There were just a few instances during my time at Northwestern when I was stunned into silence, if only for a moment.

One of those moments happened last quarter when I heard a professor jokingly tell a student to get involved in an abusive relationship so that she could later tell all of us why women stayed with violent men. He then punctuated that “joke” with this statement: “If I were the woman (in an abusive relationship) I would have nothing to do with the man.”

I’ll let that sink in.

I firmly believe that the immediate — and alarmed — responses from the faculty and other students around this professor’s joke are more representative of the NU community. However, thinking about this “joke” as an outlier that can be dismissed is also problematic. It would be easy to criticize this particular professor’s words and beliefs, but I don’t think doing so would solve anything. Instead, I think it is more pressing to discuss domestic violence as a social problem and to understand the need for perspective and context in conversations about this topic.

First, domestic violence, although previously viewed as a private, individual problem, is a social problem because it is a reality for a disturbingly large number of individuals in the United States. The United States Department of Justice released a report on domestic violence, which included data from 1993 to 2010, and recorded an overall decrease in domestic violence in America. What is telling about this data, however, is not the downward trend that the data shows but rather the people that this data represents. These statistics only included nonfatal instances of “intimate partner violence,” meaning the department did not scrutinize homicide or suicide records in this report. This is significant because Jacquelyn Campbell, a prolific researcher currently at Johns Hopkins University, has published numerous studies on the heightened risk of homicide and suicide that victims of domestic violence face. Homicide and suicide are recurring themes that cannot be extricated from domestic violence. Although the official data shows a decrease in nonfatal domestic violence, it tells us nothing about the prevalence and persistence of the most violent and deadly forms of domestic violence in this country.

Using the same statistics from the Department of Justice shows that domestic violence affects people — over the age of 12 — at a rate of 3.6 per 1000. This is staggering, and not a subject fit for a jest. That is why I do not hesitate to describe domestic violence as a social problem. A social problem, at its most basic definition, is an issue that negatively affects a significant number of people in a community and warrants a response to change the circumstances of those people. Conceptualizing domestic violence as a social — and not just an individual — problem compels all of us to think about the perspectives of those whose actions and situations are difficult to understand.

In a recent interview about her career and work with abused women, Campbell summarized one of the most common reasons women “choose” to stay in abusive relationships — regardless of whether that decision was conscious or not — is because there is an “absolutely normal tendency” for these women to not think about the “scary stuff” in order to take care of their children and function as a member of society. This means that in the point of view of these women — the women that Campbell interviewed and studied — their actions made the most “sense” to them given their circumstances. It also means that as a society, we need to put less emphasis on scrutinizing the victims who stay with their abusive partners and direct more energy toward understanding how structures in communities can support these victims.

This is not to minimize the importance of scholarly work and research done on studying victims of domestic violence. However, we as a community have a responsibility to recognize the stories embedded in the statistics and research without getting absorbed into moralistic questioning of the victims.

In the end, the casual observation that “people choose to stay in abusive relationships” is unhelpful and moralizing, and is more illuminating of those who make these statements.

Naomi Johnson is a Weinberg sophomore. She can be reached at [email protected]. If you would like to respond publicly to this column, send a Letter to the Editor to [email protected].