The Cost of Looking Away

AwarenessCommunity
Written By Empower Now Team

Does anyone want to do what it takes?

That is not a rhetorical question.

Interpersonal Violence. Domestic Violence. Domestic Abuse. Call it whatever you want, this is the pandemic society chooses to ignore.

🔍 What we keep failing to see

  • 🧠 Not enough awareness is brought to it.

  • 💰 Not enough people understand its widespread costs.

  • 👁️ Not enough people recognize how they contribute to it.

  • ⚖️ Not enough professionals truly understand how it works in real life.

What is wrong with us?

Why don’t we have the collective will to do more?

⚖️ The gap between policy and reality

Here’s one hard truth: what websites, TV, and public officials tell you about abuse, advocacy, and recovery from abuse is a whole lot different than facing your abuser in court on a Monday morning. The laws, policies, and good luck don't always seem to work for real people in real time. Everything looks as it should online or when talking to an advocate, but it rarely translates into reality.

🗣️ Why this blog exists

With this reality in mind, this blog will confront what looks good on paper versus what actually happens day to day in cases of domestic violence.

We will share:

  • 🧩 First-person accounts of lived experience

  • 📉 What has failed and why

  • 📈 What has worked and under what conditions

Our goal is to shine the light on one of the most misunderstood and prolific forms of violence in our society and to offer attainable solutions along the way.

🔔 A place to start / solutions 

When a victim or a victim and her children are killed by her partner, do not accept the familiar response: “We may never know why this happened.”

Instead:

🗣️ Hold a press conference.

Ask the Attorney General, Sheriff, Chief of Police, or the Rhode Island Coalition Against Domestic Violence to stand at the podium and explain the known characteristics and patterns of domestic abuse that preceded the violence.

🔍 Invite local experts to explain:

  • How domestic violence operates

  • How it escalates over time

  • How it hides in plain sight

  • How to recognize and interrupt it before it turns lethal

Then, when the next domestic violence felony occurs, repeat the process.

Not as a symbolic gesture.

  • ⚖️ As public accountability.

  • 🧠 As education.

  • 🛑 As prevention.

Empower Now Team