Domestic Assault Quotes

In order to escape accountability for his crimes, the perpetrator does everything in his power to promote forgetting. If secrecy fails, the perpetrator attacks the credibility of his victim. If he cannot silence her absolutely, he tries to make sure no one listens.

No amount of me trying to explain myself was doing any good. I didn't even know what was going on inside of me, so how could I have explained it to them?

Today I wore a pair of faded old jeans and a plain grey baggy shirt. I hadn't even taken a shower, and I did not put on an ounce of makeup. I grabbed a worn out black oversized jacket to cover myself with even though it is warm outside. I have made conscious decisions lately to look like less of what I felt a male would want to see. I want to disappear.

Intimidated, old traumas triggered, and fearing for my safety, I did what I felt I needed to do.

The abuser’s mood changes are especially perplexing. He can be a different person from day to day, or even from hour to hour. At times he is aggressive and intimidating, his tone harsh, insults spewing from his mouth, ridicule dripping from him like oil from a drum. When he’s in this mode, nothing she says seems to have any impact on him, except to make him even angrier. Her side of the argument counts for nothing in his eyes, and everything is her fault. He twists her words around so that she always ends up on the defensive. As so many partners of my clients have said to me, “I just can’t seem to do anything right.” At other moments, he sounds wounded and lost, hungering for love and for someone to take care of him. When this side of him emerges, he appears open and ready to heal. He seems to let down his guard, his hard exterior softens, and he may take on the quality of a hurt child, difficult and frustrating but lovable. Looking at him in this deflated state, his partner has trouble imagining that the abuser inside of him will ever be back. The beast that takes him over at other times looks completely unrelated to the tender person she now sees. Sooner or later, though, the shadow comes back over him, as if it had a life of its own. Weeks of peace may go by, but eventually she finds herself under assault once again. Then her head spins with the arduous effort of untangling the many threads of his character, until she begins to wonder whether she is the one whose head isn’t quite right.

We don’t necessarily know how to hear stories about any kind of violence, because it is hard to accept that violence is as simple as it is complicated, that you can love someone who hurts you, that you can stay with someone who hurts you, that you can be hurt by someone who loves you, that you can be hurt by a complete stranger, that you can be hurt in so many terrible, intimate ways.

Make sure your fun is not mocking someone’s pain and your enjoyment is not another’s suffering. The melody of your ears must not be the cries of a powerless.

It is not a single crime when a child is photographed while sexually assaulted (raped.) It is a life time crime that should have life time punishments attached to it. If the surviving child is, more often than not, going to suffer for life for the crime(s) committed against them, shouldn't the pedophiles suffer just as long? If it often takes decades for survivors to come to terms with exactly how much damage was caused to them, why are there time limits for prosecution?

When a man’s face contorts in bitterness and hatred, he looks a little insane. When his mood changes from elated to assaultive in the time it takes to turn around, his mental stability seems open to question. When he accuses his partner of plotting to harm him, he seems paranoid. It is no wonder that the partner of an abusive man would come to suspect that he was mentally ill. Yet the great majority of my clients over the years have been psychologically “normal.” Their minds work logically; they understand cause and effect; they don’t hallucinate. Their perceptions of most life circumstances are reasonably accurate. They get good reports at work; they do well in school or training programs; and no one other than their partners—and children—thinks that there is anything wrong with them. Their value system is unhealthy, not their psychology.

Alcohol does not a change a person’s fundamental value system. People’s personalities when intoxicated, even though somewhat altered, still bear some relationship to who they are when sober. When you are drunk you may behave in ways that are silly or embarrassing; you might be overly familiar or tactlessly honest, or perhaps careless or forgetful. But do you knock over little old ladies for a laugh? Probably not. Do you sexually assault the clerk at the convenience store? Unlikely. People’s conduct while intoxicated continues to be governed by their core foundation of beliefs and attitudes, even though there is some loosening of the structure. Alcohol encourages people to let loose what they have simmering below the surface. ABUSERS MAKE CONSCIOUS CHOICES EVEN WHILE INTOXICATED

Truth: Rape does indeed happen between girlfriend and boyfriend, husband and wife. Men who force their girlfriends or wives into having sex are committing rape, period. The laws are blurry, and in some countries marital rape is legal. But it still is rape.

