In reality, in the United States, a lot of men say “I won’t ever hurt you”, but they will look benignly at bruises and fractured bones or black eyes, and feel that they haven’t done anything.
But they have. They have physically abused you. They have battered you.
And they will promise over and over again not to ever do it again. But they will. And each incident will be a little worse than the one before.
An abuser is trying to break your self-esteem, your self-confidence, YOU. He wants to control you and keep you in his power. When he says you can’t leave him , what he’s really saying is he can’t lose his power and control over you.
You need to contact your local shelter or the national help hotline. Get counseling. Make an escape plan, before you’re hurt so badly you don’t care anymore that you’re hurt. Leave, before he kills you.
There is legal help for you in every state. The laws and penalties for battering vary by state, but your local shelter will help you get through the process. They know what to do.
It is time to begin a new, violence-free phase of your life.
I have begun again to volunteer at a Domestic Violence shelter here in North Carolina. It feels good to be back once again to the cause the helped to form me as a feminist.
Domestic Violence is not only physical, emotional, sexual and psychological violence. Psychological violence is intense and repetitive degradation, creating isolation and controlling the actions or behaviors of the victim through intimidation or manipulation to the detriment of the individual.
A battering incident is rarely an isolated event. Battering tends to increase and gradually become more severe as time goes on.
The newest stats show us that 85% of women experience at least one incident of battering in her lifetime. One in three women are abused emotionally and physically.
Domestic violence is a pattern of behaviors used to establish power and control over another intimate partner that often leads to the threat or use of violence. Many victims suffer multiple forms of abuse. Approximately 40% of women report that the first assault by their partner occured during pregnancy.
Physical abuse includes but is not limited to hitting, spitting, biting, pinching, slapping, twisting an arm, punching, or tripping. After the first assault, the abuse may be frequent or infrequent, prolonged or brief, severe or mild. The purpose is to gain power and control over the intimate partner.
Victims of emotional abuse often say that it takes longer to recover from emotional abuse than most physical abuse. It can take a lifetime to heal from emotional assaults. Anyone can be abused, male or female, straight or homosexual. And there is no excuse or reason that is ever acceptable for the Domestic Violence. There is no legitimate or viable reason to hit an intimate partner.
There are laws to protect victims in every state in the continental United States. There are also laws in Hawaii, Alaska and all 0f the US possessions. There is relief for every victim of battering.
There are many reasons for Domestic Violence and each are true to a certain degree. Each carries a certain amount of truth. Primarily, the theories distract police and the court system from the real truth. It works! Battering allows the perpetrator to get what they want. It is really that simple.
More than 1 in 3 women (35.6%) of women and more than 1 in 4 men (28.5%) of men in the United States experience Domestic Violence during their lifetimes. They have experienced rape, physical violence, and /or stalking by an intimate partner. This is from the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey: 2010 report.
It is a crime to commit Domestic Violence and marital rape is a crime in all states and all American possessions. We have to stop the violence.
Peace on Earth begins at home. No More Violence!
Domestic Violence
This is what an abused child looks like.
The majority of victims are strangled at least once. often before a homicide.
The impact of gun violence on victims and survivors of domestic violence cannot be overstated. The statistics are chilling: Approximately 2 out of every 3 domestic violence homicides are committed with firearms; the presence of a firearm in a domestic violence situation increases the likelihood of homicide by at least 500 percent. At least 44 percent of mass shootings are domestic violence-related, and 61 percent of all femicides committed by men wielding guns in 2013 were related to domestic violence .
These statistics are only the most publicized, easily quantifiable manifestations of the intersection between domestic violence and firearms. Guns are used to terrorize far more often than they are used to kill. A survey by the National Domestic Violence Hotline found 16 percent of respondents’ abusers owned firearms. Of respondents whose abusers owned guns, 67 percent percent believed their abusers were capable of killing them.
These statistics are staggering, yet they are more than numbers—they are people. My colleague, Rob Valente at the Hotline, quotes two survey respondents. One respondent disclosed that her husband owns over 100 guns. She never knows where the guns are, or how many guns he is carrying at any given time. Another respondent tells of repeatedly waking up at night to the sound of her abuser releasing the safety on the gun he is holding to her head.
