Center opens doors to helping domestic violence victims
Bee Editorial
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one in every five deaths in the United States is related to smoking.

What have national leaders done to address the problem? Plenty. Public service announcements about the dangers of smoking and how to find help quitting flood the airwaves. Tobacco companies have been fined millions of dollars for enticing children to smoke and forced to set aside more funding for smoking cessation programs. Laws have been enacted to ban smoking in many public places to protect nonsmokers from secondhand smoke.

Everyone knows smoking is dangerous because the message has been loud and clear in awareness campaigns. If such campaigns can drive down nicotine addiction, they also could work for another epidemic in our society that isn't as easy to see, one in which power serves as the drug - domestic violence.

The statistics are just as staggering as they are for smoking. One in four women and one in nine men will be physically or sexually abused in their lifetime.

If domestic violence were a disease instead of a social taboo that gets swept under the carpet, "there'd be a clinic in every neighborhood," said Linda Ray, director of the Family Justice Center of Erie County Inc.

For now, that clinic in our "county neighborhood" is the Family Justice Center, and it provides services to help those in danger to escape domestic violence and find comfort in one place, instead of having to visit several different places - police stations, courts, emergency rooms - and having to deal with personnel who are sometimes not as sensitive as they should be to victims' needs.

The Family Justice Center is the ultimate safe haven for anyone - woman or man - who is suffering with domestic violence.

The center also is working to conduct a campaign in October that has the potential to save lives. Volunteers would hang posters with the slogan "violence happens behind closed doors, so does help" on the inside of stall doors in women's restrooms in public places. If a woman viewing the poster needs help, she could tear off a small portion of the poster that would contain the Family Justice Center's contact information. The initial secrecy would provide the key to empowering a victim to seek help.

Domestic violence may happen behind closed doors, but the barriers to publicizing this social disease and helping victims must be knocked down. Community groups are encouraged to back the Family Justice Center with whatever resources they have available.