Sheerine Alemzadeh (’11), Co-Founder and Co-Director of Healing to Action, contributed an op-ed to the Chicago Tribune discussing how experiences of domestic violence are minimized when framed as private disputes rather than community safety issues, calling for a broader community safety response including funding for education and support programs (“Domestic Violence Is a Community Safety Issue, So Let’s Treat It That Way,” Mar. 22). “When domestic violence leads to lethal harm, the victim becomes the one who ‘slipped through the cracks,’ cast as an anomaly in a system that is portrayed as generally functioning fine. . . . This framing continues to isolate survivors, to cast the harm they suffer in an individualized light instead of as a systemic problem that requires the entire community, the entire city, to come together to solve. . . [I]t’s time to invest in survivors — including survivor-led, peer-based models of support — to ensure the safety of our communities.”