Recognizing the role of firearms in domestic violence, Congress passed the Lautenberg Amendment prohibiting people convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence or people subject to permanent domestic violence protective orders from owning firearms. In enacting this prohibition, Congress took into account two important factors that differentiate domestic violence from other forms of violence: 1) Domestic violence misdemeanors are frequently pled down from felony charges and involve felony-level violence; and 2) Domestic violence is a pattern of behaviors rather than a single incident, so there is a high likelihood an abuser will reoffend.
Although the Lautenberg Amendment saved countless lives, it is no longer adequate; society has changed and the law must be updated to reflect these changes. Under existing law, the definition of domestic violence only includes abuse perpetrated by a current or former spouse, cohabitant or biological co-parent. Dating abuse does not trigger the firearm prohibition, despite the fact that current or former dating partners commit approximately half of all domestic violence homicides. Likewise, people convicted of misdemeanor stalking are not prohibited from owning firearms, although stalking is a key indicator of lethality; a 10-city study found that 76 percent of women killed by intimate partners were stalked before being murdered, and 85 percent of women who survive murder attempts were stalked.
Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s Protecting Domestic Violence and Stalking Victims Act of 2015and its companion bill from Reps. Debbie Dingell (D-Minn.) and Robert Dold (D-Ill.), Zero Tolerance for Domestic Abusers Act, expand the existing domestic violence prohibitor to include dating abuse and stalking. These narrowly focused domestic violence bills could save countless lives without infringing on the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding Americans. We at the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, our colleagues at other organizations, advocates across the country, victims and survivors call on Congress to demonstrate their commitment to ending domestic violence by passing these two bills. The time for talk is over—it is time to take a stand!
If a man or a woman stays in a violent home, their life will continually rotate around the cycle of violence. Help is available. Look at this cycle and see if it is familiar to you.
So often in life, we give others advice. Some of it is solicited and some not so much. Advice often comes in a small package of two words: “Speak Up”. I have even said it on my blog. I have been told to speak up, but usually, by the time some one tells me to, I already have.
So why are we discussing it today? I will explain. There are not many times when women have stood up and spoken. Since we were little girls, we were taught to be “ladies” and to stay clean and don’t be too loud. Actually, these admonitions have been around for centuries. The words were packaged differently but the ultimate meaning was the same.
By the 1800’s, many women had had it with the second class, stay-in-the-kitchen-and-keep-having-babies mentality that surrounded them. Women were treated like birds in a cage. They were to look beautiful and be charming and witty.
Long before the 1800’s, there was domestic violence in America. The Pilgrims brought it with them, and it came over with immigrants from England, and Scotland and Ireland and Germany — from everywhere, really, because it was at that time the norm to beat your wife. The first laws of this brand new country called America were based on English jurisprudence. It was considered legal to beat your wife, for correctional purposes, so long as you used nothing thicker than your thumb. It could be metal, but not thicker than your thumb.
In the 1800’s, as I have written about many times in the past, the Suffragettes came together and began to hold meetings because they wanted to be able to Vote. The men felt this was extremely funny, I have read diaries from women written in that time, talking about how hard it was to be woman living with a man who felt you were too stupid to know which candidate to vote for. Here job was to have the children, raise the children, feed the family, clothe the family (all with the man’s money) and, often, take care of the livestock and help in the fields. For more well-to-do married couples, there were servants to do many of these chores, but the only activity left for a woman was needlepoint, pianoforte, reading, and of course, being charming and witty.
Even after the end of the American Civil War and Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, the black man was free but black women were in the same position as white women or Asian women or any other women. They were not allowed to vote; they were not equal citizens even to a greater extent than the black man was not an equal citizen.
Suzanne B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton organized the women who lived in and around Seneca Falls, NY, and decided that they wanted the right to vote. They also put out a newspaper that referred to women’s issues of the time, which helped to prove that they had the intelligence to vote, as they had a higher level of literacy than many of the male voting public. Oh, and they found a way to use their own money to support all these efforts, not the money of the men in their lives, taking in washing and doing mending and other “womanly” chores to support their Women’s Cause. These ground-breaking women also get credit for women being allowed to wear trousers, called bloomers at the time; they got rid of corsets, which these women (rightly) believed to be bad for the health of women who wore them; corsets were a major reason for women “swooning” all over America and Europe because they simply could not get enough oxygen and passed out as a result.
