Members of the City of Auburn’s Domestic Violence Task Force welcomed police, City leaders and others to City Hall Plaza on Monday night to light candles and blast out one clear message: domestic violence has no place in Auburn.

Unfortunately, as Auburn Police Chief Bob Lee told the crowd, his officers respond to about 5½ domestic violence calls per day, volatile situations that offer the men and women in blue no clue as to what ugliness may be waiting for them on the other side of the door.

Ugliness that all too often beggars all description.

Shelly David, domestic violence legal advocate for the City of Auburn’s Prosecutors Office, noted that offenders use this pattern of physical assaults, threats and force to control a present or former intimate, employing verbal, emotional, sexual, physical, psychological and economic abuse.

Affecting more than 30 percent of American women, domestic violence too often results in death, serious injury, emotional damage, medical trauma and poverty.

All of which is why Mayor Nancy Backus has proclaimed October Domestic Violence Awareness Month in the City of Auburn.