Naples Daily News Editorial: For many, it’s a scary world inside their own home
Naples Daily News Editorial
Oct. 5, 2018
The dirty outside world is pretty scary these days.
Red tide has persisted on and off for nearly a year, making it a daily uncertainty whether it’s safe to go to the beach for fear of respiratory distress or the unpleasant sight of dead sea life washed up on the beach. In the Fort Myers-Cape Coral area and as far south as the Lee-Collier county line, blue-green toxic algae has spoiled waterways. Now there’s a recent bloom that’s turned Gulf waters brown along Collier’s coastline.
Then there’s politics, from the battle over a U.S. Supreme Court nomination to Washington, D.C., stagnated by polarized parties to candidates for high office in the state accusing one another of lying, deceit and corruption. Its omnipresent in the outside world as the Nov. 6 election approaches.
Yet October is a month to remember that, for some, scary is defined by what’s within the walls of their residence. They can’t look beyond the despair of living within those walls to fret much about the outside world. They live in physical, emotional and-or financial fear of an abusive, controlling or violent person.
In our scary world, this is National Domestic Violence Awareness Month.
All around us
The Florida Coalition Against Domestic Violence website offers some national and state figures of the magnitude of the problem:
» 1.3 million women yearly are victims of physical assault by a partner.
» On average, three women are killed by husbands or boyfriends every day in the U.S.
» More than 100,000 domestic violence acts annually are reported to Florida law officers, based on the latest available data.
But that’s the nation and state. It can’t happen here in Southwest Florida where it’s paradise, right? It can. It does.
Recent news reports chronicled violence in Collier County targeting two female teenagers who each had been involved in relationships. Last year there was a deadly case that ended in a murder-suicide of senior citizens in one of Collier’s more affluent gated communities; authorities said domestic violence was in the home.
In a guest commentary publishing Sunday on these pages, The Shelter for Abused Women & Children reports that in 2017 in Collier there were 1,794 reports of domestic violence, or nearly five every day. Those numbers included two killings, 29 rapes and 317 aggravated assaults, the shelter reports.
The shelter provided a pin map showing where those 1,794 domestic violence calls came from that led to written reports by law enforcement officers. It’s shocking documentation of a concentration of calls in every population center in Collier. No, this isn’t a problem just in communities historically thought to be higher crime areas. It’s pervasive.
Act on the act
As the calendar turned to October and National Domestic Violence Awareness Month, the clock shamefully was running out on the federal Violence Against Women Act.
Approved in 1994, the act was designed, in part, to provide money to social service agencies that support victims of sexual assault and domestic violence. The act was approved after a historic battle over a Supreme Court nomination in 1991 in which sexual harassment allegations were raised. Sound familiar?
The act was set to expire Sept. 30.
President Trump signed a bill keeping the government open that included extending the act’s existence into early December.
October is a month for special attention to domestic violence. November is a month for elections. By December, we hope federal lawmakers are prepared to consider extending the act on more than a temporary basis.
