About 35 years ago, then-Greenfield Police Chief David McCarthy pulled open a file drawer crammed with paperwork — domestic abuse restraining orders. He was lamenting how much time his officers spent enforcing those protective orders and how little good they seemed to do.
That was five years after formation of the regional domestic abuse prevention organization, New England Learning Center for Women in Transition, which marked its 40th anniversary last week. We can’t say “celebrate.” That will be saved for a time, sooner rather than later, we hope, when fewer men, and women, abuse those they profess to love.
After decades working to end domestic violence and sexual assault, representatives from the center say that while progress has been made, violence against women is still a pervasive problem throughout the area.
As the center marked its 40th year, advocates noted that the rate of women who seek a restraining order is 36 percent higher in Franklin County than the rest of Massachusetts — a pattern that, sadly, doesn’t seem to have changed since McCarthy’s day.
Rural communities are especially susceptible to widespread domestic abuse, because they are prone to low-wage jobs, a lack of transportation that literally makes it difficult to escape abuse, and an environment that breeds isolation and a cycle of violence that carries from one generation to the next.
Locally, criminal charges have been brought in about a hundred domestic assault cases per year for much of this decade.
In 2014, when The Recorder ran a four-day series of stories on changes in the state domestic violence laws, 40 percent of the caseload in the local district attorney’s office consisted of domestic abuse. The new law made strangulation a crime for the first time, with serious penalties. And the law made it easier to prosecute even when victims are intimidated into silence.
But still we see hundreds of restraining orders and a thousand calls to the women’s center hotline a year. Clearly, we must continue to resist domestic violence, as individuals and as a society.
We must dig at the deep roots of the problem — which is found in every economic class — by addressing the stressors that lead people to abuse and by appropriately punishing those who give into their worst instincts.
At The Recorder and other news organizations, we can do our part by continuing to report on individual crimes and and the issue they reflect. As a society, we must do what we can to break the cycle driven by men growing up in an environment where people exert dominance over another or deflect pain and anger onto others they supposedly love.
Too many men seem to have grown up thinking it’s normal to abuse others. We need to support the police, prosecutors and courts case by case, person by person, through arrest and court-ordered education and rehabilitation. We need more community education programs, so the trend slowly is reversed by good example.
And of course, we need to recognize and support efforts like those made at the women’s center.
At last week’s NELCWIT event, men in the audience took a pledge promising never to commit, condone or remain silent about violence against women. District Attorney David Sullivan and Greenfield Community College President Robert Pura led the pledge.
We must all take that same pledge, in word and in deed. The work is not just the women’s center to do.