Sports and Domestic Violence

Everyone is part of the problem, so let's be part of the solution instead.

This has been a pretty horrible week for sports in general. We're all gritting our teeth and hoping to get to the end of it without any more horrific news coming down the wires.

As a culture, we spend all year looking forward to that mythic four month time frame we call "football season". We put off weddings, organize schedules, and plan our lives around what we like to think is the best time of year. There's nothing like going over to your buddy's office and trash talking the Aggies or complaining about Nick Saban.

I could pretend the games will take my mind off things, but they won't. The games are, by and large, pretty terrible, but even if there was wall-to-wall epic rivalries this weekend, what would it say about us that we could be so easily distracted?

But that's the point, really. When is the time we want to talk about domestic violence? We like to push the unpleasant things to back of our collective consciousness, and there's never a right time to bring it up. We don't want to hear it, and we don't want to talk about it.

This is probably why domestic violence goes so unreported. So let's go to the Department of Justice for some facts about domestic violence:

42 million women will experience physical violence, rape, and/or stalking by an intimate partner in their lifetime

18 million women have been victims of sexual assault

1 in 3 women will experience physical violence

1 in 10 women will be raped by an intimate partner

Over 1,000 women were killed by their male partner in 2010

1 in 5 women who have experienced intimate partner violence were between the ages of 11 and 17 at the time of their first violent encounter

20 to 37 percent of adult women are victims of dating violence

18 percent of American women have been raped

44.6 percent of American women have been victims of sexual violence

1 in 10 American women have been raped by an intimate partner

75 percent of women who have been raped were first raped before the 25th birthday

There are no shortage of horrifying statistics, but they are all capped by this one: Only 1 in 5 women will report their victimization to the police. It is even less likely they will report the crime when perpetrated by an intimate partner, despite injury rates being higher among women victimized by an intimate partner than a stranger.