On a bright, chilly Saturday earlier this month, a large contingent of Islanders turned out to participate in a walk to promote awareness about sexual assault and domestic violence. Carrying signs, people of all ages marched along the Oak Bluffs harbor and into Ocean Park in this third annual event hosted by Connect to End Violence, a program of Martha’s Vineyard Community Services. Connect seeks to curb the incidence of sexual assault and domestic violence and help its victims through advocacy, education and free, confidential counseling.

More than thirty years after Dr. Milton Mazer, the Vineyard’s first psychiatrist and a founder of Community Services, chronicled the problems of isolation, alcoholism and domestic violence in his book People and Predicaments, it’s heartening to see a problem that has long lived in our midst, for the most part silently, come out in the open.

Sadly, a provision in a state law that took effect last August is taking the commonwealth in a strikingly different direction. Public access to information about domestic violence in Massachusetts is now more restricted than ever.

Intended to protect victims of domestic abuse, the new law has many positive provisions, including a mandatory six-hour “cooling off” period following an arrest that allows a victim to take safety precautions before the possibility of bail for the defendant, and another one that grants victims unpaid leave from their jobs.

But it also includes a troubling provision that allows police reports to be viewed once a case makes its way into the courts, but not before. And there are many cases that never reach the courts.

This provision in the law stands out as the only one of its kind in the country.

Robert Ambrogi, an attorney and head of the Massachusetts Newspaper Publishers Association, of which the Gazette is a member, recently conducted an in-depth study of the laws in 49 states pertaining to public access to police logs in cases of domestic violence. The study found that outside of Massachusetts only two states restrict access to police logs and reports in domestic violence cases: Florida and North Dakota. And even those two states only block access to addresses and telephone numbers, not to the identities of victims and perpetrators.

“It appears that Massachusetts is alone among all states in barring access to names of domestic abuse victims and perpetrators in police logs and records,” Mr. Ambrogi wrote in his study, performed at the request of Rep. Josh Cutler, a Democrat from Duxbury who is working on legislation to revise the law.

Like many other newspapers, the Gazette has long had a policy of not reporting the names of victims or of information that may lead to their identity in cases of domestic violence and sexual assault. That policy continues.

But the provision that closes police logs to public scrutiny has the unfortunate collateral effect of protecting perpetrators and keeping the long-hidden epidemic of domestic abuse out of sight.

Far from showing Massachusetts to be the progressive state we imagine it to be, it marks a troubling step back toward the dark ages. It should be repealed.