Editor:
Casey Jacketta’s column about domestic violence lays undue blame on the communities surrounding incidents of domestic violence. Just because a community is considered “close-knit” doesn’t mean the individual members actually confide in one another with personal problems. More often an effort is made to “save face” than to actually open up.
People are really good at hiding their problems, and some signs of abuse are hard to identify. Rarely will an abused person use a classic “I fell down the stairs” or “I ran into a door” excuse or even show any visible signs of abuse?sometimes the abuser will target places on the body not readily seen, like the kidney area. Many people are afraid of reputations being soiled or becoming the target of the gossip mill.
I truly doubt most people even know what goes on behind the doors of their neighbors. Neighbors may seem happy and upstanding, but that is usually just a facade. The neighbors in the cases Jacketta described probably didn’t even know that domestic violence incidents even occurred in the past. The only way they could’ve known would have been to spy on their neighbors, and even then, how would they know that an abuser would be coming back to actually kill the people inside the house?
So if people don’t want to open up and the only way to discover forms of domestic abuse is to spy on your neighbors, what is the solution? I feel the solution lies in a change in the larger society, not the communities. For instance, people with restraining orders placed upon them could be forced to wear an unremovable wristband with a sensor on it that notifies the police and the victim if it is too close to the victim. Help groups should be better publicized, and domestic abuse specialists could be sent with the police to the homes of possible domestic abuse victims.
Christopher Condrat
Junior, Electrical Engineering