We live in a world in which women are battered and are unable to flee from the men who beat them, although their door is theoretically standing wide open. One out of every four women becomes a victim of severe violence. One out of every two will be confronted by sexual harassment over her lifetime. These crimes are everywhere and can take place behind any front door in the country, every day, and barely elicit much more than a shrug of the shoulders and superficial dismay.

In the 1890s, when Freud was in the dawn of his career, he was struck by how many of his female patients were revealing childhood incest victimization to him. Freud concluded that child sexual abuse was one of the major causes of emotional disturbances in adult women and wrote a brilliant and humane paper called “The Aetiology of Hysteria.” However, rather than receiving acclaim from his colleagues for his ground-breaking insights, Freud met with scorn. He was ridiculed for believing that men of excellent reputation (most of his patients came from upstanding homes) could be perpetrators of incest. Within a few years, Freud buckled under this heavy pressure and recanted his conclusions. In their place he proposed the “Oedipus complex,” which became the foundation of modern psychology. According to this theory any young girl actually desires sexual contact with her father, because she wants to compete with her mother to be the most special person in his life. Freud used this construct to conclude that the episodes of incestuous abuse his clients had revealed to him had never taken place; they were simply fantasies of events the women had wished for when they were children and that the women had come to believe were real. This construct started a hundred-year history in the mental health field of blaming victims for the abuse perpetrated on them and outright discrediting of women’s and children’s reports of mistreatment by men. Once abuse was denied in this way, the stage was set for some psychologists to take the view that any violent or sexually exploitative behaviors that couldn’t be denied—because they were simply too obvious—should be considered mutually caused. Psychological literature is thus full of descriptions of young children who “seduce” adults into sexual encounters and of women whose “provocative” behavior causes men to become violent or sexually assaultive toward them. I wish I could say that these theories have long since lost their influence, but I can’t. A psychologist who is currently one of the most influential professionals nationally in the field of custody disputes writes that women provoke men’s violence by “resisting their control” or by “attempting to leave.” She promotes the Oedipus complex theory, including the claim that girls wish for sexual contact with their fathers. In her writing she makes the observation that young girls are often involved in “mutually seductive” relationships with their violent fathers, and it is on the basis of such “research” that some courts have set their protocols. The Freudian legacy thus remains strong.

He told me that if I hung up, he'd do it. He would commit suicide. He told me that if I called the cops he would kill every single one of them and I knew that he had the potential and the means to do it

The story of my birth that my mother told me went like this: "When you were coming out I wasn't ready yet and neither was the nurse. The nurse tried to push you back in, but I shit on the table and when you came out, you landed in my shit." If there ever was a way to sum things up, the story of my birth was it.

John was still making comments regarding violent things that he shouldn't, but I hoped he was just being a big mouth. Nobody was going to listen to me anyway.

I realise I'm behind on this but Rebekah Brooks was married to Ross Kemp of Gangs fame?! And she assaulted him? That explains so much.

Child abuse, domestic violence, sexual assault, hate crimes, war crimes, genocide, and all other forms of interpersonal violence flourish in a culture of silence and shame.

Acts of psychological abuse include berating or humiliating the victim; interrogating the victim; restricting the victim's ability to come and go freely; obstructing the victim's access to assistance (e.g., law enforcement; legal, protective, or medical resources); threatening the victim with physical harm or sexual assault; harming, or threatening to harm, people or things that the victim cares about; unwarranted restriction of the victim's access to or use of economic resources; isolating the victim from family, friends, or social support resources; stalking the victim; and trying to make the victim think that he or she is crazy.

SUICIDE IS NOW – in places including the UK and US – a leading cause of death, accounting for over one in a hundred fatalities. According to figures from the World Health Organization, it kills more people than stomach cancer, cirrhosis of the liver, colon cancer, breast cancer, and Alzheimer’s. As people who kill themselves are, more often than not, depressives, depression is one of the deadliest diseases on the planet. It kills more people than most other forms of violence – warfare, terrorism, domestic abuse, assault, gun crime – put together.

Why didn't I report it? Because when you are sexually assaulted by a relative, it's terribly complicated. Initially, I felt shock, numb, and powerless. Keep in mind, sexual assault is an act of violence; not sex. In addition, sexual assault is about power. It's common for victims to feel helpless.

The best countries at closing the gender gap are the most peaceful. The best countries at closing the gender gap are the most prosperous. The most peaceful countries are the happiest. The most peaceful countries are best on the environment.

