Joanna Kerns as battered mom she faces losing custody of her children in Shameful Secrets
People Magazine
She had her share of comedy on "Growing Pains", and in the awake of that long running show, Joanna Kerns has had her share of drama. Humor generally has been absent from the actress' recent TV movies. "Not In My Family" concerned incest, "The Man With Three Wives" involved bigamy and "The Nightman" (which she also produced) cast her in flashbacks as a women who already had been murdered when the story started.
Kerns' string of serious projects continues with Sunday's "Shameful Secrets". the story of a battered wife who emerges from a hospital to find herself challenged for custody of two children by her abusive husband (Tim Matheson).
He intends to claim that she abandoned him and the youngsters, and through a social worker (La Tanya Richardson)helps her prepare a defense, she's stunned to learn that the Americans legal system considers testimony regarding spousal abuse to be inadmissible.
Fearing for their safty of her offspring while they're violence-prone father, she then recruits a lawyer (Theresa Saldana of "The Commish) in a fight to have that ruling changed and her parental rights restored.
Schedual in conjunction with National Domestic Violence Awareness Month, the telecast also coincides with effort by Rep. Constane Morella, R-Md., to secure government funding for re-establishment of a national hotline providing counsel and information to vitcims of such abuse.
"At least, it's not just a women-in-jeopardy movie," Kerns says of Sunday's project.
"This is a very strong peice. 'The Burning Red' was really about the cycle of abuse and how that women kept going back to it-and how she ultimatly left it but this is different.
"This women is locked out of her house by a husband who decides he's going to punish her, by treating her like a bad dog, basically because he thinks she spoke up in the hospital about the abuse she's suffered, She didn't, but he's afraid that she's about to open her mouth.
"This is more about cycle of violence within a family.....husband to wife, husband to children, and children to children. It's also about the craziness a women faces in trying to get custody of her children from an abusive spouse in today's court system."
A resoultion authorized by Morella, implording judges to consider evidence of such abusive in making determinations, was passed unanimously by Congress and is now in place in 37 states.
Both Kerns and Matheson have offered to appear with Morella as she lobbies for the--aforementioned hotlined this month in Washington D.C.
"For some, whenever a actor or a well know celebrity shows up at those hearings, it helps lawmakers hear a little bit better," Kerns reason.
"There's '800' number for people to call at the end of this picture, because there is no Dometic Violence Hotline right now. There's nowhere for these women to go, and usually, there're finacially handicaped; the husband exert such controll over them, they can't get out, and there's no one to call.
"If the police are called, the women sometimes gets a worse beating afterward for having called them. If the man is recognized in any way publicly for having done this, he takes it out on her and the children, and then she's afraid to report it again.
"Staistics show that 6 million women a year are beaten by their mates, and 6,000 women a year, are killed as a result of this abuse. Also 63% of the husbands who abuse their wives also abuse their children, so it's a big deal."
Acknowledging the numbers of "issue" or true-crime movies she's done--with others, such as "The Preppie Murders" and "The Rape Of Richard Beck" made while she was playing perennially sunny mom Maggie Seaver on "Growing Pains"--Kerns maintains that the genre is "one of the things that television does best, when it's handel properly.
There's been all this about violence for violence's sake on television lately, but in the case of 'Shameful Secrets',the violence is both physical and psychological.
"It's been all this about violence that is taken place in our homes, with families we don't even realize it's going on with, and television is doing a good job when it teaches us about such things."
