Gravity of domestic violence

By Rick Christie

Saturday, Sept. 20, 2014 | 2:02 a.m.

“I will never forget the first time I was abused,” the on-air testimonial began. “Everything happened so fast: the attack, the police, my family getting involved. It was the worst night of my life. Until the next time it happened, and the next, and every time after that.”

The victim in this case, Joy Taylor, a South Florida talk radio host and sister of former NFL great Jason Taylor, goes on to painfully and poignantly explain how she was repeatedly abused before finally leaving the relationship.

“It is very easy to judge someone who stays in an abusive relationship, especially if you’ve never been in one,” Taylor says.

But if there’s one thing we’ve all learned in the past week, there are a lot of women who’ve “been in one.”

The Ray Rice domestic abuse case, and the fumbling way in which the NFL has handled it from the beginning, is shining a well-deserved spotlight on the issue. As it should, because domestic abuse is pervasive.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1 in 4 women will experience domestic violence in their lifetimes.

Women ages 18 to 24 are at greatest risk of becoming victims of domestic violence. And 50 percent of women who are homeless in U.S. are homeless because they’re escaping domestic abuse.

As Taylor testified on-air last week, leaving is difficult. In fact, advocates who work with domestic-abuse victims say a woman will leave and return to an abuser as many as seven times before finally walking away.

“The range of emotions that a victim goes through is wild, conflicting,” said Jennifer Rey, a program services director at Aid to Victims of Domestic Abuse. “People have to get past this question of, ‘Why doesn’t she just leave?’ ”

Indeed, it’s that societal attitude that had many people blaming Janay Palmer for staying with former Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice after their physical altercation on a hotel elevator in February. She even married him and appeared with him on stage during his mea culpa once a video of him dragging her limp body off the elevator became public.

Those questions got louder last week after another, more disturbing video was released, this one of him punching her out on the elevator.

It’s that video that has caused some collective hand-wringing by NFL owners, and public calls for league Commissioner Roger Goodell to either step down or be fired over questions about how seriously the NFL takes the issue.

But perhaps the best recognition of the Rice incident’s impact has been trending Twitter hashtags WhyIStayed and WhyILeft. They’ve been used in posts more than 150,000 times:

• From Kate Dunkle: #whyistayed he made me feel obligated to put my unhappiness second to his happiness. He manipulated my kindness to suit his needs.

• From Michelle Shonka: #whyistayed he threatened to get my daughter taken away, he stalked me & I was afraid #whyileft to save myself & my daughter.

• From Salina Sweet: #whyistayed I didn’t want to be alone again #whyileft I didn’t want to be alone in a casket.

Rey knows these stories all too well. Seventy-five percent of women in abusive relationships are either planning to leave, in the process of leaving or have left.

“But it’s tough because this is all about control,” she says. “The batterer doesn’t want to lose that control, so they will do whatever they can to keep her from leaving: beg forgiveness, threaten her, cut off access to money.

“We’ve had women move from state to state to state because once the batterer loses that control, the consequences become dire.”

Rey says she has done multiple media interviews over the past week, which is good as it gives her a chance to highlight the fact that Domestic Violence Awareness Month begins Oct. 1. But, she hastens to add that the issue should be discussed year-round.

“We need for the media to not only write about this when there’s a high-profile incident,” she said.

But the Rice case, because he was eventually terminated by the Ravens and suspended indefinitely by the NFL, does give Rey a chance to focus on what she calls “batterer accountability.”

Typically, she said, the focus on the victim and “what’s wrong with her. But why does he get to keep his life?”

A good question. Three women die in domestic abuse situations in the United States every day. That means more than 600 women have died since Ray Rice punched out his now-wife in February.

There is no excuse for this in a civil society. None.

Rick Christie writes for the Palm Beach Post.