In The News

Another sad statistic of abuse
By Dianne Williamson
May 22, 2007
Worcester Telegram & Gazette

Cheri Robinson is still missing. But any day now, she will likely turn up as another sad statistic in the annals of domestic violence, a reminder that the boogeyman isn’t typically lurking in the parking garage as often as he’s sleeping in the same bed.

Police plan to resume their search today for Ms. Robinson, the 35-year-old mother of two from Spencer, whom friends described as a woman who feared her husband but was finally determined to do something about it in the weeks before she disappeared.

The story is all too familiar, and rather sickening in its injustice. Friends and colleagues say Ms. Robinson lived for her two kids and had toiled at a factory night shift for 17 years. She paid all the household bills, including her husband’s child support payments for a child by another marriage.

Her husband, meanwhile, was mainly unemployed. She told co-workers that he had a drug habit and that she feared him. In recent weeks, Ms. Robinson had confided to colleagues that he had agreed to leave the home and give her custody of the kids.

That’s not what happened. Instead, Ms. Robinson went missing and concerned colleagues at Allegro MicroSystems called police. Last Tuesday, when police went to the couple’s apartment at 9 School St. to find her, they found Paul Robinson barricaded inside with his two children. He eventually sent them out safely, and then indicated to police that he might have harmed his wife a few days earlier. He offered information about where she might be found. Then he shot himself in the head.

So now, police are searching for what is most surely the body of Cheri Robinson, who ironically placed herself in the greatest danger at the moment she summoned the courage to change her life.

“Leaving is one of the most dangerous times for victims,” said Debra Robbin, director for education at Jane Doe Inc., a statewide coalition that fights sexual assault and domestic violence. “It’s a very high-risk time for abuse. It’s very threatening to the batterer to lose the object of his control, and many homicides occur when someone is trying to leave, or has left. And murder-suicides are all too common in domestic violence.”

Even though women are most often harmed or killed by someone they know, it’s easier to focus on stranger violence because it doesn’t pull at the societal fabric of home and family, Ms. Robbin said.

“Domestic violence creates discomfort because instead of looking at strangers, it means we have to take a closer look at the people in our lives,” she said. “That’s a very challenging thing to do. The family is sacred and private. But domestic violence takes a private family dynamic and makes it public.”

Despite a nationwide decline in the number of deaths attributed to domestic violence in the late 1990s, the number of people killed in such assaults is rising sharply in Massachusetts. In 2005, Jane Doe tracked 15 such killings. In 2006, that number jumped to 31. And so far this year, there already have been 19 such killings. The U.S. Department of Justice estimates that more than 90 percent of all domestic violence victims are female and that most abusers are male.

And these numbers are recorded even as victims of domestic violence have more escape routes than they did in the past, including restraining orders, support groups, hot lines and shelters. Divorce carries less of a stigma than it did 20 years ago. Still, desperate women continue to die.

Yesterday, Spencer Police Chief David B. Darrin said local and state police will continue their search today for Ms. Robinson. Asked if he held out any hope that she could still be alive, he said, “You always hope that. But it doesn’t appear that that’s the case.”

No, it doesn’t. And while yet another family grieves, and the friends of Cheri Robinson burn candles to symbolize their fading hope, her fate only serves to remind us that, for many women, home is the least safe place they can be.

“She clearly had reached a point where she was trying to make a different life for herself and her family, and she didn’t succeed,” Ms. Robbin said. “It’s heartbreaking.”

But not surprising. Not anymore.