From now on I’ve decided that my priority is to commit to being a genuine ally to the women I know. I want them to feel safe in my company, to know that if they are ever the victim of any kind of sexual harassment or assault, I’ll always be there for them. I’ll always believe them, I’ll never for a moment doubt the truth of anything they tell me in confidence. I’ll never try to minimise what they’ve gone through, or impute any responsibility to them, even if – especially if – I know the attacker. I want to tell them they’ll never have reason to fear that I’ll find an excuse for him, or that I’ve set my heart on staying in touch with him. I refuse to be one of those people who thinks that domestic assault, for example, is a question of ‘perspective’, or a private matter between the two parties.

Still later, after the invention of saddles and stirrups, horses allowed the Huns and successive waves of other peoples from the Asian steppes to terrorize the Roman Empire and its successor states, culminating in the Mongol conquests of much of Asia and Russia in the 13th and 14th centuries A.D. Only with the introduction of trucks and tanks in World War I did horses finally become supplanted as the main assault vehicle and means of fast transport in war. Arabian and Bactrian camels played a similar military role within their geographic range. In all these examples, peoples with domestic horses (or camels), or with improved means of using them, enjoyed an enormous military advantage over those without them.

Some people have never seen their fathers beat their mothers, only because their mothers are the ones who did or do the beating.

Behind every man alive and kicking, there is a woman. Behind every woman abused and killed, there is a man.

The destructive impulse with respect to nature all too often has psychological causes that go beyond the greed for material resource or the need to domesticate an environment. There is too often a deliberate rage and vengefulness at work in the assault on nature and its species, as if one would project onto the natural world the intolerable anxieties of finitude which hold humanity hostage to death.

By elevating physical violence over the other facets of a battered woman’s experience,” law professor Leigh Goodmark wrote in 2004, “the legal system sets the standard by which the stories of battered women are judged. If there is no [legally designated] assault, she is not a victim, regardless of how debilitating her experience has been, how complete her isolation, or how horrific the emotional abuse she has suffered. And by creating this kind of myopia about the nature of domestic violence, the legal system does battered women a grave injustice.

There is probably nothing more menacing or dangerous than an individual who is devoid of compassion or empathy. When this individual is permitted by community apathy and bias to successfully cloak himself in the attire of one who claims allegiance to his or her Creator, it becomes the moral imperative of those who lay witness to the peril to step up before it is too late. Until such a time when domestic violence and sexual assault are eradicated for good, the perpetrators of these deplorable acts will continue to cause unspeakable harm as Evil’s welcomed ambassadors and Tyranny’s strongest ally.

I still carry a picture in my mind of an abuser who is a rageaholic, a monster, a person visibly and uncontrollably angry. Someone easily identifiable as a “bad guy.” I may even have operated under the idea that my own gut instincts would alert me to such a man. And what strikes me immediately—in fact, deeply unsettles me in a way—is how incredibly normal they all seem. Like a bunch of guys I’d go have a beer with. They are charming. They are funny, gregarious, shy, high-strung. Good-looking or not, well-dressed or not. They are Everyman. One of the hallmarks of domestic violence, Adams told me, is this false idea that abusers are somehow angry generally; rather, their anger is targeted—at a partner or at the partner’s immediate family. As a result, friends and acquaintances of abusers are often surprised to hear that they committed an assault.

I inhaled deeply and trapped all the air inside, as I realized I had a choice: I could suffocate under the dreams of the life I didn’t get or survive in the one I did.

Violence does not need to be used very often; it merely needs to be convincing when it is used.

I can’t tell you how many abusers I’ve heard bemoaning their inability to stop loving the same women they assaulted so severely it landed them in prison.

I never understood rape until it happened to me. It was a concept- of savagery, of violence, of disrespect. I had read my share of Kate Millet and Susan Brownmiller but nothing prepared me for how to handle it. Within a marriage, fighting back has consequences. The man who rapes me is not a stranger who runs away. The man who rapes me is not the silhouette in the car park, he is not the masked assaulter, he is not the acquaintance who has spiked my drinks. He is someone who wakes up next to me. He is the husband for whom I make coffee the following morning. He is the husband who can shrug it away and tell me to stop imagining things. He is the husband who can blame his action on unbridled passion the next day, while I hobble from room to room. I begin to learn that there are no screams that are loud enough to make my husband stop. There are no scream that cannot be silenced by the shock of a tight slap. There is no organic defence that can protect against penetration. He covers himself with enough lubricant to slide part my resistance. My legs go limp. I come apart.

