummey says. "The system had failed her." And other people, too, Mummey figured.

She asked Allen if she could follow her the rest of the day, and ended up trailing her for the rest of the school year. Unprepared to take care of herself, Allen got pregnant and became trapped in an abusive relationship. Mummey tells the story in a 4-minute audio slideshow for Soul of Athens, an end-of-year compendium of multimedia projects by Ohio University students.

She started the project with no purpose beyond her own curiosity and interest. Nor did she know how or where she might publish the story in the end. Initially, Mummey and Allen hung out together in Athens, visiting Allen's friends and getting acquainted, and the relationship "just progressed," Mummey says.

Allen agreed to be followed around because she thought it would be fun. "She also said she thought I was nice and polite to her. She said I wasn't just taking pictures, I was talking to her and trying to help her through it. I guess this is what I had trouble with. I saw things that I thought were wrong, that no one should have to put up with. And it was really hard to create that boundary."

The story took its first ominous turn when Mummey was home in Iowa for the winter holidays, and Allen called to tell her she was pregnant. "There was a big awkward silence. I didn't know what to say, because she didn't sound happy about it," Mummey says. "I told her I'd meet up with her when I got back [to Athens], and that maybe I could photograph her throughout her pregnancy."

One of the first things Allen showed Mummey when the photographer returned to Athens was a tattoo on the back of her neck that said, "Property of Mark Anthony Butcher," who was Allen's boyfriend.

"I saw that and I just knew that something was really wrong, and I didn't know how to explain it," Mummey says. "It's like looking at Nan Goldin's work or Donna Ferrato's work. You know there's something more going on [than what you actually see]."

Mummey photographed the tattoo, as well as Allen's emotional unraveling. She spent many days and countless hours documenting Allen, and was witness to the verbal abuse. Her suspicions of the physical abuse were finally confirmed when Butcher ended up in jail and Allen called from a women's shelter.

"I went over to photograph her, but the shelter wasn't comfortable with that, so I photographed her when she left," Mummey says.

Within two weeks, Butcher was out of jail, though Mummey didn't know that until she called Allen and Butcher answered the phone. "They wanted me to come over," Mummey says. Suddenly she was in a dilemma. "I didn't know what I would do if [Butcher] got violent," she says, explaining that she didn't want to photograph Allen getting beat up, but as a journalist she didn't want to interfere with the story by calling the police to intervene.

Mummey declined the invitation, and tried to figure things out. Another time she had been hanging out with Allen until late at night (as she frequently did), and after she left, Butcher woke up and started hitting Allen.

"I got kind of down on myself. I wondered: Should I be spending more time with them? Then it felt really wrong to try to catch that particular moment when he was hitting her, because I didn't think that was right," Mummey says.

Asked if she thought her presence was affecting Allen's relationship with Butcher, Mummey said, "It crossed my mind. I think that photojournalists always struggle with that line—what's too close and what's close enough. I had a struggle with what my role was. I didn't want to change her situation, but felt bad that I couldn't. I saw her make these decisions that I wouldn't have made for myself."

In the end, she never witnessed Butcher hitting Allen. But the abuse is nevertheless evident in the images: in the tattoo, in an image of Allen changing a door lock, in the sad resignation written on her face, in the hostile body language and distance of Butcher, and the chaos of both of their lives. And the abuse is explicit on the audio soundtrack.

Mummey was only photographing Allen at the start. She began interviewing her after enrolling in an audio class last winter. With both emptiness and longing in her voice, Allen describes a short and ugly path from her abusive stepfather to her abusive relationship with boyfriend and single motherhood.

Mummey made a slideshow of the images and audio for her audio class, then began revising it again and again—"there must have been eight versions," she says—on the basis of feedback and suggestions from instructors, including Chad Stevens (an ICP multimedia instructor and MediaStorm contributor), fellow graduate students Charlie Zimkus and Jenn Poggi, and Stan Alost, an OU professor. (Zimkus was Senior Producer for the version of the story that appears on Soul of Athens.)

"I re-arranged the narrative arc to start with what was current, then give the background, then come back to what's current," Mummey says. (The piece opens with the sound of a baby's heartbeat over an image of Allen holding up an ultrasound image of her baby.)

Another important change she made was to add Butcher's voice to the narrative. Mummey says her relationship with Butcher was arm's length. "He kind of acknowledged my existence, but we never really talked that much because I wasn't focused on him. I was focused on her."

But the story implicated him as an abuser, before he was tried or convicted on those charges. So Alost and others pressed Mummey to interview Butcher. "I knew they were right," she says. "I just didn't have it, because I couldn't get in [Butcher was by then back in prison] and I was scared. I never had to tell someone I was doing [a] story on domestic violence, and he was the abuser."

Mummey finally got permission from prison officials to interview Butcher, which she finally did. "It was really scary," she says. "I didn't know if he would say yes, or get mad at me, or get violent with me."

Despite her telling Butcher that her story was about domestic violence, he was willing to talk, and signed release forms to do it.

"I'm not exactly sure what he thought. He was like, 'Maybe this will help me in my case,' in so many words," Mummey says. "I said, 'I don't know if it will help you that much.' I was honest with him."

Butcher proceeded to say on tape, "So I think I just pushed her, and maybe spit on her a couple of times, and she just sat there crying."

He has since been sentenced to a lengthy prison term "for a multitude of things. He'd been in jail 18 times in the last three years on charges of violence," Mummey says.

Allen may be safe from Butcher, but her situation remains tenuous, at best. Her baby is due in August, and Mummey plans to continue documenting her story. "The next chapter will be her giving birth and trying to make it as a single mother," Mummey says.