The scourge of domestic violence illustrates how profoundly unevolved we remain as a species.
Here's something to consider:
Here's something to consider:
"Between 2000 and 2006, 3,200 American soldiers were killed in combat. During that same period, in the United States, more than three times as many women died at the hands of their husbands and boyfriends."
That's how The New York Times opened its review last month of Rachel Louise Snyder's new book on domestic violence, No Visible Bruises: What We Don't Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us. The World Health Organization categorizes domestic violence as a "global health epidemic." The U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention views domestic violence as a public health crisis, as well, ringing alarm bells on a subject that too few justice and law enforcement officials take seriously enough. That's a staggering reality, given that CDC research finds that nearly half of all murdered women in the U.S. are killed by current or former "romantic partners" - generally by guns.
As a savvy leader and communicator, Snyder uses research-based facts and powerful storytelling to shine light in the dark, menacing void she calls "intimate partner terrorism." Domestic violence is a stunningly complex and unnecessarily political issue that so many men in power choose not to understand and to ignore. Snyder's no-nonsense outreach is focused and firm, but it's highly accessible. She's a warrior on the subject, but in a manner that seeks to include people in the conversation and not reduce the subject to simplistic, black-and-white banalities. She understands, for example, that the perpetrators of domestic violence should not be, as she told Insight Radio's "Tell Me Everything" host John Fugelsang today, merely reduced to evil comic-book villains. The origins of their egregious violence and the genesis of needed solutions are much more complicated than that.
Snyder is calling attention to the issue, of course. As effective leaders do, however, she's focused on enacting serious, specific, and sustainable change - public policy remedies in this case. Yet, the Times underscored the paradoxical challenge leaders face in raising awareness of truly painful issues that some people would rather avoid. How does a leader and communicator "stoke a reader’s outrage and then translate that outrage into action, keeping it from curdling into cynicism or despair"? That's always a difficult leadership balancing act.
Image courtesy of MPR News.