Ready to reduce the 3%

When the purple band snapped, I knew it was my last one. Since then a couple of weeks have gone by and I felt as if my call-to-action powers have dimmed.

Of course I know that a bracelet with the words "Hope, Faith, Courage, and Strength" don't really generate superpowers of any kind beyond awareness.

And it won't protect my girls from harm's way.

However, I read recently about a new book by Steven Pinker called The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.

In tribal societies, hunter-gatherers and hunter-horticulturalists, an average of about 15 percent of people met their ends through violence. In the 20th century, if you try to come up with the highest estimate you can, combining all the wars, all the genocides, all the man-made famines, you get to about 3 percent.

Three percent. That's an amazing decline when you consider the dramatic population growth in the past 100 years.

But in that 3% there is still violence where 3 out of 4 murdered know their murderer and 60% of those raped know their rapists.

As a father of two girls, these stats haunt me. Intimate partner violence is alive and well and it's up to us to generate awareness and prevention programs at work and at home, because domestic violence doesn't discriminate. We do, but it doesn't.

I'll continue to do my part. And now that it's Domestic Violence Awareness Month and I've ordered a new batch of purple superhero bracelets, I'm ready to reduce the 3%.