What’s really going on?
The rhetoric surrounding Benjamin LaGuer obscured the ongoing work of serious people who address the unvarnished reality of female violence. The state legislature’s joint committee on public safety held hearings and issued a report on domestic violence in the state. Jane Doe Inc. published its first domestic-violence homicide report. Quincy District Court released a study last December, a first of its kind in the country, shedding new light on re-offending by domestic batterers over time. The state opened its first multi-service Family Justice Center, on Comm Ave in Boston, to help women victims. The Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office, along with the Boston Police Department, began treating underage prostitutes as victims to be saved rather than criminals to be punished. The Sexual Assault Nurse Examiners program was expanded throughout the state. And a series of programs in Newburyport to help battered women find assistance have been so successful, some officials would like to duplicate them across Massachusetts.
Taken together, it’s an impressive effort, but it’s been largely ignored. The public-safety committee released its report 12 days after Dominique Samuels’s body was found, but only one member of the press showed up — from a weekly paper in one town that was spotlighted in the report — says State Senator Jarrett Barrios. Neither the Globe nor the Herald even mentioned it. And so there has been no groundswell to enact its recommendations.
There is a significant disconnect between perception and reality in public policy, too. Congress authorized a huge increase in funding for the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) when it passed a five-year reauthorization of VAWA, which George Bush signed early this year. But that funding was left out of the federal budget for the new fiscal year.
Likewise, despite Kerry Healey’s talk, Mitt Romney recently cut victims’ services, along with other “emergency” 9C programs. Healey, Romney, and the legislature made great headlines with their efforts to list more sex offenders on the Internet, extend sexual-dangerousness definitions to people caught urinating in alleys, and provide witness protection to gangbangers. Yet they have done little or nothing to implement intensive parole oversight, reform restraining-order procedures, or implement uniform dangerousness-assessment procedures.
And sadly, the state has failed to use its resources to counter misperceptions with real understanding, which could help women who are victimized, say advocates who believe that prevention depends in large part on the awareness and caring of the general public.
As an example, they point to the May 20 murder of Carla Souza and her 11-year-old son, allegedly beaten to death with a hammer in their Framingham home by Souza’s husband, Jeremias Bins. Bins and Souza were both born in Brazil; domestic-abuse experts went on a local Brazilian radio program and talked about the societal norms that can lead to abuse in that culture and keep it from coming to light. Brazilian women in the area responded, calling the station seeking help.
That response could have led to a general call for more education and outreach services in minority communities. But reality, as usual, was not interesting enough to spread. When the Herald featured that murder on its cover, the headline blared, in typical TV-drama fashion: DID TOO MUCH RELIGION MAKE HIM KILL?
