Domestic violence numbers demand community action

The Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman was among the assembled media in Wasilla’s downtown fire station Tuesday at a press conference announcing findings of a domestic violence survey of the Mat-Su Borough.

Here’s the black heart of the survey: 53 percent of Valley women reported experiencing intimate partner violence, sexual violence or both. Think about that, more than half the women who live here have been victims of violence.

While those numbers are repugnant, they should not be surprising to anyone paying attention. Violence against women and children in Alaska has occurred at epidemic levels for years. This is just the first attempt to tabulate the size of that epidemic.

We see a steady flow of law enforcement reports detailing weekly fights and domestic disputes that lead to assault charges against Valley men for the violent acts committed against their partners.

We have reported on cases that left women hospitalized and stories about women who were lucky to have escaped with their lives. We’ve reported on women who were not so lucky, women who were shot, stabbed or beaten to death, and almost always at the hands of someone they loved.

We choose our words here purposefully — men are sometimes victims of domestic violence, but not nearly as frequently as women.

To be frank, the numbers, while useful for policymakers, are largely irrelevant to our purpose here. To use an analogy, if your house is burning down, you don’t need to know how hot the flames are, you just need to douse the flames.

We are not surprised by statistics that say 34 of 100 Mat-Su women reported experiencing sexual violence in their lifetime.

We are outraged. This is a call to arms.

No person — male or female — should be hit, hurt or live in fear of someone who claims to love them. Love is respect in action. It’s putting the well-being of someone else ahead of your own.

Love isn’t partners who hit and say they are sorry later. Love isn’t a man who tortures your pets to control you. Love isn’t angry and it isn’t spiteful.

Love makes you want to be a better person.

We don’t need to know more about the heat of these flames. We want action at the state, city, borough and household levels. We want to help identify ways that each of us can step forward and say we value love and we Choose Respect.

Choose Respect is a hollow catch phrase unless we model this behavior for our children. We must raise our sons to be men who understand that because they are bigger and stronger it is their role to protect their families, not torment or brutalize them. We must teach our daughters to respect themselves and to require the same from anyone who says they love them.

We applaud the public information campaigns, yearly rallies and marches to draw attention to the problem of domestic violence, but clearly all of this is not enough.

If we are to turn this tide it will require a commitment from us a community. There’s plenty of work, even for our kids.

Violence impacts our community in so many ways, from kids who come to school unprepared to learn, to full prisons and crowded women’s shelters.

Talk to the children in your life. Donate time to a charity that helps victims of violence. To extinguish a fire this hot, we’ll need everyone to lend a hand.

Start now. Send us a note sharing your ideas for grassroots ways we can push back against this evil plague. Write us at news@frontiersman.com or Frontiersman, 5751 E. Mayflower Court, Wasilla, AK, 99687.