We Still Try To Hide Domestic Violence

She was privileged, rich and beautiful, but the world now knows the darker side of Nicole Brown Simpson’s life.

The details were shocking, but we learned a little, too:

That domestic violence is blind to socioeconomic status; that there is no love in violence, only rage and hurt; that even women with the financial means to escape sometimes cannot.

The former Mrs. Simpson tried, and what happened?

As Los Angeles County Deputy District Attorney Christopher Darden told it: “With every thrust of the knife into her body and into Ron’s body, there is a release, you know, a small release. … And he stabs and he cuts and he slices until that rage is gone and until these people are dead. And after that, the rage is gone. He’s better.”

Whether the jury finds Simpson guilty or not, the message drawn from the Simpsons’ violent relationship remains the same: Obsession is often confused with love - a love that punches, that hurls against the wall and sometimes kills.

Despite heightened awareness, the subject remains an uncomfortable one for those who would keep it boxed inside its traditional home, the shadowy confines of secrecy and shame.

But turning a blind eye to such violence is akin to doing nothing at all, and which is worse? So it is in Sacramento. Or, almost was.

The story starts at the open-air Thursday Night Market, where the anti-violence group Women Take Back The Night set up an informational booth in September, in part to promote an upcoming annual event protesting violence against women.

The group’s display included Sacramento’s version of the international Clothesline Project, a collection of T-shirts designed by survivors of violence and their loved ones.

The idea: By hanging a decorated shirt out in the open, women can leave behind a little of their pain and begin the healing process. The shirts’ hand-painted messages are powerful, disturbing and sometimes provocative.

“Kathleen,” one said, “God we miss you. I miss my big sister.”

“I trusted you. You tricked me,” another said. “You left me for dead. You were wrong. I survived.”

Another captures the cyclical nature of abuse: “For Mom: I was standing there as you were getting abused. I got older and caught myself in your place. Now I look at my 2-year-old baby girl and I pray for her. Let life be better.”

“The response was just amazing,” said Take Back The Night spokeswoman Jody Muller. “People found them very thoughtful and compelling. We didn’t get any negative feedback at all.”

Until the night of Sept. 14, when a representative of the Downtown Sacramento Partnership, which oversees the market, asked the group to stop displaying the T-shirts because someone found them obscene.

“The T-shirts are not obscene,” Women Take Back The Night coordinator Andrea Margolis wrote in a letter to the committee. “Turning our backs on violence, however, is obscene.”

The group originally was told of one or two complaints, but a board member later verified that it was a committee member, not the public, who found the shirts objectionable.

“There were concerns … that the wording on some of the shirts was inappropriate for a family event,” said committee chair Sidney Garcia-Heberger, who manages the Crest Theater. “We are trying to keep the market as a family event.”

But some of these families are exactly the audience the women’s group hopes to reach. Family violence kills more women every five years than the total number of Americans killed in the Vietnam War. Those are the kinds of families some people are dealt.

The partnership came to the same conclusion, eventually. I can only surmise this because the partnership’s chief executive officer called me late Friday to say they’d made an error about the Clothesline Project display.

“The issue of domestic violence is more important that any possible offense the shirts might bring,” the partnership’s Tom Carroll said. “It was absolutely inappropriate of us to have offended them and made them drop out of the market. We want them back. In fact, we will actively recruit them back.”

The shirts will speak after all, and, oh, the tales they will tell. These tales are sad and disturbing, but they are also real. And they can be stopped.

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The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Diana Griego Erwin McClatchy News Service