By MELANIE KISER
Cronkite News Service
PHOENIX - Looking back now, the signs were there. Demeaning put-downs, fervent jealousy. An occasional twist of the arm, a pinch here, a shove there.
But Donna Bartos says she unwarily endured five years under the spell of her high school sweetheart, even following him to college before the verbal and emotional abuse culminated in an act of violence after she chatted innocently with one of his male friends.
“Then it went from, ‘Oh, he’s angry and he’s got to cool down,’ to getting my head cracked open one night after a fraternity party,” said Bartos, who now lives in Peoria.
Bartos broke off the relationship and didn’t tell anyone about the abuse until more than a decade later. It was then that she learned she’d been part of a problem perpetuating abuse within relationships: failing to recognize the warning signs or talk about it after.
In 2006, she founded the Purple Ribbon Council to Cut Out Domestic Abuse with the mission of stopping abuse before it spirals out of control by increasing public awareness, engagement and understanding of the issue’s root causes and far-reaching complexity.
“There’s a lack of understanding of what this really is,” Bartos said. “So many people have this perception of a woman who’s insecure with herself or likes it and stays with a man who’s beating her.”
Those sentiments are in line with a growing consensus around the need for new approaches to handling violence among intimate partners, according to a March report from the Morrison Institute for Public Policy at Arizona State University.
The Forum 411 report identifies vast room for improvement on three fronts: prevention before abuse escalates; finer distinctions among the many types and degrees of violence, abusers and victims; and awareness that abusers can inflict incredible suffering without laying a hand on the victim. The authors call the last an “insidious campaign of coercive control.”
“There is a notion that not all abusers are alike and some can be reformed and possibly some can’t,” said Richard Toon, associate director for research at the institute. “Once we’ve got a broader understanding of what it is we’re talking about then we can look at what’s appropriate for what types of people under what circumstances.”
This notion is the central theme of an upcoming Symposium to Prevent Abuse, which will feature a discussion of the report and panels on prevention in parenting, faith-based communities, government, the business sector and people involved with teenagers. The event, which community members can attend free via scholarship funding, will take place April 21, during National Crime Victims’ Rights Week, at the Glendale Civic Center.
The laws dictating Arizona’s civil and criminal justice systems’ handling of abuse between intimate partners have advanced considerably in the 30 years since Arizona passed its first domestic violence bill in 1980.
In the last five years alone, the Legislature has increased punishment for repeat offenders, reduced several roadblocks for victims seeking protection and added sexual or romantic relationships to the statutory definition of domestic violence, which until 2009 only applied to couples married or living together.
Allie Bones, executive director of the Arizona Coalition Against Domestic Violence, said the priority now should be effective implementation of these laws, most of which were written and lobbied for by her group.
“We just need to make sure officers, prosecutors and the courts are working appropriately on the policies in place,” she said, “and that they have the appropriate training and that there’s greater communication, coordination at all of the different levels.”
Domestic violence remains a confounding problem, however, going unreported 65 to 75 percent of the time yet still accounting for more police calls than any other crime in the state, according to the Morrison Institute report.
“The reality is that most victims aren’t reaching out to police as their first and only response, so we do need to have coordinated services in the community,” Bones said.
Toon and his co-author identified a need for new, more precise responses to the spectrum of situations where abuse hasn’t yet reached the criminal level but will without intervention.
They cite a 2005 survey by the Morrison Institute finding that although 90 percent of people initially regarded calling 911 as the best way to handle domestic violence, this number dropped by nearly two-thirds when the problem was defined as verbal, psychological and-or financial abuse through which one partner seeks domination and control of the other.
Coercive control is integral to virtually all domestic violence cases and often as much or more of a problem than the physical violence, Toon said.
Bones said that in some cases, one punch to the face may be enough for abusers to seize control over their victims.
“They’ve done it, you now know that it could happen again, and there’s that intimidation,” she said. “They’ve established, ‘I have power over you, and I can do what I want to you.’”
Some prevention proponents, Bartos included, believe “domestic abuse” may be a better concept to describe the means used to gain and maintain dominance over an intimate partner.
“You say domestic violence and immediately the perception is a black eye, a physical encounter, and it starts way before that and many of the situations out there maybe do not get violent but the abuse is equally detrimental,” Bartos said.
Because abuse most often stems from exposure to it as a child, the gold standard in addressing the problem may be school programs intended to prevent young people from becoming the next generation of abusers, Toon said.
Bones said that although such programs are needed, accountability for perpetrators is most important.
“And then yes, we do need to have prevention programs,” she said. “But if we’re teaching kids prevention in schools then they’re going home and seeing it, but dad or mom or whoever is not being held accountable, whatever message we send in schools isn’t going to help us.”
No comments:
Post a Comment