New Jersey Coalition for Battered Women executive director: Roger Goodell shouldn't lose job

From the outcry on social media, it seems everyone wants NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell out of his job. Even the National Organization for Women has called for his ouster.

Jane Shivas is not one of those people. And her voice has extra weight, because she's the executive director for the New Jersey Coalition for Battered Women. Her organization is located roughly 70 miles from the Atlantic City hotel where Ray Rice punched Janay Palmer in a casino elevator.

"There are calls for Goodell's resignation," Shivas said Wednesday. "We don't support that."

The reason is fairly simple: Goodell has become more aware of domestic violence issues, and Shivas doesn't want to undo the progress the league has made recently.

"Since this incident and he learned about it, he began to reach out and he was willing to learn," Shivas said. "He listened and he learned about dealing with family violence. He changed policies."

The obsession with what Goodell knew and when he knew it threatens to detract from the goal of increasing cultural knowledge of domestic violence. Time spent scrutinizing Goodell isn't time spent learning about an issue that has plagued society for many generations.

"We need to focus on the positive changes they're trying to make in the NFL culture," Shivas said. "Let's look forward and see the good things we're doing now. That's what healthy relationships are all about: being able to work together. So if we can do this on a societal level, that's a good example to individual families."

Families are affected more than most realize. In 2012, the Trenton-based Coalition sheltered more children (1,753) than women (1,530). There were more than 90,000 calls to the Coalition's hotline. There were 2,229 people who were turned away from the shelter that year because of insufficient space. Of those, 1,206 were children. That's the real challenge: finding ways to help victims who have no place to go. In Charlotte, where Carolina Panthers defensive lineman Greg Hardy was arrested for domestic violence in May, the Safe Alliance shelter only had 29 beds for the entire county up until last year. The agency had to resort to finding hotel rooms for those in need. Even now, with an 80-bed shelter, there is often more than one family member to a bed.

That's a far more pressing problem than Goodell's job status.

Shivas does have frustrations with an obstacle victims face every day: the legal system. While she supports the pretrial intervention program (PTI) that enabled Rice to avoid jail time, she's "disappointed" it was used in this case. She's also disappointed Rice's record of abuse can be expunged, depending on his progress in the program.

Awareness of both state and federal laws can help change them, however, and that's one potentially positive outcome of the Rice fiasco. New Jersey lawmakers have come out in favor of reviewing and altering how PTI is used. State Senate president Steve Sweeney has called for an attorney general's review of how the Rice case was handled.

"If this is the system our prosecutors and judges are forced to live with," Sweeney told the Press of Atlantic City newspaper, "we need to change it."

More generally, Google searches for "domestic violence" have spiked to the highest level in nearly a decade – higher than when singer Chris Brown pleaded guilty to felony assault of then-girlfriend Rihanna in 2009.

It could be argued the NFL had its warning on domestic violence two years ago, when then-Kansas City Chiefs linebacker Jovan Belcher murdered his girlfriend, Kasandra Perkins, before taking his own life later that morning at the team facility. It could also be argued that domestic violence has been an issue for the NFL for far longer than that, considering former Panthers wide receiver Rae Carruth was sent to prison for his role in the murder of his pregnant girlfriend, Cherica Adams.

For Shivas, though, who understands how slow justice and growth can occur, the most important factor in the debate over Goodell is the NFL's movement over the summer and into this season.

"There's a distinction between the criminal justice system and how we respond to situations on moral ground," she said. "Regardless of what happened back then, they recognized they erred and they corrected that."