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I grew up in Washington, D.C. in the '50s and '60s, with a mother who was a Ph.D. university professor and a father who was an official in the federal government.

But our family had a dirty little secret: My father regularly, and very violently, beat up my mother. Sometimes every day for a week, sometimes just once a week, sometimes only once a month. Never predictably, but always terrifying. He would change from a loving and playful father to an enraged, frightening, and terribly powerful man. I would lie in bed at night wondering if I should try to intervene, worrying that the gun would go off. I would wake up in the morning, not knowing for sure if I would find my mother alive. Wondering if he would turn on us kids.

Anything could set him off. Perhaps she didn't answer him quickly enough, or she had forgotten to buy toilet paper, or she had interrupted him while he was telling a story, or she didn't remember to bring ketchup to the dinner table. I remember him turning her purse upside down, scattering its contents in a rage, because it wasn't neat enough. At some point in the fights, he would say, "If you say one more word, I'll hit you." And then my mother, by now pretty upset, would say something, and then he would throw her down, kick her, slap her, punch her, pull her hair.

As a child always listening to the fights in the stairway leading to their bedroom, I would try to figure out who was right and who was wrong. I never could. He always seemed so right, so logical. Why did she say that one last thing? And, yes, she had forgotten to buy toilet paper. I couldn't understand that the excessiveness of his reaction was what was wrong.

Of course, we told no one. There was just an overriding sense of shame, and of needing to keep it secret. The morning after, I pasted a smile on my face and set out for school, exhausted after sobbing all night, so ashamed at what had happened that I didn't want anyone to know. I felt torn apart all day, many days.

My mother would go to the university with black eye, and tell her colleagues, "I ran into a door." None of her friends or coworkers asked any questions - they didn't want to know. Needless to say, my father didn't tell anyone either.

The toll this violent secret took on me was enormous: when I was 17, I had a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized for a year, nearly destroyed by what had gone on in my family.

It's possible that a shelter might have been an option for my mother.

But undeniably the most significant factor keeping my mother bound to my father, enabling my father to continue his abuse, and driving me to the brink of self destruction, was society's attitudes: They went (and in large part continue to go) something like this: whatever goes on in your home is not our concern, it's your problem to deal with, a woman's responsibility is to stand by her man, a crazy father is better than no father at all (my mother actually said that to me), he's sick and can't help it, if he had broken a leg you wouldn't tell me to leave him (she said this too), and anyway there's nothing to be done...

Add to this the fact that this problem was never uttered, and that those people who knew our family, and had some idea of my father's unpredictable anger and dangerousness, never reached out for help. We were, all of us, so terribly isolated.

What a difference it would have made if those attitudes were changed, if this private, secret problem was, instead, understood to be a public one, if everyone knew that battering is never acceptable under any circumstances, and if people were working in their communities to do something about it.

A brief update: Fifteen years after I left home, I founded La Casa de las Madres in San Francisco, one of the first battered women's shelters in the country. It felt so good to me to be able to help women and children who were being terrorized. Even though this was back when the entire concept of domestic violence was unheard of, our shelter was full and with a waiting list the day we opened. It still is.

From Family Violence Prevention Fund