Local NO MORE campaign seeks
to reduce DV and sexual assault
October each year is National Domestic Violence Awareness month, so designated by an act of the U.S. Congress in 1989. The purpose of setting aside a whole month is to get more people to recognize that DV thrives when too many people are silent.
"Too often the crimes that citizens help us solve involve DV," said E. Winslow (Buddy) Chapman, CrimeStoppers executive director. "Mass awareness and knowledge of the problems associated with violence in the home can bring down crime statistics and build families rather than destroy them."
The Memphis Area Women's Council, working with the Memphis Sexual Assault Kit Task Force, is a lead agency in helping to bring the national NO MORE awareness campaign to Memphis.
Called "Memphis Says NO MORE" here, the campaign is telling the community through depictions of well-known local faces on posters and in public service video announcements that there "is never an excuse for domestic violence or sexual assault."
Everyone can help in the cause by taking a survey designed to determine where the whole community is currently in the attitudes and behaviors that surround the issues of sexual assault and domestic violence.
The survey, put together by the University of Memphis Criminology Office and located here -
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/MNNLL7J
- over time will help show how awareness is changing. It only takes a few minutes to do the survey and the results are completely anonymous.
DV by the numbers
More than half of all violent crime in our greater Memphis community is DV-related, when the wide definition of domestic violence is taken into effect, including family members, roommates, and ex-intimate partners.
An analysis by Richard Janikowski, a University of Memphis professor studying crime trends and statistics, showed in 2014 that of all DV offenses - 17,434 incidents reported to area police departments - the majority happened between 3 p.m. and midnight.
Among those crimes in 2014 were:
* 11 homicides
* 72 DV-related forcible rapes
* 1,819 aggravated assaults
Through the end of August this year, there were 9 DV homicides, 645 forcible rapes, 1,246 aggravated assaults, 7699 simple assaults, 1,962 intimidation offenses, 222 cases of stalking.
The total domestic violence offenses through the first eight months of 2015: 11,451.
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