Domestic Violence Awareness Month is a sweeping national movement to bring domestic violence and its prevention to the forefront of public debate.

Every October, hundreds of events are planned across the country. The activities and outreach initiatives generally focus on:

Building awareness – domestic violence is a crime that occurs in every community.

Alerting the public to services that can help battered women and their children.

Encouraging community responsibility for prevention.

Increasing awareness – domestic violence is a human-rights violation and is linked to other forms of violence and oppression.

Each year, the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Domestic Violence chronicles and reports on domestic violence-related fatalities in the state. Annually, the numbers are high and the killings are horrendous, yet public response is negligible and the political impact nonexistent.

So what does it take to move us toward a gentler and safer society? How much blood has to be spilled, and how many families have to be decimated before domestic violence is recognized and responded to as the deadly crime and powerfully destructive force it truly is?

In 2007, more than half of Pennsylvania’s counties experienced lethal acts of domestic violence. By year’s end 121 people had died – 95 of them victims and 26 of them perpetrators who committed suicide or were killed by police.

There can be no doubt that this loss of life is profound, as is the impact on those left behind. The lives of surviving children and their futures are forever altered by what many of them have witnessed. Their experiences are haunting.

In one case, just a week before Christmas, a terrified 7-year-old boy hid in his room for two days after watching his father beat and stomp his mother to death. The youngster had tried to intervene several times to help his mother, pleading with his father to stop.

The boy took cover under the kitchen table as his father fist-beat his mother. The dad left the room for a short time and returned wearing shoes so he could stomp on her face and body, as she lay unconscious on the floor.

When the couple’s 18-year-old son came home two days later, he discovered his mother’s body – and his young brother hiding in his room. The teen listened in horror as his father told him “I killed your mother.”

Our commonwealth and its elected leaders owe these children and their families a commitment to do better; to do more to stop the violence and end the killings.

Likewise, each of us needs to recognize that the safety of victims and the accountability of batterers reach far beyond the doors of the local domestic-violence program and police department; that there are things we all can do.

We all share the responsibility of making our communities as safe as possible. Too many lives have already been lost and too many lives hang in the balance to do nothing.

Complacency is not an option. We can:

Call the police if we see/hear abuse.

Ask if they’re safe or need someone to talk to.

Tell them that free, confidential help is available at the Women’s Help Center.

Offer a ride to the center, or to a safe place from which to make a phone call.

In a study focusing on the first six months of 2008, Pennsylvania had the fourth-highest number of murder-suicides in the nation – 14 cases in just six months (there were at least 554 deaths in 234 murder-suicides across the country) – and most involved domestic disputes.

Using these figures, the Violence Policy Center estimates that nearly 1,100 Americans die each year in murder-suicides. Most – 88.5 percent – involve a firearm.

Domestic-violence experts say these statistics are even more reason for potential victims to seek help at the first sign of trouble.

Of that we should all agree.



Susan S. Shahade is executive director of the Women’s Help Center Inc. of Johnstown.