Domestic violence targeted

• By SARAH CHACKO
• Advocate Capitol News Bureau
• Published: Aug 1, 2008 - Page: 19A - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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Domestic violence prevention advocates Thursday memorialized three women and a child who were killed in one week as they tried to find ways future deaths could be prevented.

“This is hard work,” Vikki Peay with the Capital Area Family Violence Intervention Center said, fighting back tears as she read about 12-year-old Ametria Pierce, who wanted to be a professional basketball player before her mother’s boyfriend killed her and her mother July 26. “We need your help.”

Ametria and her mother, both of Baton Rouge, were killed the same week a Gonzales woman was shot by her husband of less than a year. Another Baton Rouge woman was killed that week but her slaying has not been directly linked to a domestic violence issue.

Shannon Willis, director of Turning Point Battered Women’s Program in Alexandria, is compiling a list of all the names of domestic violence victims so far this year. It’s not complete, Willis said, but already the numbers are significantly higher across the state than the two previous years.

“The problem is definitely not small,” said Michelle Wilson, family violence program director for the YWCA of Northwest Louisiana. “It’s just not being addressed on the level it needs to be addressed on.”

“We finally said, look, we’re tired of talking to ourselves,” said Capital center director Martha Forbes. “We need other people’s voices and ideas and solutions.”

Conversations during Thursday’s meeting, which drew a group of about 35, including some law enforcement and civic group representatives, touched on funding, response training and gaps in services, as well as family values and community awareness.

Wilson said the average response people have to a victim is, “Why don’t you just leave?”

But people don’t understand the dynamics of domestic abuse — that a woman will stay loyal to her abuser out of fear that she will otherwise face retaliation, that a victim may not have a safe place to flee to or that they can suddenly become sitting ducks in their own workplace, Wilson said.

“There are things that seem very simple,” she said. “But in the life of an abused woman, they’re huge issues.”

Willis said the current economy is an obvious factor in both keeping women in abusive relationships and causing them to return to the abuser.

“It was difficult before times got financially hard,” Willis said. “Now it’s become impossible.”

Times are hard for prevention programs as well, advocates said.