Clearly, much of the violence in domestic life, both physical and verbal abuse, is linked to job misery. We can encourage friends and loved ones to move toward greater self-love by supporting them in any effort to leave work that assaults their well-being.

big domestic mammals were crucial to those human societies possessing them. Most notably, they provided meat, milk products, fertilizer, land transport, leather, military assault vehicles, plow traction, and wool, as well as germs that killed previously unexposed peoples.

Off Spruce, there was a little known trail. A savage gulley wound through acreage of older residential homes that met up with Green Rock Drive. A natural bouquet gust of wind assaulted me. The domestic and native encroached on each other in a battle for dominance at the edges of the cramped path's undergrowth. The tangy scent of wild onion and sagebrush intermingled with the verdant odor of wild geranium, blue flax, columbine and creeping pussytoes. The wild weeds spiced up the encroaching grass turf and the tamed floral honeysuckle vines and lilac bushes.

Child neglect and abuse is a hidden epidemic. The topic is taboo. Surviving abusive relationships, especially in the family unit, is complicated. Oftentimes, victims of child abuse, sexual assaults, domestic violence, and narcissistic abuse don’t report it. During my extensive research, I discovered that most children don’t disclose their sexual abuse, until late in life. On the website, Child USA, they share about delayed disclosure. “Most child victims of sexual assault disclose, if they disclose at all, during adulthood, with a median age of 48 and an average age of 52.

And there’s one other matter I must raise. The epidemic of domestic sexual violence that lacerates the soul of South Africa is mirrored in the pattern of grotesque raping in areas of outright conflict from Darfur to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and in areas of contested electoral turbulence from Kenya to Zimbabwe. Inevitably, a certain percentage of the rapes transmits the AIDS virus. We don’t know how high that percentage is. We know only that women are subjected to the most dreadful double jeopardy. The point must also be made that there’s no such thing as the enjoyment of good health for women who live in constant fear of rape. Countless strong women survive the sexual assaults that occur in the millions every year, but every rape leaves a scar; no one ever fully heals. This business of discrimination against and oppression of women is the world’s most poisonous curse. Nowhere is it felt with greater catastrophic force than in the AIDS pandemic. This audience knows the statistics full well: you’ve chronicled them, you’ve measured them, the epidemiologists amongst you have disaggregated them. What has to happen, with one unified voice, is that the scientific community tells the political community that it must understand one incontrovertible fact of health: bringing an end to sexual violence is a vital component in bringing an end to AIDS. The brave groups of women who dare to speak up on the ground, in country after country, should not have to wage this fight in despairing and lonely isolation. They should hear the voices of scientific thunder. You understand the connections between violence against women and vulnerability to the virus. No one can challenge your understanding. Use it, I beg you, use it.

Because street harassment is perhaps the clearest manifestation of the spectrum of sexism, sexual harassment and sexual assault that exists within our society. Yes, it starts out small; but allowing those ‘minor’ transgressions gives licence to the more serious ones, and eventually to all-out abuse. We’ve heard the same words and phrases crossing over and echoing and repeating, from women who are shouted at in the street to women who are assaulted and women who are victims of domestic violence in their own homes. The language is the same. And if we say it’s acceptable for men to assume power and ownership over women they don’t know verbally in public, then, like it or not, we’re also saying something much wider about gender relations – something that carries over into our personal relationships and our sexual exchanges. Because this is a line that doesn’t need to be blurred. It should be clear and simple. Take it from the women whose experiences started out with just a little ‘harmless’ street harassment – a sexual ‘compliment’ or a wolf whistle, or a ‘Hey baby’ – but then turned nasty, became full-blown attacks. Ask them what the problem is with a harmless bit of fun.

In the United States, more than three women are murdered by their husbands or boyfriends every day. Every nine seconds in the United States a woman is assaulted or beaten. Domestic violence is the leading cause of injury to women—more than that caused by car accidents, muggings, and rapes combined.

From a short distance, the few attending mourners under the blue tarp looked on silently as each ritualistic movement necessary to properly complete the last rites of the dead were respectively adhered to. Not surprisingly, only the constant raindrops marred the utter silence of the occasion, and not a single teardrop fell. Not a whimper or a shudder. Not for this man. Not today. Not ever again. It took all Skye had not to walk over to the hole, lift up her skirt, and piss on the man who had repeatedly raped her as a child. Good riddance, you nasty bastard. Now you are in God’s hands. Have fun with that, you piece of garbage.

