Family Violence

ASK YOURSELF -- would you ever invite someone into your home to teach your children that violence is a good way to solve problems, that it will likely be rewarded and that it causes no pain?Of course not. Yet we effectively do this every day. Our children watch an average of 28 hours of television each week. By high school graduation, most teen-agers have spent more time in front of television than in school.And what are they watching? Kids leaving elementary school have seen 8,000 murders and more than 100,000 other acts of televised violence.

The problems that arise from domestic violence cover a wide range of issues -- and fall under many different state laws. One of the dilemmas that has long vexed people working to curtail the frequency and the effects of violence within the home is the question of legislative strategy.Is it better to go for small steps each session, the piecemeal improvements that can address small areas of the problem, or hope to build political momentum for a larger-scale reform that would touch all the bases?

A 20-year-old Eldersburg man who police said attacked his mother was treated at Sinai Hospital in Baltimore Friday night after he was struck with a baseball bat by the woman's husband, authorities said.Matthew O'Connell of the 7000 block of Saddle Drive was intoxicated when he began arguing with his mother, Judith Stromberg, about noon, police said. Tfc. Nicholas Over said the young man went to his room and began throwing furniture, which he continued to do in the room where his mother was sitting.

With public interest focused on judicial responses to women's issues, most of Maryland's 242 judges are expected in Towson today and tomorrow for a conference on family violence convened by Chief Judge Robert C. Murphy."

Once again, the myth of the evil, brutal male perpetrator and the perfect, innocent female victim is being broadcast and written. The discussion is national. The rage and sorrow, palpable. Only when we come to terms with the fact that domestic violence is the responsibility of both men and women, however, can we put a stop to this horrible nightmare.Domestic violence is not an either-or phenomenon. It is not either the man's fault or the woman's. Both the male and the female are bound in their dance of mutual destructiveness, their incapacity for intimacy and appreciation of differences.

The greatest mass addiction in America today is not alcohol orcocaine, it is television.The tube is America's electronic Trojan horse. It seemed so benign at first, but in less than 50 years, it has captured virtually all our leisure time, and hypnotized families, communities and the nation every day.TV is the master teacher of our children and the biggest classroom without walls. It is the electronic pulpit of values and the cultural religion of our time. Americans learn more from television than anything else, but what are we teaching and what are we learning?

BOSTON -- How to explain the inconceivable: father stabbing, shooting and choking their children to death."God knows we wish we knew the reason, because then we could do something about it," said Christine Butler, a lawyer and director of the Suffolk Battered Women's Advocacy Project. "We've been tearing our hair out trying to figure out how we could have seen these killings coming."This year alone, at least a dozen Massachusetts children and young adults have been killed, police say, by their fathers or by their mothers' boyfriends.

Every five years, the number of American women who die due to family violence equals the 48,000 U.S. men who were killed in battle during the nine-year long Vietnam War, says Dr. Antonia C. Novello, the U.S. surgeon general.The degree of violence against women is so broad now that "it's unbelievable," the nation's top doctor said yesterday in an interview. "Women have to learn to talk about it and to bring it up to their doctors," she said.And, Novello is confident that doctors across the land will be willing to listen because she and the American Medical Association have just launched a nationwide campaign to heighten awareness of the problem.

On her first day as Miss America, Carolyn Suzanne Sapp came down to the cameras waiting on the beach at Atlantic City wearing a T-shirt and shorts and a radiant smile, ready for the pictures of innocent sensuality that is the image of her role. "There she is," as the song puts it, "your ideal."But on the second day, her private life intruded. There were news reports from her home state of Hawaii that Miss Sapp had been abused by an ex-boyfriend, a former NFL football player, that he had beaten her and tried to strangle her and that she had sought protection from the courts and the police.

Family violence has reached epidemic proportions in Maryland, and government efforts must be reorganized to deal with it, according to an 18-month study by a group of local experts."