If you are interested in more information about the Suffragettes and how they got women the Vote in America, I would suggest the book Founding Sisters and the Nineteenth Amendment by Eleanor Clift, one of the many books available on the subject at your local library, bookstore (brick or online) and e-reader source.
You also may refer to one of the several blogs I have written on the subject of Suffrage for additional resources and information.
In the 1960’s and 70’s, women began to Speak Up again. A feminist woman named Betty Friedan wrote a book called The Feminine Mystique. As women across America read this book, more and more of them found that the book reflected their inner most secret feelings about being a woman — that basically, it was not a really great deal. Women’s place had stayed in the home, except during World War II, when they were sent to the factories to make war planes and ammunition when the men were sent to fight. Many women found this to be a heady experience of independence, being able to earn money on their own for the first time and to work outside the home. When the War ended, and the GIs came home to return to their jobs, women were sent back to the kitchen.
A lot of women who had tasted independence in the 1940’s had daughters in the 1960’s to whom they expressed their discontent at being still trapped in the home.
In the 50’s and 60’s women still wore a strand of white pearls, white gloves, a hat and a dress that was below the knee. When I was in high school in the 60’s the teachers measured the lengths of our skirts and if they weren’t long enough, you were sent home. In public school.
As the women began to deal with their discontent and the feeling that their minds were withering inside their skulls, small groups began to pop up across the nation, in every state; groups of women only, where women could talk about their experiences, how hard it was to have a college education and never be allowed to use it. They wanted more.
This was the beginnings of the last Women’s Movement. Women were not called Suffragettes this time. This time, they — we — were called Women’s Libbers or Feminazis, bitches or even lesbians because that, to men, was the worst thing you could say to a woman.
It was during this period of time that we were able to finally get Domestic Violence on the books as a crime which carried a fine and often a jail sentence. Shelters were opened across the country to help victims of domestic violence and, copying the successful Underground Railroad that, a century before, had moved black slaves to safety in the north, a new Underground Railroad was created to move women and their children to places where they can live in safety without fear of being found and further victimized by their abuser.
Traditional laws based on the British jurisprudence that our founding fathers adopted was no longer an acceptable defence for beating your wife or girlfriend, or sister or mother.
Rape Crisis centers were opened in the 70’s and women were trained as counselors in Domestic Violence and Rape. Women began returning to college and we began to stand up for our reproductive rights, something that never was addressed by the 19th century Suffragettes, even though Elizabeth Cady Stanton had 11 children.
We are now facing a time in the 21st century when an American woman is beaten every 9 seconds. Rape is on the rise and, once again, men are trying to blame the woman for his inability to “control his passions”, forcing him to rape her, when in actuality rape has nothing to do with sex: it is an act of power and control.
So, women in this country can vote. We have places to go when we are afraid and in danger from our domestic partners. Think how many years it that has taken.
Now the men want to take away our ability to control our own bodies and our own reproductive systems. They want to control their own sexuality (often through artificial means) as well as ours.
Last but not least, is the fact that women of any color who are citizens of the United States of America are notlegally equal. If you think that begin legally equal is not of vital importance, ask the next black man you meet. Despite an increase in racism in our country, at least on paper, black men are equal. It is only women who are full citizens, often college educated, running businesses, teaching in Ivy League colleges, going into space, working to find a cure for cancer, who are not, in the eyes of the law, equal.
Once again, we women have our work cut out for us. And once again, I will say Speak Up. You can bring about changes. Writing, emailing, Twittering your Senators and Congressman, and the White House — these are all ways that you can Speak Up, even when your life is crazy and there are not enough hours in the day.
Do it in memory of your mothers; do it for your sisters; do it for your daughters and your granddaughters.
Let’s make Congress give us Legal Equality this time.
Speak Up. Settle for nothing less.
Betty Freidan, author of the Feminine Mystique
Alice Walker, feminist and author
Eleanor Roosevelt was one of the first ladies who was a feminist
According to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development domestic viollence is the third leading cause of homelessness among families. If a couple has a violent arguement in the home, it is usually the woman and children who flee. They flee with little but what is on their backs. This is another reason why Domestic Violence Shelters are so important. They can place the women and children into temporary housing. Most can then also help them to find housing for her and the children. In my long experience I have never known a man to leave unless he is the victim.