If you are, or someone you know is a victim of domestic violence, please do not wait any longer, get help today. There are people who will help you. Please call. The National Domestic Abuse Hotline: 1-800-799-7233 The National Sexual Assault Hotline: 1-800-656-4673 The National Teen Dating Abuse Hotline: 1-866-331-9474

At one point in the book, Susi says that, in Australia, one woman dies every week because of domestic violence. In the United States, more than three women are murdered by their husbands or boyfriends every day. Every nine seconds in the United States a woman is assaulted or beaten. Domestic violence is the leading cause of injury to women—more than that caused by car accidents, muggings, and rapes combined.

The weaknesses of the system, the inherent dangers of being a part of a domestic monopoly in an industry open to other countries, had not yet revealed themselves. So, while other areas of the American economy remained competitive, no one challenged the auto industry until the full-scale assault of the Japanese in the seventies. When it finally came, the extent of American vulnerability surprised even those who had been critical.

Julia's fears of coming forward with the violence were based on anticipated as well as actual responses from friends and acquaintances. I also recognized Julia's introverted and moody side, but I knew she wasn't capable of inciting her husband to kick, choke, and lock her in her home like an animal. Besides, considering how she was being treated, it was not surprising that she seemed moody, sensitive, even depressed. More important, nothing any woman could do could justify such behavior.

Consider the following: More than 40 percent of women in the United States have likely been the victim of violence, including childhood sexual abuse (almost 18 percent), physical assault (more than 19 percent), rape (more than 20 percent), and intimate partner violence (almost 35 percent).4 Some 6 percent of all pregnant women experienced violence during their pregnancies as well.5 Despite the widespread violence against women, less than 10 percent of primary care physicians normally screen for domestic violence during routine office visits.6 Yet if the violence is not addressed, it

The F.B.I. Web page on the Murrah bombing lists it as “the worst act of homegrown terrorism in the nation’s history.” That designation overlooks the Tulsa riots of 1921, in which a white mob, enraged by a spurious allegation that a black teen-ager had attempted to assault a young white woman, was deputized and given carte blanche to attack the city’s prosperous black Greenwood section, resulting in as many as three hundred black fatalities. From one perspective, the Murrah bombing was the worst act of domestic terrorism in our history, but, as the descendants of the Greenwood survivors know, it was likely not even the worst incident in Oklahoma’s history.

Like other new gender crimes, the critical feature of “domestic violence” is that it has no definition. The fact that violent assault is already illegal in every jurisdiction on earth is ignored amid the hysteria and rush to punishment. Legally, domestic violence is adjudicated not as violent assault but as a conflict within an “intimate relationship.” Like rape and sexual harassment therefore, it blurs the distinction between disagreement and crime. Indeed—and this is difficult for the uninitiated to fully comprehend—it need not be, in fact, violent. In fact it need not be even physical and almost never is, since true battery can be formally charged as criminal assault.

Couples counseling has long been banned from the list of acceptable treatments for domestic violence . . . "an inappropriate intervention that further endangers the woman." Schechter explained: 'It encourages the abuser to blame the victim by examining her "role" in his problem. By seeing the couple together, the therapist erroneously suggests that the partner, too, is responsible for the abuser's behavior. Many women have been beaten brutally following couples counseling sessions in which they disclosed violence or coercion. The abuser alone must take responsibility for the assaults and understand that family reunification is not his treatment goal; the goal is to stop the violence.

