Often when victims are beaten, they are hesitant to tell others. Especially men. If you know someone who has bruising, their partner is controlling, or they seem afraid a lot, find the phone number of your shelter and give it to them privately on a piece of paper. You just may save a life.
Namaste
Barbara
Real Men Don’t hit Women Photograph and copyright by Barbara Mattio 2015
Yesterday was such a beautiful day. It was like summer here in the mountains. Of course, it is frequently like that. The sky was Carolina blue with big white cumulus clouds overhead.
So Amy and I started a journey on the Blue Ridge Parkway. I decided to take photographs, no surprise, I am sure. So what follows is a pictorial record of our journey and the colors that are beginning to come to the tops of mountains. I hope you enjoy our trip. I wish you all a fabulous week.
Namaste
Barbara
The French Broad River before we got on the Parkway. Photograph and copyright by Barbara Mattio 2015
The Blue Ridge Parkway
Photograph and copyright by Barbara Mattio 2015
The road is cut out of rock in some places. Photograph and copyright by Barbara Mattio 2015
The colors are just beginning to show and there are so many shades of green. Photograph and copyright by Barbara Mattio 2015
The clouds. Photograph and copyright by Barbara Mattio 2015
There are always more mountains no matter what direction you look. Photograph and copyright by Barbara Mattio 2015
There are many tunnels going through the mountains. Photograph and copyright by Barbara Mattio 2015
Red my favorite color. Photograph and copyright by Barbara Mattio 2015
Sometimes no words are necessary. Photograph and copyright by Barbara Mattio 2015
Bad Fork Overlook. Photograph and copyright by Amy Halperin 2015
Coming out of a tunnel. Photograph and copyright by Barbara Mattio 2015
The higher elevation you are at, the more colors you see. Photograph and copyright by Barbara Mattio 2015
The joy of color. Photograph and copyright by Barbara Mattio 2015
Antique truck out for a ride. Photograph and copyright by Barbara Mattio 2015
A beautiful colorful day. Photograph and copyright by Barbara Mattio 2015
I love the tunnels and there are many. Photograph and copyright by Barbara Mattio 2015
The River. Photograph and copyright by Barbara Mattio 2015
Farmwife
The woman who has nodded to me from her porch
for weeks, still nodes now, bobs her head
leading me inside to see
21 grandchildren posed on a shelf,
sills full of colored glass.
Twice, I heard, she left her husband
and then returned
He stays outside with the dogs,
hollering them away from the barn.
Chickens flutter and squall,
leaving patches of brown feathers.
She says she’s been nodding 26 years.
The doctor calls it ‘the trembles’
but she knows something sharper
is pecking her brain.
Twice his fists have hit,
knocked her against the wall.
Twice she’s returned
to faces of grandchildren
perfectly still in the tilt
of their frames, glass
shining on every sill,
to hens squawking themselves into trees
whenever a dog comes near.
She sweeps up the puddles
of brown and white feathers
that fear send flying,
pours them into ticking
to cushion her relentless,
affirming head.
–Betsy Sholl
Arden, North Carolina. Photograph and copyright by Barbara Mattio 2015
It’s hard when sheltered little girls start to grow up and get interested in boys, and boys return the interest. You only want to really talk about positive things with your daughter, because she’s your little girl and you cannot imagine adult types of things happening to her.
Then it’s time for the first date, and she’s excited and going on and on about how good looking he is, and how sweet he was when he asked her out, and you’re thinking “Good. Because that’s what my daughter deserves.” Not that you’ve told her that. She should know that.
She goes out on the date and he’s a perfect gentleman, and everything is storybook. She’s so happy she’s giggling as she goes about the house, talking on her cell phone to her girlfriends.
After about a month of dating, he asks her to go with him to a dance. She’s very excited and “I can have a new dress, right? Can I have a new dress? Can we go shopping, Mom, please?” And of course, the answer is Yes.
You go shopping with her, and you find the perfect dress: it covers in all the right places; it’s something your own mother would have approved of for you, and she looks beautiful in it. So, you figure, that everything is fine.
The night of the dance, he picks her up wearing a tux, has a corsage for her and promises you and your husband that he will have her home promptly at midnight.
