A friend of mine who lives on a large Marine Corps base confirmed something that the news has reported: domestic violence is a serious and frequent problem for base families. But my friend also added what the media can’t: chilling personal anecdotes and confirmation of how grossly under-reported the crime is.
“We hear it,” Sarah said as we ate lunch at a taco stand. “It happens all the time . . . Like, one time we could hear the wife screaming from three houses down.”
Over the past year, I had been neck-deep in research and statistics on the subject through my work at The Family Violence Project, a non-profit organization that trains people—teachers, faith leaders, teens, and the military—about how to respond appropriately to different types of abuse. I asked my friend her opinion because I wanted to hear a real-life perspective on the subject. Wow, did I get it! “Everybody on base totally knows this is a huge problem,” Sarah added. “They come back from deployment and beat the crap out of their wives! Or, I know a couple who are both enlisted, and they beat the crap out of each other.”
This is not to say that the military hasn’t been working hard to stop this ugly trend: they have tons of great resources to help families in many ways, and I know several hard-working people on base whose job is to do just that. Plus, there are outside organizations, like the project I worked for, that care so much about the problem and about military families that they raise money and forge community partnerships to help families for free. Together, all of these people and organizations have made some significant progress on a tough issue. But the problem of domestic violence in the military is still a glaring problem despite all of our efforts and the wide-eyed despair (or fed-up resignation, in Sarah’s case) of base families. Why is that?
There are a lot of factors at work here; scientific studies have found that certain factors
