Valley rallies for ‘Choose Respect’

PALMER — This year’s Choose Respect march in Palmer drew about 350 participants in solidarity against domestic violence, organizers said.

The event is sponsored by the Alaska Family Services to help curb domestic violence in our communities. Alaska has the highest rate of domestic violence in the United States. Alaska Family Service’s shelter is the only service provider of it’s kind — it provides transitional housing for domestic violence victims — in the Mat-Su borough.

Students at Alaska Job Corps also help organize the annual march, started in 2009 under the Parnell administration.

“They do a great job,” said Donn Bennice, President of Alaska Family services.

Official estimate of participants was 350 people, some as young as one year old, some octogenarians, according to Palmer manager Joe Hannan.

The city of Palmer also helped organize the event. The city manager, police, road crews, and councilwoman Linda Combs attended. Mayor DeLena Johnson led the march through the streets of Palmer flanked by supporters.

Domestic violence is one of the most important economic and social issues pressuring the state, organizers and officials say.

Attempts to collect information about rates of domestic violence in the Valley are relatively recent, with the first study released in October 2013. That first look at violence against women here indicated that 53 percent of women in the Mat-Su Valley have been a victim of intimate partner or other sexual violence in their lifetimes, according to the study, authored by the Council on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault.

The effects of domestic violence can ripple across our lives from court and legal costs to hospital and medical costs, from violence in schools to forced or willing entry into homelessness, to the Office of Children’s Services, to the tourist industry and police departments.

The Palmer event — and other Choose Respect rallies planned throughout the state this week — helps keep the issue at the front of and fresh in the minds of the community.

Domestic violence has no color or economic status or religion. All strata of society suffer equally by this social blight.

Though women also contribute to domestic violence, statistically, the majority of perpetrators are men.

If one statistic about domestic violence against women be taken away from the Choose Respect rally, participants and organizers ask that this bit of math be taken to heart: more women have been killed by their husbands or boyfriends since Sept. 11, 2001, than all the Americans who were killed by 9/11, or in Afghanistan and Iraq, according to US Department of Justice figures.

Victims or those in fear of domestic violence should call police immediately. Sexual and physical assault is a crime.

The Alaska Family Services operates a 24-hour hotline for folks in the Valley in violent circumstances. For help, call 746-4080, or 866-746-4080.