You’re confident in him, because he’s never broken a curfew in the month that they’ve been dating.
He returns her home at 12:05, but that’s hardly worth mentioning. She comes in and she’s happy, she says she’s happy and says she’s tired and wants to go to bed. You wish her a good night’s sleep and off she goes.
In the morning, when she awakens, she calls her girlfriends, and tells them that he pushed her last night. He got upset because, while he was getting punch for her, a boy from her Chemistry class came over and was talking to her about the last lab they’d had, and how crazy their teacher is. She was laughing with the boy, because she agreed. Her boyfriend, as he was walking back to her with the punch in hand, saw her laughing and talking with this other boy. The lab partner excused himself and walked away when her boyfriend returned.
Her boyfriend asked: “Who was that? What did he want?”
She replied: “Oh, nothing we were just talking about Chemistry.”
He accused: “You were laughing. Looked like you were having a good time.”
She told him it was no big deal, and then his face darkened and he pushed her.
She didn’t fall to the floor or anything, but she felt scared. He had never been anything but gentle with her, until last night.
Another phone call comes in to her cell phone; it’s her boyfriend, she has to talk to him.
He’s sorry. He shouldn’t have pushed her. He wants to make it up to her by taking her to the movies tonight.
She says, yes, and gets ready.
You notice that she’s all bubbly and happy again, and wonder what the dark cloud had been that you’d noticed earlier, while your daughter was on the phone to her friends. Maybe it was just those teenage hormones.
You don’t ask.
She goes to the movies and they have a wonderful time.
About a week goes by, and she’s walking down the hall in school, with a bunch of her classmates — boys and girls. One of the boys is her Chemistry lab partner. Her boyfriend is looking for her, and he sees her having fun with all of these people, and with that one boy from the dance, laughing and talking with her.
He can’t see anything else but the just the two of them. Laughing. Together. Very together.
He walks up and grabs her and drags her away from everyone else. He’s holding her arm so tightly, as he pulls her to her locker to talk, that he leaves bruises.
“You’re hurting me! Stop!”
He begins to rant. He accuses her of cheating on him with her lab partner.
She’s confused; her lab partner is just a friend, she doesn’t know why he’s upset. And he’s hurting her. She tries to pull away.
His hand reaches back and slaps her face, and calls her a whore.
Nothing like this has ever happened to her before. She doesn’t know what to think or what to do.
She tells him to leave her alone, and she stalks off to class with her arm hurting and her face red, still feeling the handprint.
During class, she’s distracted, thinking about what happened. How could this have happened to her? Why would he do this? He’s always been so gentle, so charming.
And she thinks, she must have done something wrong. He said she had, she shouldn’t have been talking to those kids, that boy. She didn’t mean to be doing anything wrong. But that’s what upset him, so she must have been doing something wrong. Right?
Over the next few weeks, she pulls away from her friends, gradually and steadily. Her grades go down a little bit, but not enough for her teachers to worry, to call her parents.
You don’t know.
Then, it’s spring. She comes down for breakfast with a turtleneck on. It’s a beautiful, warm spring day. You ask her why the turtleneck? It’s a beautiful morning!
“I’m cold,” you’re told, tersely.
She’s running late, she doesn’t want to talk, and she hurries out the door before you can ask anything more.
She’s running from herself, but you don’t know that. She’s running from a situation that she just can’t understand. She’s afraid, and you can almost see that, but you can’t understand why.
What you don’t know is, the night before, on their last date, her loving boyfriend tried to choke her. The turtleneck is covering the bruises on her neck. She knows you would never allow her go see him again if you knew.
But he loves her. He told her he did; well, after he choked her.
And she loves him. Well, usually.
She wants to ask one of her old girlfriends if this had ever happened to them. But it was embarrassing. What if it hadn’t happened to them? What if they thought it was her fault, if they knew she did something wrong?
She can’t talk to you. You’ve never talked about anything like this. You’d never understand.
She decides to just keep the information to herself.
Six more months go by. He asks her to go steady. She eagerly says yes, but there’s a little voice inside that’s saying, “Run. Run.”
He tells her that now, she will be His. And no one can every interfere with them. He’ll take care of her, she won’t need anyone else, because she has him.