End Violence in the Home
Survivors of domestic violence face higher rates of depression, sleep disturbances, anxiety, flashbacks (PTSD) and other mental disturbances. Many are too ashamed of being beaten to go to a doctor or mental health workder and ask for help.
You Can’t Beat a Woman.
Domestic Violence contributes to poor health in survivors. Chronic conditions such as heart disease, gastrointestinal disorders can become more serious due to repeated battering. Fear and anger build up in the victim and the stress can lead to other health issues.
Among women brought to an Emergency Room after being beaten, were socially isolated, and had fewer social and financial resources than women who were not abused. Part of the emotional abuse is social isolation. The victim is cut off from friends, family, therapists, neighbors because the abuser needs to have total control over the victim. Abusers don’t want women to hear there is a place to go and get help. i often would put the hotline number on a piece of paper and pass it to the victim without being seen. Each city has a hotline number and you can help save a life by getting the number and gently putting it into a woman’s hand.
Without help, girls who witness domestic violence are more vulnerable to abuse when they are teens and young adults. Without help, boys who witness domestic violence, are far more likely to become abusers of their partners and/or children as adults. This continues the cycle of violence into later generations.
I initially became a feminist because of books. I was taking some continuing education classes in nursing. One book I had to read discussed the “The Burning Times.” These were in the good old days when women were midwives. Men felt that taking care of sick people was beneath them. Midwives got paid in a pie, some vegetables, some homemade bread. They were also more than expert in herbs and healing plants. Because of the nature of such a woman, she often enjoyed gentle relationships with the animals around her cabin or home.
There were a few men who exhibited the same gifts. Today we would call them feminist men. I am sure everyone knows some. The Church, in those days found it hard to handle midwives and healing women.
We are looking at the time in history of the Spanish Inquisition. Protestants had to confess after torture, Jews fled to present-day Europe and the Ottoman empire. Special priests were sent out to root out and to kill the blasphemers who said they could heal. As time went on, village after village suffered through “witch trials.” Many good and caring women went to their deaths because they were deemed witches. Children had no protection from these accusations. They often would be tortured and would speak the name of someone they knew. They would call someone a witch, just to get the pain to end.
It is said that over 2 million women were murdered for being witches. This was also a holocaust. At this time, midwives went underground and men began to look to medicine as a way to make a living. So men suddenly had good reason to ensure that no healing women or witches were in their communities. Much information about the healing effects of herbs was lost for a very long time.
I was interested in what I was reading and took more books out of the library. I couldn’t stop reading and thinking about these women. There is an article you might be interested in reading called “Witches, Midwives and Nurses”, by B. Ehrenreich and D English.. It can be found at .www.blancmange.net/tmh/articles/witches.html.
To this day women’s medical practice has thrived in the midst of rebellious lower class movements. These witch hunts for the midwives did not stop these healing and caring women,, but the midwives where often branded as superstitious and possibly malevolent.
I read all this, and another feminist was born. I got involved with other concerned women in my community and we tried to assess women’s needs in our community. What we discovered was that women were being abused in their homes. So we started a shelter for abused women. We had no money, but we got a rundown old house in a bad neighborhood and the Jewish, Protestant and Catholic women worked long and hard to save these battered women and their children. Some of the Catholic women were nuns and I remember that we all “planted” a penny in the tree lawn of that house and the nuns prayed for the women and children who would be saved. Today that shelter, started in the 1970’s has a budget of nearly a million dollars a year. I am still a feminist because they need every penny of that budget to continue to protect the women and kids.
Children are also beaten
This may be happening to someone you know…like your sister, your cousin, the neighbor, your minister’s wife, or the wife of that nice young family who always comes to church.
As our society becomes more violent, with mass shootings and other community violence, Domestic Violence is not shrinking. Nearly forty years after domestic violence shelters and programs were established in this country, we are still taking pictures of injuries, advocating for abused women in court and hiding them until they and their children can get safely away from the abuser. Oh, I must not forget to tell you that more women are killed trying to get out than at any other time in the battering relationship.
This is the number one reason I am still a feminist, however it isn’t the only reason. I am concerned that women are not legally equal, and do not get paid the same as a man for the same work. And so, I fight on.
Together we can gain our legal equality. Together we can take care of each other. Together we can become equal partners. Together we might just add some peace to the world.
You can’t beat a woman!
Please remember the extremedanger many women are in and talk to the young women and girls. It isn’t their fault. They were victims.
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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