It was reported on a segment of the CBS News that an unbelievable amount of wife beating occurred. Every 15 seconds in America, a wife is beaten by her husband. Friend, any man who would strike a woman is a coward!
The January 18, 1994 edition of Time magazine had an article entitled, “Till Death Do Us Part.” It was about women who, after years of abuse, kill their husbands.
Take for instance, Rita Collins, whose husband was a military recruiter. She reported he said to her, “You are old, fat, crazy and have no friends, and I will take care of you.” His care included “threats with a knife, punches, a kick to the stomach that caused a hemorrhage.” She said, “He’d slam me up against doors. He gave me a black eye, bruises. Winter and summer, I’d go to work like a Puritan, with long sleeves.”
Mr. Collins must have hated himself very much to have treated his wife with such brutality. The articles says, “She tried to get out. She filed for divorce, got a restraining order, filed an assault and battery charge against him, forced him from the house they had bought with a large chunk of her money when they retired to Florida. Yet still, she says, he came night after night banging on doors trying to break the locks.”
She says she remembers her husband’s face, the glassy eyes and a knife in his hands. “To this day I don’t remember pulling the trigger.”
Rita Collins is in a Florida prison. Personally, I know that the taking of anyone’s life is wrong, but I hope that she will receive clemency on the grounds of self-defense and be released.
Brethren, are you aware of the fact that more women in America are injured by men in their lives than by car accidents, muggings and rape combined? In addition, 22 to 35 percent of all visits by females to emergency rooms are for injuries from domestic assaults?
In 1991, some four million women were beaten and 1,320 murdered in domestic attacks, and 622 women killed their husbands or boyfriends. The women have become the lightning rods for debate since their circumstances and their responses were most extreme.
Talk about injustice in the system, The Battered Women’s Justice Center has found that the average sentence for a woman who kills her husband is 15 to 20 years while for a man it is 2 to 6 years.
There is a “hot line” in our country for about everything, but there is no number, no national resource for people seeking information about domestic violence. Who said that this is the year of the woman?
The article in Time asks, “What about shelter facilities? They are inadequate. New York has about 1,300 beds for a state of 18 million people. In 1990, the Baltimore Zoo spent twice as much money to care for animals as the state of Maryland spent on shelters for victims of domestic violence.”
