October is Domestic Violence Awareness month in Alabama. The issue is also a concern internationally. The U.S. State Department invited APR to discuss its human rights coverage with Erika Leonaite. She’s the human rights ombudsperson with the Parliament of Lithuania. Leonaite says her nation bolstered its domestic violence laws just last year to include a protection order that could separate victims of their alleged attackers for fifteen days.
“It was actually a widely disputed legislation because a lot of politicians were talking that it would violate, like, the right to private property if the offender was removed from his own house, shared together with the victim, or that such an order could be imposed by a court order only,” said Leonaite.
APR heard from Stephanie McTarsney, who’s with the domestic violence victim support group Kelly’s Rainbow in the Huntsville area. She says rural parts of Alabama are often hit harder…
“We go into the schools and we, you know, we go to court with them in Cherokee County, and we do protection orders in Cherokee County, it's harder for them to flee because they don't know, you know, necessarily, because it's such a rural area that there is actual help out there,” she said.
The Alabama Law Enforcement Agency operates a website called Crime.Alabama.gov with funding from the Department of Justice. It quotes data from 2021 that ranks Mobile County as highest in the state with over four thousand occurrences of domestic violence that year. Jefferson County comes in second with almost three thousand. In Lithuania, Erika Leonaite says conservative politicians in Parliament opposed the idea of a fifteen day protection order that was newly enacted.
“Sometimes our conservative politicians say that it's due to alcohol abuse, some maybe spontaneous dispute. It's a one time incident. It should not be taken so seriously, but in a lot of cases, it is a pattern of abuse and what is a very progressive development that in the procedure of appointing that in what's the correct term in imposing that order?” said Leonaite.
The U.S. State Department and the citizens’ diplomacy group Global Ties Alabama recognized the APR news team for its talks before foreign delegations and dignitaries on its major news investigations and news disinformation.
