As the national YWCA Week without Violence begins, local officials said domestic violence is a problem everywhere, including Ames.

Twenty-three domestic violence arrests have been made in Ames through August of this year. The ACCESS assault care center receives six crisis calls each day from people in abusive situations. Ames Police said domestic violence happens in poor and rich neighborhoods in all parts of town.

Still, Ames has less of a domestic violence problem compared with other Iowa cities with similar populations, said Detective David Schultz of the Ames Police.

“Ames has four domestic violence arrests each month,” he said. “We have an officer [that came] from Muscatine and one from Clinton. Both populations are smaller than Ames and they were averaging 15 to 20 domestic violence arrests a month.”

The presence of a university in a town brings its own types of abuse, such as abuse between boyfriends and girlfriends, people in a live-in relationship or young married couples, Schultz said. Some ISU students from foreign countries who bring spouses with them may even use their temporary citizenship to intimidate their partner.

“Sometimes the husband will come over for a graduate degree and his wife is allowed into the country with him because they’re married and she’s only here because he’s a student,” Schultz said. “If he is abusing her and she brings up leaving or calling the police, sometimes what happens is that the batterer will say, ‘If you call the police, I’m going to divorce you and they’re going to send you back home.'”

Overall, women are the victims in domestic abuse situations 95 percent of the time. However, in Iowa, women are victims 83 percent of the time and men are victims 17 percent of the time.

Schultz said few statistics accurately predict the extent of the problem.

“Depending on which book or whose study you’re reading, the numbers say that anywhere from 40 to 50 percent of the time [domestic violence] cases go unreported — it could be up to double what we know,” he said. “It’s estimated that once every 12 seconds there’s a woman beaten because of domestic violence but that’s only based on statistics that are reported.”

Powerful reasons are behind a person’s decision whether to report domestic violence. Schultz said most victims view the abuse as a private issue.

“It’s happening within someone’s house and it always involves close family members,” he said. “Most people don’t like to bring their inner family problems out into the open.”

According to ACCESS statistics, it takes a victim of domestic violence an average of seven attempts at leaving before leaving for good. Schultz said this cycle is more logical than it may seem — victims don’t want to lose important parts of their lives, like their children.

“Cops always wonder about why a victim recants or goes back on their statement or in some cases blatantly lies afterwards,” Schultz said. “It’s an incredible balancing act that these victims go through.

“Every time this abuse takes place, these people think, ‘How much will I take to keep what I have?'” “The most important thing in a lot of cases is the children. They’ll take [the abuse] all the way up to a point where they risk being killed because they don’t want to give up their children.”

In those situations, children often aren’t any safer than the parent in danger. In half of all domestic violence situations the children are also abused by the batterer, Schultz said.

Children are often hurt simply because they’re close by during an abusive incident, said Angie Schreck, youth and family program coordinator for ACCESS.

“Children are likely to witness the abuse and be there when the abuse is going on and thus get in the middle of the abuse,” Schreck said.

ACCESS’ policy is to ask children about their own victimization, she said.

“We screen for both sexual and physical abuse when kids come from a violent home,” Schreck said.

“An abuser has a sense of entitlement that makes them believe that not only do they have the right to hurt and control their partner, they have the right to hurt and control their children.”

After experiencing abuse, many victims go through an anger stage, then a honeymoon stage in which the batterer seems sorry and changed so the victim will return to the situation. Things go well for awhile, then the cycle restarts, Schultz said.

“They always believe that the batterer is changed, then they go back and the abuse happens again,” he said.