A 1992 national survey by the Family Violence Prevention Fund found that 13% of women surveyed had been physically attacked by their partner. According to the FBI, domestic violence claims the lives of four women each day.

A Philadelphia study found that 20% of women presenting with injuries at emergency rooms were victims of domestic violence.

A 1988 study by the National Women Abuse Prevention Project found that physical abuse of women resulted in more injuries to women than rape, muggings and automobile accidents combined.

In 1992, the Senate Judiciary Committee reported that 1 in 5 of all aggravated assaults reported to the police were aggravated assaults in the home.

There exist 3 times more animal shelters than battered women's shelters in the United States.

The rate at which women separated from their spouses suffered violent victimization was 128 per 1,000, or over 12 times that of never-married women, approximately twice that of divorced women, and more than 6 times the rate of married women.

In 1991 at least 21,000 domestic crimes were reported against women every week.

Women are 10 times more likely than men to be victimized by an intimate.

Letter From a Survivor

(by Daniel Stewart)

I grew up as one of four children born to an abusive father and a controled mother who spent much time in psychiatric hospitals for nervous breakdowns. When we were growing up, we didn't know that there were others in the world just like our family. We thought surely we must be an isolated case.

In the turbulant 60s, violence was a part of everyone's life to some degree. We had watched our nation's leaders murdered before our eyes on television, we watched our sons shot down in Viet Nam on the nightly news and violence had become a part of our everyday culture through films. The term "dysfunctional family" had not yet been coined, and families who faced domestic violence on a day-to-day basis was a rare exception.

My family, indeed, was that exception. Born to an alcoholic and physically/mentally abusive father, beatings and torment was as common to our home as chicken dinner on Sunday might have been to yours.

As the oldest of the children, I became the self-appointed guardian for the others. But more often than not, Dad's alcoholic-induced rage hit the target on each of us. Beatings, strange and unusual punishments, and intentionally-inflicted pain simply for the sake of pain inself was a near daily occurance. We couldn't invite friends over to stay because we never knew when his next outburst would be, and we knew we'd never live through the shame of having our playmates be witness to that horror. And so we became one another's only friends, finding security and trust only among the siblings.

I remember many nights of terror when I would gather the little ones in my bed, listening to the cries and screams of the other innocent victim in our home -- our Mom. Beatings, threats and the worst verbal abuse imaginable. This is what we heard directed at Mom on a consistant basis. As her fear of Dad increased, so did her reclusiveness. Until one day, she stopped leaving the house altogether. How could she go out and have to constantly explain the sunglasses to disguise the black eyes, or continually create ways in which the bruises had "mysteriously appeared". So she gave up her friends, her family and her dignity.

I still cry when I think of the many nights I would lay in bed as a child and plan to somehow, someway make Dad pay for what he was dong to Mom and to us. I planned to get his own gun and shoot him, or to slip into his room as he slept and drive the big kitchen knife straight through him, or put all my Mom's sleeping pills into his coffee. So much hate for a seven or eight year old boy to carry.

The four terrified little children are all grown now. And to this day, each member of my family carries the physical and emotional scars left by a man whose responsibility it should have been to only love us. As adults, we continued to each have our own struggles dealing with the past. I think in everything we did, we were still trying to please Dad and be accepted by him. Even grown and now with families of our own, those suppressed little children occasionally surfaced and wondered, after all these years, if Daddy could love us and be proud of us. Thirty, forty years later, we were still under bondage to our fears, a bondage from which we were finally released on July 5, 2000, when Dad took his handgun and took his own life.

If you're a husband and/or a Daddy, and you see the smallest part of yourself in our family's story, please seek help immediately. Or if you have ever thought that you might be capable of any of these actions, don't ignore it until it's too late. Help is there. Take advantage of it, I beg you.

And if you're a woman and your life or the life of your children are being threatened by Domestic Violence, get out of the home, whatever it takes. You are no longer living in an age where there are no resources, no support or no way out. you might think he will change, but statistics show that it seldom, if ever, happens while the family is still living together.

The saddest footnote to my family's story is that my Dad's life is over. He never looked for help, and he showed no remorse for what he did to any of us. And at the end, he took his life, placing himself in Hell for eternity, when four simple words could have healed everything -- "Jesus, I need You".

I was recently told by someone that a suicide dies one death, while those they have left behind die a million deaths for the rest of their lives. This might be true, because I have learned that the guilt and the grief is almost unbearable. But I refuse to allow my Dad to have the last victory in this. I have a Heavenly Father now, One who will never hurt me and One who will never let me down.

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