By Alex Irizarry
Staff Writer

By the time you have finished reading this sentence, a woman, somewhere in the United States, has been assaulted or beaten. Every nine seconds another women is abused; think about that number.

Nine seconds is all it takes.

Domestic violence is an issue that has plagued this country for decades, but it has gotten much worse as time has gone on. Half of the homeless women and children in the United States are fleeing from domestic abuse, one-third of American women and one-fourth of women worldwide will experience domestic/dating violence in their lifetime, and, while it’s not as common, men are also the victims of domestic abuse and rape crimes.

Millions of men and women face domestic violence each year, yet only 25 percent of these crimes are ever reported.

People are most impressionable in their teenage years. This period is when they are molded into the men and women they will become in adulthood. Isn’t this the time when we should be hitting home on the issue of domestic abuse and why it is wrong?

The answer, quite simply, is yes; we constantly hammer the consequences of unsafe sex, cheating, drug use/abuse and bullying. These are all important issues in their own right, but we should also be hammering the issue of domestic violence into our children’s heads, especially on our young professional athletes where the problem seems to arise the most, especially throughout the past year.

As of late, there have been four high profile cases from the NFL alone, with players like Adrian Peterson accused yet again of child abuse and Ray Rice for beating his fiancé in a Las Vegas elevator this past July. In fact, there have been 83 domestic violence arrests, over 55 percent of all NFL arrests, since 2010.

When you look at those statistics and the issue of domestic violence as a whole, which is the leading cause of injury to women – more than car accidents, muggings and rapes combined, you cannot help but wonder why more isn’t being done to stop it.

As a whole, the American people are not really doing anything to prevent it, we are encouraging it by letting celebrities like Chris Brown off the hook with only a slap on the wrist and a few months of jail time. That puts out the idea that this behavior is acceptable, that there is no real punishment if you hit your wife and kids around every now and then.

There is no deterrent, as Brown is still successful in his music career and Rice stands a pretty good chance of appealing his indefinite suspension from the NFL. If it is such a big issue, our punishments for committing these crimes should be much more strict and children should see there are true consequences for these acts.

There is a quite simple way to teach students of the dangers and consequences of domestic violence, in the vein of the abstinence talks most students in Coppell were given in the seventh and eighth grade, we can begin having yearly seminars to teach the issues. These would only have to be hour-long seminars each time, where students could experience the stories of victims or simply have an activist come out and speak to the students.

We could set up sessions for young students that may have experienced violence to come in and speak with a counselor to help them work through it in a constructive way instead of bottling it in and just suffering because they ‘deserve it’. We have to do something.

But all of this instruction should not stop the moment students exit the doors of the school, because while it is the responsibility of the institution to teach students, it is not their responsibility to raise them. We can put on all the seminars we want but unless the message is carried through in their homes then the idea will not stick. Parents should be the ones truly showing the way and teaching their children right from wrong; there needs to be an emphasis on this problem like there hasn’t been before.

It is extremely important that our young professional athletes, and students, be taught now that domestic violence is wrong either through these seminars or by other means. Young men need to learn control their actions and young women need to know what to do if they are thrust into these situations. Children and teens should be learning this from their teachers and parents; children live by example. So parents and teachers need to be the example, not these fallen stars.