The near economic collapse of 2008-09 has stressed our financial systems, the housing and jobs markets, and our patience with the corporate/political status quo that led us so quickly to this state of affairs. Yet, the stress point that has the potential to do severe and lasting damage to our social fabric is buried deep in our families. Too often, the cultural stresses and strains of high unemployment, lowered expectations, and diminishing personal resources gets played out at home in the form of domestic violence. Because of its private and ugly nature, the problem is often hidden from view under layers of shame.

After three months of study, a bipartisan task force convened by Connecticut’s House Speaker Christopher Donovan (D-Meriden) issued a report this week on this serious and growing problem. Each year, at least 50,000 people in Connecticut are victims of domestic violence, including far too many children. The task force report came with a list of recommendations. Some of them were relatively inexpensive policy changes, like allowing information in the state’s protective order registry to be shared with judges. Some of them are critically important but expensive, like keeping domestic violence shelters open around the clock. Cost: $3 million. (Just two of the state’s 16 shelters are open 24 hours a day; five more will be adding round-the-clock service in April thanks to federal stimulus funds.)

We typically think of domestic abuse as a man abusing a partner or wife. But abusive families corrode the lives of every member of the household. And such families are incubators of abuse, spreading its debilitating influence out onto the streets and into the schools.

The Speaker’s Task Force reported that nearly one in five Connecticut teens will experience dating violence before they graduate from high school. A state Department of Health survey showed that 18.6 percent of Connecticut high school seniors report being hit, slapped, or physically injured by a partner in the past 12 months. Teenage abusers have grown adept at using the Internet, cellphones, and even GPS systems to stalk and bully their victims. Nationally, 30 percent of teens say they have received text messages 10, 20, or 30 times an hour by a partner.

Adding any money to curb domestic violence to a state budget that is $500 million in the hole is a long shot. As Governor M. Jodi Rell told legislator’s in her budget message last week, “We have a state government that has outgrown the ability of our citizens to pay for it. We need to recognize that not every service, not every program, not every function is absolutely essential.”

What is essential, whether state legislators have the political will to pay for it or not, is that we not abandon isolated and powerless victims caught in the deadly downward spiral of daily domestic violence and abuse. The governor is right: in the current economic climate, it is unreasonable to expect the state to shoulder every social responsibility. Yet our collective responsibility to protect families, the core of any civilization, needs to be a priority not only for our elected representative government, but for each of us. In our schools, in our spiritual communities, in our neighborhoods, and in our own homes, we each must take up the cause of safety and protection for those who routinely suffer jury and abuse in their own homes and in their closest relationships.