We must choose respect

A distraught woman came into the Frontiersman’s office last week and asked for a copy of a story we’d posted on frontiersman.com about an alleged domestic-violence homicide Alaska State Troopers were investigating.

She said she’d been the couple’s landlord for five years and wasn’t surprised by the news that the man ended up dead — reportedly at the hands of his wife.

“We always thought he’d kill her,” the sad-eyed woman said, shaking her head.

When the trooper dispatch report came in that day, we ran a mention of the case on the website and did a records search for the deceased man’s name on Courtview. The search pulled up two 2006 cases involving allegations of domestic violence, though no assault charges or long-term protective orders resulted from those cases.

Then Thursday, Gov. Sean Parnell and Lt. Gov. candidate Mead Treadwell stopped by the newspaper for an interview with the Frontiersman’s editorial board.

We used the opportunity — in part — to talk to Gov. Parnell about his Choose Respect campaign and the domestic violence public service announcement he recorded earlier in the year.

Friday’s Frontiersman included that story and a Spectrum piece on the Opinion page by Judy Gette, director of Alaska Family Services’ Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault Program.

Both Gette and Treadwell mentioned Alaska’s despicable national ranking as No. 1 for violence against women and children.

“We want Alaska to lead, but not in that statistic,” Treadwell told our editorial board Thursday.

Gette said our state also leads the nation in the number of women killed by their intimate partners. And she referenced a recent survey by the University of Alaska Anchorage Justice Center that found “47 percent of women polled had experienced physical violence from an intimate partner at some point in their lives.”

Surely regular readers of our For the Record page also have noticed a similar pattern among the arrests for domestic violence assault: Though the ages vary from 18 to 80, the assailants are nearly always male.

That’s why we’re such big fans of the Choose Respect campaign.

Every day, women who are our neighbors are choked, beaten, have their eyes blackened and their bones broken by men who say they love them.

Back in the day, domestic violence was treated as a private family matter. It’s not. It’s a crime.

Now the Valley has shelters to help protect and heal the women and their children who have suffered these horrors at the hands of men who say they love them.

This is not love. Love means putting the best interests of someone else ahead of your own. Love means protecting your family from harm.

What earned Gov. Parnell our kudos is the personal stand he’s taken to challenge his peers — men — to “Choose Respect.”

All the editorials, shelters and long jail sentences for offenders are for naught until Alaska’s men take a stand to protect families.

Women should seek help to leave harmful relationships. If you or someone you know is being abused, call the Alaska Family Services 24-hour crisis line, 746-4080, or toll-free, (866) 746-4080.

But no one deserves to be hit. And no one has a right to hit you. We’ve spent years building women’s shelters and staffing toll-free crisis lines. But the most powerful tool our community has to end domestic violence is men themselves.

It is imperative that men take up this cause and teach their sons by example that real Alaska men protect, nurture and love their families.

It is imperative that we choose respect.