Domestic Violence Can Reach Beyond The Home Front

NEW YORK. - When the file of an abused Greek woman reached Pamela Paziotopoulos' desk at the Cook County State Attorney's office in Illinois a few years ago, the lawyer didn't know this would be a case she would talk about to this day.

During her 11-year service as a prosecutor at Cook County, Paziotopoulos, who is a domestic violence expert, supervised over 100,000 cases per year. This case, however, was unlike any other.

The victim was an 83-year-old Greek woman, who decided to file a suit against her 90-year-old husband after he had beaten and thrown her in the street in the middle of the night. "Even at 90 he was a pretty big guy and she was very small," Paziotopoulos told The National Herald recently. Despite the strong evidence to support her case, however, on the day of the trial, the victim was late. "We were waiting for her and the husband kept telling me she wouldn't show up." At the last minute the woman rushed in. "She said she was late because she had to make her husband breakfast. He took the Cadillac to come to court but she had to take two buses and a train," Paziotopoulos recalled. Not long after the verdict was announced, issuing an order of protection for the 90-year-old abuser, his wife headed back out of the court- room in a hurry. This time she had to be home in time to serve her husband's lunch.

Paziotopoulos tried to shake her back to reality. "Do you know what just happened here?” I asked her. She grabbed my hand and said, “we got married in a village in Greece when I was 15 years old and he's been beating me ever since. I just wanted somebody to believe me and that's what I got today.”

Luckily, however, the lawyer heard back from the woman six months later. "She got a divorce, an apartment and decided that for whatever years she had left, she wanted for the first time in her life to find some peace,” Paziotopoulos recalled.

Paziotopoulos has been trying to help thousands of women find peace, practicing, what she called, an extremely complicated field of law. Recently, the Chicago-born lawyer decided to take her practice to a more challenging and relatively unexplored level by heading a private, self-titled firm that specializes in workplace-related domestic violence issues.

Paziotopoulos, a second generation Greek American, brings years of expertise in the Paziotopoulos Group, Ltd., a consulting company that educates and trains companies in dealing with a problem that reportedly costs corporate America more than $5 billion a year in productivity. Paziotopoulos retired from her Cook County office to head the firm, which, as she explained, trains companies in handling specific cases as well as in writing specific workplace policies.

"When the victim moves out, her spouse may not know where she lives anymore but he knows were she works," Paziotopoulos explained. "[He] may start a stalking behavior such as calling her or showing up at work and generally harassing her. We try to get employers involved, to get them to recognize that they should not only help the particular employee but make their entire workplaces safe."

Paziotopoulos said that corporations are often reluctant in dealing with what they consider a private problem. "If you come into work smelling of alcohol, the company will naturally get you into a program. But if you come in with a black eye or unusual bruises, people tend to look the other way. They don't want to deal with it because they think it's something that's happening at home. But it's really the same as if someone was an alcohol or drug abuser. Neither can be productive at work.”

Paziotopoulos said she believes a company's liability to be largely dependent on the level of protection it can secure for its employees. "When you manage people you manage their problems. A victim needs to feel comfortable coming forward, going to her supervisor," she said, adding that an order of protection against an abuser, often lists the corporation under the name of the victim. She said that companies will often lock their premises or provide the