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 May 6, 2008 Tuesday

SECTION: LEDDY; Pg. A21

LENGTH: 845 words

BYLINE: DANIEL LEDDY

BODY: 

ROAD TO MISERY She must end it regardless of how much sorrow he professes, how many tears he sheds, or how many promises he makes that he will never hit her again. He's either conning her or he's conning himself. Either way, he's the first stop on the road to a lifetime of misery. For many victimized women, getting off that road is very difficult; and for some, it's impossible.

Paralyzed by feelings of shame, humiliation, impotence, and stark fear, victimized women often view endless, silent suffering as preferable to any other alternative available to them. Some dare to whisper their secret to those they trust but resist urgent pleas that they act to stop the abuse. So, in the end, they suffer still, alone with their demons.

Others summon the will to go to family court, obtain a temporary order of protection, and have their abusers served with notice of the proceeding and a direction to appear in court at a future date. However, approximately 60 percent of these women abandon their cases before trial and let their temporary orders of protection expire.

Usually prompted by sympathy for their abusers and naive confidence in their promises to reform, it is, in fact, the single biggest mistake that victims of domestic violence make in family court. For having been brought to the precipice of their day of reckoning only to see their victims blink, the abusers are further emboldened.

Victimized women who do obtain final orders of protection against their abusers must insist that these mandates be strictly obeyed. Because domestic violence is deadly serious business that can escalate on a dime, any violation should be prosecuted vigorously by the victims and punished severely by the courts. That means jail time, the first time, in every single case.

Precisely because domestic violence is such deadly business, it is essential to crack down on those who file false allegations for purely tactical reasons such as gaining the upper hand in divorce proceedings or cases involving child custody and visitation. Such all-too-common practices undermine confidence in the legal process and, in a very real sense, tend to call into question the legitimate claims and motives of those truly victimized by domestic violence. The same problem attaches to the actions of gun-shy judges who hand out orders of protection like water just for the asking.

Finally, no discussion of the plight of abused women is complete without acknowledging that men, too, are victimized by domestic violence. Without minimizing its impact in individual cases, it is nonetheless a fact that women as a class are the targets far more often and with far more serious consequences.

Daniel Leddy's On The Law column appears each Tuesday on the Advance Op-Ed Page. His e-mail address is JudgeLeddy@si.rr.com

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BYLINETITLE = STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. - An excellent feature article appearing on the front page of last Sunday's Advance addressed "the silent secret of domestic violence" on Staten Island. Noting that instances of this societal scourge continue to increase here, the story recounted the passionate efforts of 27-year-old college student Bianca DiMitri to do something meaningful to assist and empower its victims.

During my career as a family court judge, I saw first hand the devastation wrought by domestic violence. The faces of the more memorable victims flash before me now even as I write this column. They are painful images of women, bruised and broken, stripped bare of their self-esteem, and thoroughly embarrassed to be in court. All this while they obsessively questioned their very decision to seek help and, reflecting domestic violence's cruelest irony, blamed themselves at some level for the perpetrators' acts of brutal betrayal.

Then there were the children, kids who should have been in school learning, or outside playing, or at home sleeping, anyplace but inside a courthouse with the security of their little worlds being ripped apart. Because children can't remain unscathed in homes polluted by domestic violence, they are always victims too. There are no exceptions as it is only the degree of damage done that varies from case to case.

An estimated 1.3 million women are victims of physical assault by an intimate partner each year, according to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence. The organization also asserts that one in four women will be victims of domestic violence at sometime in their lives. The urgent challenge for us today is to stop this chilling projection from becoming a reality.

While we have made progress over the last several years in identifying and combating domestic violence as well as providing remedial services to its victims, we need to be much smarter and much more aggressive if this critically important undertaking is going to be successful. The place to begin is with education.

A girl must be taught before she starts dating that if a boyfriend strikes her once, he will do it again. That's not a prediction; it's a guarantee. That's why she must end the relationship then and there.

LOAD-DATE: May 6, 2008