A great liberal betrayal is afoot. Unfortunately, many “fellow-travelers” of Islamism are on the liberal side of this debate. I call them “regressive leftists”; they are in fact reverse racists. They have a poverty of expectation for minority groups, believing them to be homogenous and inherently opposed to human rights values. They are culturally reductive in how they see “Eastern”—and in my case, Islamic—culture, and they are culturally deterministic in attempting to freeze their ideal of it in order to satisfy their orientalist fetish. While they rightly question every aspect of their “own” Western culture in the name of progress, they censure liberal Muslims who attempt to do so within Islam, and they choose to side instead with every regressive reactionary in the name of “cultural authenticity” and anticolonialism. They claim that their reason for refusing to criticize any policy, foreign or domestic—other than those of what they consider “their own” government—is that they are not responsible for other governments’ actions. However, they leap whenever any (not merely their own) liberal democratic government commits a policy error, while generally ignoring almost every fascist, theocratic, or Muslim-led dictatorial regime and group in the world. It is as if their brains cannot hold two thoughts at the same time. Besides, since when has such isolationism been a trait of liberal internationalists? It is a right-wing trait. They hold what they think of as “native” communities—and I use that word deliberately—to lesser standards than the ones they claim apply to all “their” people, who happen to be mainly white, and that’s why I call it reverse racism. In holding “native” communities to lesser—or more culturally “authentic”—standards, they automatically disempower those communities. They stifle their ambitions. They cut them out of the system entirely, because there’s no aspiration left. These communities end up in self-segregated “Muslim areas” where the only thing their members aspire to is being tin-pot community leaders, like ghetto chieftains. The “fellow-travelers” fetishize these “Muslim” ghettos in the name of “cultural authenticity” and identity politics, and the ghetto chieftains are often the leading errand boys for them. Identity politics and the pseudo-liberal search for cultural authenticity result in nothing but a downward spiral of competing medieval religious or cultural assertions, fights over who are the “real” Muslims, ever increasing misogyny, homophobia, sectarianism, and extremism. This is not liberal. Among the left, this is a remnant of the socialist approach that prioritizes group identity over individual autonomy. Among the right, it is ironically a throwback from the British colonial “divide and rule” approach. Classical liberalism focuses on individual autonomy. I refer here to liberalism as it is understood in the philosophical sense, not as it’s understood in the United States to refer to the Democratic Party—that’s a party-political usage. The great liberal betrayal of this generation is that in the name of liberalism, communal rights have been prioritized over individual autonomy within minority groups. And minorities within minorities really do suffer because of this betrayal. The people I really worry about when we have this conversation are feminist Muslims, gay Muslims, ex-Muslims—all the vulnerable and bullied individuals who are not just stigmatized but in many cases violently assaulted or killed merely for being against the norm.

With most crimes, police generally do not arrest suspects without a warrant unless they personally witness it. Yet the mob justice surrounding domestic violence has brought the innovation of mandatory arrest, even when it is not clear who has committed the deed or even that any deed has been committed at all. One prosecutor in Hamilton County, Ohio, notes that this is “turning law-abiding citizens into criminals.” Judith Mueller of the Women’s Center in Vienna, Virginia, who had lobbied for the mandatory arrest law, says, “I am stunned, quite frankly, because that was not the intention of the law. It was to protect people from predictable violent assaults, where a history occurred, and the victim was unable for whatever reason to press charges. . . . It’s disheartening to think that it could be used punitively and frivolously.

The corollary of new crimes that only some people can commit is to exempt others from punishment for standard crimes—indeed, to pro vide a license to kill. Harriet Harman, deputy leader of the British Labour Party and Minister for Women, proposes allowing women to kill their “intimate partners” with impunity if they kill while “claiming past, or fear of future, abuse from male partners.” Murder would thus be condoned if a woman claimed to have suffered “conduct which caused the defendant to have a justifiable sense of being seriously wronged.” How the dead (and unproven) “abusers” could establish their innocence is not discussed in the proposal. “Effectively, what Harman and the ultra-feminist lobby want is a licence for women to kill,” writes Erin Pizzey, a long-time advocate for domestic violence victims, who has reacted in horror at the hijacking of the movement by ideological extremists. “Women can murder as long as their sense of victimhood is sufficiently powerful. . . . Rather than reducing violence, Harriet Harman’s proposals could become a charter for domestic chaos, as vengeful women believe they can butcher partners they come to loathe, inventing incidents of abuse or exaggerating fears of assault.” Robert Whelan of the Civitas think-tank accused the government of introducing “gang law” into the legal system. Lyn Costello of Mothers Against Murder and Aggression described the changes as “utter madness.” “We need clear laws, not more grey areas. . . . Unless there are really exceptional circumstances, such as self-defence or protecting yourself or family, then there is no excuse for killing someone, and it should be murder.

