Business leaders focus on domestic violence

Don Newton recently attended a 25th reunion of employees who worked at a plant where the workforce was especially closeknit.

Bill Moss

Don Newton speaks at luncheon.

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Audience listens to speaker.

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“Even though it went through a hostile takeover and was shut down those people still get together for a reunion,” he said.

One of the workers was a young woman at the time Newton worked in personnel. He walked up when she was telling the former company president that Newton “is the reason why she’s alive today.”

Then he remembered. A newlywed in her mid 20s back then, the woman was pregnant and suffering at home from an abusive situation. She came to him with the story of her trouble and fears. At shift end every afternoon at 3 o’clock, he accompanied her from the plant to the parking lot.

 “Walking her to her car was three minutes a day,” he said, “but she lived in a hell for 12 hours a day, not knowing if she was going to get back to work.”

At the reunion, she showed him a photo of the daughter she was carrying then, a beautiful 25-year-old two and half decades later.

Newton, human resources manager of Domtar Paper Mill in Bennettsville, was guest speaker for Domestic Violence: It’s Your Business, an annual lunch for that focuses on the need for business leaders to be aware of domestic violence.

Guests were welcomed by Coalition president Sam Carver, operations director for A.O. Smith Water Products Co., which was also the lunch sponsor. The lunch at Pageland First Baptist Church was catered by Mickey’s Restaurant.

Newton has been active with the Pee Dee Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Assault.

“Four years ago, you hardly heard anything about domestic abuse,” he said. “It’s not that it wasn’t happening. Some things you just don’t talk about.”

Now domestic violence is talked about more openly.

People in personnel management of large companies know that domestic violence has consequences in the work place. Newton said he recently came to learn that one his plant’s best employees, seemingly well adjusted and happy, faced a situation at home that was tearing him apart. If that worker carried such a burden, he realized, anyone in the plant could.

“Individuals — you and I — must get involved to deal with that because if we don’t, they’re going to be a statistic,” he said. “Pee Dee Coalition offers an opportunity for these folks to find a way through the problem and out of the problem. My challenge to you is find a way to get involved.”

Even if it’s protecting an abuse victim by walking her to her car.