Several more months pass. They have a horrific argument and your little girl comes home.
Her face looks like pulp. He punched her this time, and she cannot hide this from you.
He had the right to do it, he said, because she belongs to him. They were going steady, after all.
You see her. “What happened?” you ask, and for the first time in months, she tells the truth.
But she still thinks it’s her fault. He always says she’s stupid and ungrateful and a burden to him, and she’s lucky he loves her at all.
But he does love her. He says. Between the punches.
“Do you love him, this boy?” you ask.
“I..I think so,” she says, and she starts to cry. “I don’t know,” she admits and you hold her.
“Mom, I’m scared.”
And your heart breaks.
This young girl has found herself in a spot many young girls find themselves in. They think that abuse is only broken bones or going to the hospital. That’s never happened to her. He only pushes. Only shoves. Only yells. He’s only REALLY hit her once.
What these girls don’t understand is that a slap, a push, a shove, twisting her arm, punching her face; belittling and calling her names; separating her from her friends — isolating, it’s called — it’s all abuse, battering.
They don’t understand that they are in danger, and this one person is the person they should be terrified of, and should get away from.
Hopefully, after talking to a counselor with or without her parents, and dating some other young men who treat her with the respect to which all young women are entitled, she will learn that she did not deserve the violence her now ex-boyfriend introduced to her life.
Hopefully, in the future, the men that she picks will not be abusers, and she will not spend years of her life living in violence in fear.
But you could have helped, long before it started. You could have talked to your daughter, let her know with words and actions that she IS special, and worthy of love. You could have told her that no one ever has the right to push her, or shove her or call her names, and if they do, she should always come to you. That you will always be there, and you will always listen, and that you would never think…
She deserved it.
Because she never could.
Because NO ONE ever deserves to abused.
Artists4Peace
leaving the abuser
Found this on Facebook recently, a lovely reminder that Hate Cannot Win Against Love.
The WestBoro Baptist Church is an organization which regularly protests against homosexuals and other “sinners”, including our military veterans, often at funerals and at the homes of the loved ones of the beloved departed.
Their message is that “God Hates You” because you are different, in any way the WestBoro Baptist Church finds “sinful” — so, basically, all LGBT people and anyone else who doesn’t agree with them.
But this gentleman, in his video below, has found something marvelous that someone has done to combat the WestBoro Baptist Church, to remind the members of that Church every time they go to worship that their Hate is not the only force, and that Hate will never Win so long as there is Love.
Namaste,
Barbara
Eloquent Mirror
Silk-enraptured angels
hide childish fears
from all these years.
By shadow of the eloquent mirror
that little girl is a warrior,
fighting with no turning back.
I”m still standing here today
after what you put me through.
It’d be easy to loathe you
but war paint wears off
when the rain falls down,
long after you’ve gone.
Some wounds never heal….
When I cried, you tortured me more
when I fought back you whispered:
“Don’t scream…”
No one would hear if I had been
trapped in a skeletal asylum.
Suffocated ghosts in the eloquent mirror,
haunting where you once stood
reaping the innocent soul…
watching me..taunting me…
ravaging silk savagely.
Petals drift whimsically,
innocence lives on through
violet ribbons in midnight skies.
Broken, crumpled,
screaming until you were finished with me.
Lying alone I was crying.
LIttle girls shouldn’t be warriors.
She shouldn’t have had t fight
to save her innocence,
to someday look in the mirror,
and despise what she shees.
She doesn’t giggle now.
She doesn’t bat her eyes.
She feels ugly.
She looks back at you,
shatters mirrors with bare hands.
She was never told she innocent
She is standing here today
but she still feels alone.
–Lavinia Thompson author of Melting Candles
Domestic Violence is found everywhere, at every social-economic level. It matters not the color of the couple. There are women that you know how are victims of Domestic Violence. It could be your minister’s wife, the grad student’s girlfriend, the cop’s wife, the Senator’s wife. It can be your next door neighbor, you know the one, whose husband is so nice; he is charming and helpful. And he is an abuser. Your mailman may be beating his girlfriend. Your child’s favorite teacher could be a regular victim of vicious beatings. Beatings are often administered where clothes will cover the bruises.
