Excerpted from RJ Eskow’s August 13, 2009 article posted to The Huffington Post:
Domestic violence is a health policy issue. It adds to the cost of medical care while harming the public’s health. Meaningful statistics are hard to come by — which of itself reflects society’s neglect of the topic — but I recently received a compilation of domestic violence statistics from DASH, the District Alliance for Safe Housing in Washington DC, where my daughter was a law clerk this summer.
In the District of Columbia alone, with less than 600,000 inhabitants, the Police Department received 31,215 “domestic-related crime calls.” That’s one call every nineteen minutes, as DASH notes. Most of these incidents (this site [http://www.aidv-usa.com/statistics.htm] estimates 85-95%) involve violence against women.
The last meaningful federal survey took place in 2000, at the end of the Clinton administration. A Department of Justice survey on the “Extent, Nature, and Consequences of Intimate Partner Violence” found that nearly 25% of surveyed women said they had been raped and/or physically assaulted by a current or former spouse, partner, or date. That equates to roughly 4.8 million violent attacks against women annually in this country. And many women were the victim of repeat attacks (an average of 6.9 assaults by the same partner).
The study also found that “approximately one-fifth of all rapes, one-quarter of all physical assaults, and one-half of all stalkings” experienced by women will not be reported to the police. That makes DASH’s police figures even more staggering.
It’s curious how blind we become to our own culture. We can criticize tribal Muslim societies for their abuse of women, yet fail to see how ours sometimes does the same thing. What can we do? We can support organizations like DASH, which provides alternate housing for victims of domestic violence. We can press for public policies that address domestic violence. We can speak out against the culture of violence — a culture that’s strengthened every time a women is treated like an object.
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The entire article is available at:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rj-eskow/ending-the-culture-of-vio_b_259153.html
