It’s time to start talking about domestic violence

In the first half of April, the Frontiersman’s “Police Beat” section contained accounts of 15 arrests in the Mat-Su for domestic violence, an average of about one per day.

The offense has become so common that it doesn’t typically warrant more than a couple sentences stating that someone had been taken to jail — oftentimes in a drunken and/or disorderly state.

While much of the focus on crime in the Valley has centered around drugs and thievery — both of which are clearly big problems — there is little talk of domestic violence. There are no popular Facebook pages set up to track and publicly identify serial abusers, no public outcry in Juneau to put more money into treatment or prevention programs. It’s almost like people don’t want to talk about the issue.

It’s time for that to change.

Alaska’s rates of domestic violence and, in particular, crimes against women, are an embarrassment. The state far outpaces the rest of the nation in our rate of physical violence against women, and the vast majority of these crimes are perpetrated by intimate partners, usually men. According to an oft-cited study by the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, 59 percent of adult women in Alaska will experience intimate partner or sexual violence in their lifetimes, and the state has the highest rate of women killed by men in the country.

While we understand how helpless people can feel when they become the victim of theft or other property crime, those types of criminal offenses pale in comparison to the terror many women in Alaska continue to suffer in silence.

Experts say one of the main reasons domestic abuse is allowed to flourish and fester is because people are afraid to talk about it. Friends and family members are often afraid to intervene or even investigate possible abuse for fear of either making a situation worse or losing contact with the victim. Victims, meanwhile, have a myriad of reasons why they often don’t seek help, from a desire to keep the family together for the children to financial concerns to a simple hope to see their partners change for the better.

Unfortunately, this silence only makes things worse.

People who abuse others physically need help in the form of institutional intervention. Whether that means jail time or intensive mental health care is often up to the courts to decide, but there is no doubt that these problems rarely get better on their own. Instead, horrible situations tend to escalate until something horrific happens.

The only way for anyone to get help, however, is for someone to speak up. Since it’s so difficult for victims to seek help, this means friends, family members and others who know about ongoing domestic violence need to speak out. It’s not enough to let people have their privacy and deal with their issues in their own way. Intervening could cost a friendship, but not intervening could result in far greater consequences.

It’s time for Alaska to begin a frank, open and honest dialogue on domestic violence. For far too long, this issue has been treated like something that’s best left to the privacy of the home for people to sort out on their own. No more.

Until significant light is shined on abusers, until they and their victims are able to access the help they need and until — and most important of all — the men of Alaska step forward to send a clear message to those who abuse that this behavior will not be tolerated, Alaska will continue to lead the nation in this most disturbing and shameful of areas.