This month marks my tenth anniversary of writing Perspectives for the Albion News. My first column dealt with the problem of domestic violence, and with more and more domestic violence reports emerging from the National Football League, it seems appropriate to share that column again.

I saw a murder victim in Chicago when I was 19. He was slumped against the door of a little Mom & Pop store, staring glassy-eyed into eternity.   By three the next morning I could have been dead too; I was confronted by a man with a knife and a gun on a deserted EL platform en route to a friend’s apartment.

I’m sure we all appreciate the absence of such problems here. Bad things do happen, but not very often. We don’t find dead men in doorways, aren’t threatened going home. Many of us have no reason to worry about violence, and may not realize that others do.

This was hammered home yesterday when a friend asked me to help her “hang some shirts.” As outreach advocate for the Center For Survivors in Columbus, she’s spent the last month setting up “clothes lines” in area towns to increase awareness of domestic violence. Victims are encouraged to tell their stories on tee-shirts which are then hung up for people to read.

I helped her hang shirts at the local Fitness Center. It turned out to be as intense as seeing the dead man in Chicago. Some of the shirts were made on the behalf of women killed by their husbands, others by children who’d been molested or beaten. Each made by someone from this area. Some explained that when a woman is raped, part of her dies. Another said simply “Why would anyone hurt a child?”

Violence against women and children is as real here as street violence in a city, but because it happens in private, it goes unnoticed. We need to open our eyes, and respond to it with the same sense of outrage we’d feel upon finding a dead man in our doorway.