Rethinking ‘Choose Respect’

This spring, like every year, we tromped out to Palmer to watch as members of our community and some from outside rallied to bring awareness to the issue of domestic violence.

Gov. Sean Parnell’s “Choose Respect” campaign was in its fifth year.

Afterward, we went looking into crime statistics and found we couldn’t really tell if the marches — and the editorials and the advertising and the entire campaign, for that matter — had really had an effect.

This month is Domestic Violence Awareness Month. As we have in the past, we tracked down and photographed a sign put up by the side of the road bearing a startling statistic we think everyone should be aware of: 53 percent of Mat-Su women have been a victim of domestic abuse, sexual abuse, or both.

We just want to underline this for emphasis: a majority of our female neighbors have been abused.

Awareness campaigns are to be lauded, and we will continue to do so. They are one part of a larger effort to try and reduce Alaska’s shameful history as a leader in the country in rates of sexual and domestic violence.

We do not believe, however, that they go far enough.

Everyone we see at Choose Respect rallies has a reason to be there. Some of them work with abuse victims. Some of them are victims. Some of them arrest abusers. Some of them prosecute them. Some of them guard them when they are housed in prison.

What we don’t see at those rallies year to year, though, are the people whose minds — and behaviors — need to change on this issue. We did not see any abusers, or at least not that we could tell.

And while it may seem silly to expect to see abusers attending anti-abuse rallies, the point is this: no one we met there, not the police, not the corrections officers and certainly not the victims, need to be told that abuse is wrong. We’re preaching to the choir, as the adage says.

It’s abusers who need to take this message to heart.

So while we continue to support the Choose Respect rallies and the signs along our roadways citing that startling statistic, we think more needs to be done.

And here’s where we get to the tough part, because rallies like Choose Respect are low cost and only happen once a year. The solution, we think, is going to take much more money than that.

We think that there needs to be more rehabilitation programs, more funding to take people convicted of abuse crimes and get them the mental health treatment they need to give them the coping tools to resolve conflict in healthy ways.

Our court system seems to be slowly realizing that a program that only involves incarceration for crimes like drunken driving and drug abuse does little to combat the problem, and that treatment is far more effective.

We think it’s time to bring the same mindset to the work of ending domestic violence and sexual abuse.