Victim cries for help just background noise

There are certain types of crime that are so rarely committed we at the Frontiersman write about each new incidence.

Murder, robbery and rape make that list. If there is an unreported murder in this Valley, rest assured that is only because we haven’t heard about it yet.

But assault is not in that category. Assault happens with such frequency that this crime only occasionally receives news coverage. Maybe there’s a compelling back-story. Maybe the crime was committed in an unusual way.

Probably the way most assaults rise to the level of warranting news coverage is when the case is particularly egregious; when only coincidence or a smidge of luck keeps an assault from becoming a murder.

This week we ran across an assault case that warranted further investigation. The charge was assault with a deadly weapon and the weapon listed in charging documents was a tire or tire iron. Usually the spot where prosecutors record the type of weapon is reserved for a gun or knife or — most commonly — a man’s hands.

Reading the affidavit troopers filed in the case, we saw a pretty standard set of facts: A wife asked her husband for a divorce. He flew into a rage, and she was terrified but not injured.

But the specific details in each case vary. In this one, the husband passed out drunk and his wife used that opportunity to load the kids into the car. But before they could leave, the man woke up and started smashing the car’s windows with a tire iron, at one point even heaving spare tires at the vehicle.

Still, this degree of violence wasn’t enough to warrant a news article given the avalanche of similar cases in our Mat-Su Valley.

It was an uncomfortable moment of stark clarity when we realized that our decision to omit this coverage also revealed a deplorable truth about our community — domestic violence has become so common that the victims’ cries for help have been reduced to mere background noise. Every day, every week, every month, we see a steady stream of abusers arrested and charged. It is a too regular occurrence for us to see the same people arrested and charged repeatedly for violent crimes committed against their family members.

For us, it’s become just part of the numbing daily churn of police activity.

But do we really want to live in a community in which domestic violence is so common it barely draws notice? Is this really a lesson we want to teach our kids, that it’s OK to assault your spouse? Or, that it is OK for someone you love to assault you?

The answer, of course, is no. We all want loving, safe and healthy relationships for our grandchildren, our children and ourselves.

We are all familiar with the shameful statistics that mark Alaska as having the nation’s highest rates of domestic abuse and sexual assault. Mat-Su’s rates of domestic violence are about average for the state. But together, we can change those numbers.

We applaud those who work in fields directed at aiding the victims of these crimes. Even the governor has adopted ending domestic abuse as one of his signature causes and we applaud him, too.

As a community, though, the hard work remains. Beyond supporting the people who work in this field, volunteering our time or donating our money, we must stop turning a blind eye toward these crimes. Instead we must educate our children to be peacemakers, rather than tomorrow’s abusers or victims. As a community, we can reduce that steady flow of abusers through the court system. But we can’t expect victim advocates to do the work for all of us.

We encourage each member of our community to lead by example. We have a duty to show our children that — above all else — we are a community that values peace, peacemakers and peaceful solutions.