President Obama's budget reveals some darker truths about love

BY SUSIE WILSON

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

SEX MATTERS

If Christmas doesn't watch out, Valentine's Day is going to overtake it as America's premier holiday. I don't know about you, but I was greeted with almost as many salutations of "Happy Valentine's Day" this week as I was with "Merry Christmas" in December.

Sometimes I felt I was smothered in Valentiana (my word for the phenomenon): recipes for all things chocolate appeared for weeks in the newspapers, ads for diamond heart pendants dangled before my eyes online, e-mails from flower shops filled my inbox with requests not to forget the "ones I love," TV anchors promoted expanding the holiday from a single day to "Valentine's weekend," and the color red was worn by so many on the 14th that I thought the president had proclaimed it our national color.

Then I sensed I was falling in love with Valentine's Day's charms. When the media reported that indeed the "extra days" of shopping and dining resulted in a local and national economic boost, I thought that what is good for the economy must reflect the state of love in our country. I found myself lulled into thinking that all was well with romance in America.

All was well in my Valentine's Day-induced haze until I joined a conference call on Tuesday convened by the White House Council on Women and Girls. Its purpose: to discuss the President's budget priorities and appropriation items for the fiscal year 2012 for this important segment of the population. For over an hour, I heard staffers discuss how aspects of the budget are designed to "helping women and girls win the future."

Different staffers spoke to different budget items and how the president's priorities would improve the lives of women and girls if enacted. Lynn Rosenthal, the White House Advisor on Violence Against Women, spoke about how the budget would "strengthen efforts to combat violence against women."

It took only a few seconds of her talking about the physical and sexual violence presently perpetrated against women and girls to end my Valentine-induced haze.

"Domestic violence has increased markedly," she said, citing the rising rates of female homicide caused by domestic violence in three states: Rhode Island, Alabama, and Wisconsin.

At the heart of the increases are economic stress caused by job losses and cuts in services by state and local governments, she said. The rates may be even higher than the ones she cited, since "sexual assault is the most underrated of all acts of domestic violence." One in every six females in the U.S. will experience this horror during her lifetime, and we currently have inadequate mental health services to care for its victims, many of whom suffer high rates of anxiety and suicide.

Rosenthal said that because too many women – particularly young women – are beaten, raped, and stalked every year, the president's budget includes $777 million to support victims of violence, including domestic abuse and sexual assault victims. This is an increase of $175 million over the 2010 levels enacted by Congress.

The federal government will soon roll out a national Sexual Assault Campaign for intervention and prevention, and a new initiative costing $24 million to combat teen dating violence among young people ages 16-24. Dating violence rates are very high: One in five young women in their first year of college will be a victim of it.

"After these incidents occur, the lives of these students often spiral downhill," Rosenthal said. The Today Show aired a particularly moving segment that supports this fact with a profile of Liz Seccuro, who was raped during her freshman year at the University of Virginia and wrote of her experiences in her book Crash Into Me.

Although this initiative will most likely be aimed at college students, I wish it would start as early as eighth grade, when many kids in our sexually precocious society start dating. Young people need to know that love and any form of violence are antithetical to each other, and this message needs to be conveyed repeatedly in schools, homes, and religious institutions. Investment in dating violence prevention programs with school age populations would surely result in savings in future presidential budget allocations for victims of adult domestic violence.

Yet I'm dubious that the president's new initiatives to reduce domestic violence and teen dating violence will remain intact once the "deficit hawks" in Congress take a closer look. They will complain that the initiatives will only enhance spending and the deficit – forgetting that survivors are more than numbers.

If this is indeed the case, then these legislators suffer from the same Valentine Day's haze that temporarily ensnared me. Instead of smelling the roses so ubiquitously advertised in the lead-up to Valentine's Day, Congress members need to get real. They need to face up to the fact that there are darker truths about love in America and take positive actions to lessen them before Valentine's Day rolls around again.

Susie Wilson, former executive coordinator of the Network for Family Life Education at Rutgers University's Center for Applied and Professional Psychology (now renamed Answer), is a national leader in the fight for effective sexuality and HIV/AIDS education and for prevention of adolescent pregnancy. She can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

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