Every nine seconds, a woman is abused. Abuse can be physical, emotional or mental; any or all of these are abuse. If you are living with slapping, punching, broken bones, head injuries, pushing, name calling, and threats to kill you, you are living with abuse. No woman “asks” to be beaten. Abusing men like to tell their victim that it is her own fault…but it isn’t. Ever, no matter what the woman has “done” or been accused of doing, it is never her fault. Every abuser chooses to beat a woman and is responsible for his actions. I will say here that if a woman beats a man it is also a crime she is guilty of committing. 5% of men are abused but every nine seconds a woman is beaten.
Yes, women suffer. When I worked in Domestic Violence, one of my jobs was as a counselor. Stories told to me included: the woman was beaten because the kids made too much noise; she was beaten because she couldn’t get the stain out of his shirt, or because dinner was late getting put on the table. Also, he doesn’t like dinner and many women have had his plate full of food smeared into her face. Yes, this is abuse.
When children watch this kind of behavior, they learn to be abusers and victims. Often sons carry a lot of guilt and anger for their mother because she doesn’t stop the violence. They very often go ahead and begin punching, pinching, calling women names in high school. It frequently continues their entire lives.
I know of a mayor in a large city who has beaten three wives. He was an okay mayor but he was a demon to his wives. How do I know? I know because his wives came to one of the shelters I have worked with. We keep files on abusers. He was in it three times. Did he ever accept responsibility for his actions? No, not at all. The wives were convinced not to press charges, so he was never forced to accept any consequences.
I did hear today, a prosecutor stated that the law is now looking at abuse not just a women’s issue but as a crime against the community. I think this is a good thing. Why does abuse continue to be such a terrible and insidious part of life for women? Because the usual sentence is $1000 fine and 18 months in jail.
I am a spiritual person, but if you have been beaten, that is not God’s Will. It is a crime. There are places you can go for help. All communities have a Domestic Violence (DV) hotline. Shelters exist in most cities. Every taxi driver knows a DV shelter. Go, get help, start over. You do not deserve to live in violence. He always promises it will never happen again. It will. We had a program for counseling for the abusers. We found that a support group for the men worked best because they called each other on their lies and rationalizations.
If you are told that you need to forgive your abuser, to pray for him; if you are told you can’t leave because God requires you to stay in the sacred bond of marriage, you need to realize this is a lie, perpetuated by the men in power who want to keep women subservient. As a wife, you are not the property of your abuser. He does not own you and the Divine does not want you to suffer. Leave, get into a shelter, believe in yourself, you can take care of yourself and your children. If you think leaving will hurt your children, you will find that they will respect you much more if you protect yourself and them, and they may not end up as the abuser or the victim.
Anyone who says to stay in a relationship is possibly a batterer himself, or doesn’t really understand the issue or really doesn’t care about your well-being.
If your abuser threatens you with a weapon, even if he doesn’t use it, you need to realize that the chances are extraordinarily high that he will at some point and he will tell you it is your own fault that you are going to die.
I had a woman who was held at gunpoint for a solid 12 hours before the abuser fell asleep and she ran like the wolves of hell were after her. If he had awakened, he would have killed her. She made it to the shelter I worked at and we talked, cried, and held each other as she finally was able to tell her truth. I took pictures of her injuries for court and tucked her and her two children into a warm safe bed. Her face was streaked with tears, but she fell asleep immediately. I cried and prayed for her until the sun began to rise. Then I began to form her plan to go to court, to take care of her children and to take care of herself. We put her into temporary housing and helped her to find herself once again. She got out. You can, too
If you want more information go to NCADV.org. It is the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence. October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month, and as I have done in the past, I will be writing about the issue all month.
Don’t ever let someone hit you. It is a crime. I will take comments and listen if anyone is in a abusive relationship. I will give you the best answer I can based on my education and experience. It would all be confidential. Praying is not enough. Praying is good, but you need human intervention and action, in addition.
Let me help. Let others help. Remember that you deserve help.
You deserve to live without violence. Everyone deserves to live without violence.
You Can’t Beat a Woman.
Domestic Violence Stats – Cuts in Domestic Violence Support mean that more women and children will die at the hands of their abusers.
