Domestic Violence Facts Bleed

By Georgie Maddison - Sunday, April 29th, 2007

[tag]Domestic violence facts[/tag] and causes can mask the pain of family violence and force it to remain a hidden epidemic. Yet the facts are simple: domestic violence occurs in every hideyhole of current society – rural women, professionals, African-American, El Salvador and Guatemala, high society and low-income… men and women.

And what helps keep it hidden is perceptions. Perceptions of what ‘they’ will think. Halley Allcott’s experience this week is an indicator.

Eleven years ago domestic violence forced her and her children across Canada in search of a new life, and she’d resolved to speak out to help educate people. But it was easier said than done.

Preparing for an interview with Kathy Michaels of the Penticton Western News she said:
“This morning I made excuses to myself, I thought what if people I know read (the story), what will they think?”

“I was saying the same things to myself that society says in general … I was saying the things that people just shouldn’t think.

“We all say, ‘abuse doesn’t happen to me, it happens to people who are low income, or people who are Indo Canadian’ — that’s the big news now,” she said.

“But that’s not the case. They say one in five women face abuse of some kind. Abuse isn’t prejudiced against status or race, so look around you, there’s someone you know who is dealing with verbal, physical or emotional abuse, and we have to speak up and start educating people.”

Domestic violence is one of the major health problems facing families today.

Collaboration between medical professionals and community organizations is one way to effectively educate the public on domestic violence. Health care systems are particularly suited to preventing violence, as they have contact with victims and their families. By focusing on prevention, health professionals can reduce the need to treat the symptoms of violence.

Mandatory reporting of domestic violence by paramedics, domestic violence screening in hospitals and domestic violence awareness to look for signs of abuse can also help.

But it is not the complete answer. For instance, although empirical research has accumulated over the past 20 years regarding African Americans and domestic violence, many questions remain about African American perceptions of domestic violence. What constitutes domestic violence to one person is acceptable behavior to another.

Racism is an additional obstacle for the African-American victim of domestic violence. Many have extreme difficulty in obtaining adequate resources to leave an abuser and continue a life free from abuse.

Doubt about the definition of domestic violence is not restricted to one racial group, either. Domestic violence as defined by our criminal justice system bears little resemblance to the abuse inflicted on over half a million women by intimate partners each year.

One study found that the disconnect between battering as it is practiced and battering as it is criminalized is vast and it is significant. Law’s failure to define accurately the nature and harm of domestic violence negates the experiences of victims and effectively places battering outside the reach of criminal sanctions.

In fact, another study found that most bailbond agents refer to domestic violence suspects as “the bread and butter” of their livelihood. A large cash bail ($30,000 to $50,000 on average) is typically required for the pretrial release of domestic violence suspects, thus generating extremely high profits for the bailbond agent (about 10% of the full bail amount). Second, because combative spouses are more likely than other offenders to have criminal charges against them dropped by courts, bailbond agents consider domestic violence suspects “safe clients”.

Alcott says society has chosen not to see domestic violence.

“People need to know that they have the control, and you can’t give that control away,” she said. “We have to take responsibility — it’s not our fault, but we have to learn to not get into situations where we give our power away.”

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Domestic Violence Facts Bleed

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