By Kevin Rector
Baltimore Sun
BALTIMORE - When Nancy Aiken talks to students in Baltimore’s Orthodox Jewish community about domestic violence and sexual assaults, she asks the boys a simple question: How many of you want to grow up to be a perpetrator of violence?
Aiken knows the students mean it when they say, “No, not me.” But she also knows, statistically, that some will, indeed, become wife beaters or sexual predators.
“There is only so much we can do to train our young women how not to be victims,” said Aiken, executive director of the Counseling, Helpline and Aid Network for Abused Women, or CHANA. “We have to train our young men not to be perpetrators.”
Aiken’s organization, in partnership with Jewish Women International, is getting a major boost with a $350,000 Justice Department grant to recruit men and boys in the Orthodox community as allies in the fight against abuse.
Community leaders say the effort is necessary.
“I don’t know any authority in the Orthodox world today - mainstream authority - who does not already agree that this has to be addressed, it has to be addressed swiftly, it has to be addressed concisely,” said Larry Ziffer, executive vice president of the Center for Jewish Education in Baltimore, who plans to work closely with CHANA in the community.
“To me it’s a huge problem if there is one woman who is abused or one child who is abused, and there were things the community could do and they didn’t do it in the past,” Ziffer said. “If there is anything we can do in terms of prevention, to keep people safe, we have a moral and a legal and theological obligation to do it.”
The three-year grant from the Justice Department’s Office on Violence Against Women, announced last month, is aimed at men and boys of minority groups - such as the Orthodox and immigrant Jewish communities of the Park Heights neighborhood - that don’t regularly tap into secular counseling services or authorities.
The Orthodox community has its own courts for handling abuse allegations. Aiken said the large immigrant Jewish populations in Baltimore - Farsi-speaking Iranian exiles and refugees of the former Soviet Union - are often distrustful of police.
Such communities often “look for Jewish remedies to their concerns, and not elsewhere,” Aiken said. She said that approach leaves out valuable public health and legal perspectives, puts critical decisions in the hands of religious leaders who have, at times, swept problems under the rug and can lead to community silence and a tendency to blame the victim.
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