Waterstones has launched an industry-wide campaign to raise £1m by urging people to “Buy Books for Syria”.
In an unprecedented step, the industry’s top publishers from Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette and Simon & Schuster to indies such as Profile Books and Canongate are donating titles from big name authors such as David Walliams, Neil Gaiman, Victoria Hislop and Ali Smith for Waterstones to sell through their stores under the ‘Buy Books for Syria’ banner, with 100% of the retail price going towards Oxfam’s Syria Crisis Appeal.
The charity promotion will begin on Thursday (1st October) with titles displayed on tables front of store in Waterstones’ 280 shops, stickered with the ‘Buy Books for Syria’ name.
The offerings will include both frontlist and backlist titles from a vast array of authors including Mary Beard, Alan Bennett, Michael Bond, William Boyd, Bill Bryson, Tracy Chevalier, Lee Child and Julia Donaldson.
The company’s m.d, James Daunt, is committed to launching the appeal despite it being the industry’s most crucial time of the year in the run up to Christmas.
He said: “In desperate times like these, everyone feels the need to do something, to help in some way. We are doing what we do best: bookselling, and it only feels right that every single penny of each book sold will go straight to Oxfam. We are proud to be able transform the generosity of authors and publishers into such a substantial contribution to Oxfam’s work.”
He told The Bookseller that “some-perhaps most” of the sales would substitute “sales upon which otherwise we would be earning money” in the run up to Christmas but added that the company was “very fortunate to have an owner and board who have put this to one side and supported the initiative.” Waterstones is owned by Russian oligarch Alexander Mamut.
Tom Weldon, c.e.o of Penguin Random House UK, added: “We often speak as an industry about the power of books to change lives – our aim with this campaign is to use the power of books to save lives. I’m humbled by the way publishers and authors are collaborating to support Waterstones and Oxfam in this initiative. I hope that together we can make a difference.”
The original idea for the campaign came from Profile editor Mark Ellingham. The titles in the appeal include Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (Profile), War Horse by Michael Morpurgo (Egmont), Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (Vintage), One Day by David Nicholls (Hodder), The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini (Bloomsbury) and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson (Quercus/MacLehose), among others. Publishers have provided between 1,000 and 2,000 copies of all the titles to be sold for the appeal.
Support from UK publishers includes Atlantic Books, Bloomsbury, Canongate, Egmont, Faber, Granta, Hachette, HarperCollins, Pan Macmillan, Penguin Random House UK, Profile, Scholastic, Simon & Schuster and Usborne.
Other authors involved in the appeal include Mark Haddon, Matt Haig, Robert Harris, Khaled Hosseini, Max Hastings, Marian Keyes, Linda La Plante, Andrea Levy, Hilary Mantel, Peter May, Alexander McCall Smith, Caitlin Moran, Michael Morpugo, JoJo Moyes, David Nicholls, Ian Rankin, Tom Rob Smith, Salman Rushdie and Jacqueline Wilson.
Nicholls said: “This is a wonderful initiative, turning our passion for the written word into practical help at a time of terrible crisis.”
Smith added: “I support this initiative with heart, mind and soul.”
Mark Goldring, c.e.o of Oxfam, said the £1m of raised would help its program of delivering clean water to another 150,000 people in Syria, or providing support to tens of thousands of people in Jordan over the next year. “This help is urgently needed as the conflict in Syria shows no sign of ending,” he said.
Earlier in the month, authors and publishers lead by Patrick Ness helped to raise over £600,000 for Save the Children’s refugee appeal by pledging to match donations from members of the public.
Helping those in the refugee camps is important. There have not been this many refugees in Europe since WWII. Hey, Rock world, how about a benefit concert? Let’s all come up with ideas to help these poor people who have lost everything. They are our brothers and sisters. This is one world and we all share it.
Namaste
Barbara
Mensen maken de samenleving en nemen daarin een positie in. Deze website geeft toegang tot een diversiteit aan artikelen die gaan over 'samenleven', belicht vanuit verschillende perspectieven. De artikelen hebben gemeen dat er gezocht wordt naar wat 'mensen bindt, in plaats van wat hen scheidt'.
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