(Matt Davies via GoComics.com)
As a starting point: It is always wrong to hit women, children, or people who are smaller than the hitter. Violence is not the solution, no matter how much it may seem like a solution. Certainly your parents never hit you, quite probably not even a swat on the backside. Because they were smarter and wiser and more educated than that… and because you were lucky.
#WhyIStayed I was hit at home growing up. How was I to have learned relationships could be different?
— dazylady (@dazyladyblog) September 9, 2014
That tweet came from a Washington Post interview with Beverley Gooden, the woman who started the #WhyIStayed hashtag:
… Gooden listed nearly a dozen reasons it took her a year to leave her ex-husband: “he said he would change”; “I thought love would conquer all”; “my pastor told me that God hates divorce.” She ended them all with “#WhyIStayed.” She wasn’t trying to justify remaining in an abusive relationship, she said, but to illuminate why it is so difficult for women to leave. The situations Palmer and Gooden found themselves in are all too common. The National Coalition for Prevention of Domestic Violence estimates that 25 percent of women experience intimate partner violence, and according to the National Domestic Abuse hotline, it takes an average of seven tries for a victim to leave an abusive relationship…
It makes us feel better if we can tell ourselves that abusers are just off-the-chart monsters, chemically-inflamed head trauma cases who batter the gold-digging, religiously-blinded closet masochists naturally drawn to such specimens. That’s not how it happens, in this imperfect world. Charlayne Hunter-Gault, in the New Yorker, on “The Oscar Pistorius-Ray Rice Moment“:
Late Night Open Thread: Professional GladiatorsPost + Comments (32)