Within our own species we have great variation between these two reactions. One man may beat his life away in furious assault on the barrier, where another simply waits for the tide to pick him up. Such variation is also observable among the higher vertebrates, particularly among domestic animals. It would be strange if it were not also true of the lower vertebrates, among the individualistic ones anyway. A fish, like the tuna or the sardine, which lives in a school, would be less likely to vary than this lonely horned shark, for the school would impose a discipline of speed and uniformity, and those individuals which would not or could not meet the school’s requirements would be killed or lost or left behind. The overfast would be eliminated by the school as readily as the over-slow, until a standard somewhere between the fast and slow had been attained. Not intending a pun, we might note that our schools have to some extent the same tendency. A Harvard man, a Yale man, a Stanford man—that is, the ideal—is as easily recognized as a tuna, and he has, by a process of elimination, survived the tests against idiocy and brilliance. Even in physical matters the standard is maintained until it is impossible, from speech, clothing, haircuts, posture, or state of mind, to tell one of these units of his school from another. In this connection it would be interesting to know whether the general collectivization of human society might not have the same effect. Factory mass production, for example, requires that every man conform to the tempo of the whole. The slow must be speeded up or eliminated, the fast slowed down. In a thoroughly collectivized state, mediocre efficiency might be very great, but only through the complete elimination of the swift, the clever, and the intelligent, as well as the incompetent. Truly collective man might in fact abandon his versatility. Among school animals there is little defense technique except headlong flight. Such species depend for survival chiefly on tremendous reproduction. The great loss of eggs and young to predators is the safety of the school, for it depends for its existence on the law of probability that out of a great many which start some will finish. It is interesting and probably not at all important to note that when a human state is attempting collectivization, one of the first steps is a frantic call by the leaders for an increased birth rate—replacement parts in a shoddy and mediocre machine.

The list of structures is pretty much the same list (racism, sexism, poverty, and the rest), but the implication is there could, for example, exist a system of patriarchy that operated in the total absence of domestic violence or sexual assault, or a system of racism that was in no way backed up by government-enforced property rights—despite the fact that, to my knowledge, no example of either has ever been observed.50 Once again, it’s puzzling why anyone would make such an argument, unless they were for some reason determined to insist that the physical violence isn’t the essence of the thing, that this isn’t what really needs to be addressed. To pose the question of violence directly would, apparently, mean opening a series of doors that most academics seem to feel would really better be left shut. Most of these doors lead directly to the problem of what we call “the state”—and the bureaucratic structures through which it actually exercises power. Is the state’s claim to a monopoly of violence ultimately the problem, or is the state an essential part of any possible solution? Is the very practice of laying down rules and then threatening physical harm against anyone who does not follow them itself objectionable, or is it just that the authorities are not deploying such threats in the right way? To talk of racism, sexism, and the rest as a bunch of abstract structures floating about is the best way to dodge such questions entirely.

Profilers may blame Islam, fundamentalism or just bad dudes, Freeman says, but four recent attackers — prior to driving their trucks into a crowd or shooting dozens of people in a nightclub — had extensive histories of sexual assault and battery of women. “And yet,” Freeman writes, “this is almost never discussed, because there is no political capital to be gained by suggesting warped masculinity might be more to blame than Muslims. After all, domestic violence is a problem that spans cultures, and if President Trump were to try to ban men accused of domestic violence from entering America instead of Muslims, he would lose some major figures in his own White House.”13

Immigrants were depicted as outside invaders assaulting American culture, language, and institutions. As such, nativism brought the issue of nationalism to the center of right-wing populism in a way that had not been present before. Domestically, it meant that the American nation had to defend itself and its borders from nonwhite others who would destroy it. Internationally, it meant isolationism and an embrace of nationalisms elsewhere.

Yet, for another century, defeated Southerners continued the war by other means. A growing white nationalist movement continues to champion the racist goals of the Confederacy even to the point of launching an armed assault on the Capitol. Understanding how racist ideology and religion impact domestic politics and foreign affairs matters. The Civil War era demonstrates how religiously based racism can influence policy, economics, military strategy, and paramilitary terrorism. By studying it lead ers can begin to understand how seemingly innocuous conflicts become cataclysmic events with disastrous consequences.

Women who, as children, had witnessed their mothers being assaulted by their partners had a vastly increased chance to fall victim to domestic violence.

That’s what happens all the time when women are victims of crimes. They’re blamed for their own injuries. Whether it’s rape or domestic violence or assault, the inference is always that women bring it on themselves.

It’s not just public, or private, or online either. It’s also embedded in our political system, and our legal system, which before feminists fought for us didn’t recognize most domestic violence, or sexual harassment and stalking, or date rape, or acquaintance rape, or marital rape, and in cases of rape still often tries the victim rather than the rapist, as though only perfect maidens could be assaulted—or believed

[Michael] German observed how blinkered our national culture—not just within law enforcement, but within the halls of officialdom and in the national media—has become about the real threat posed by white nationalists: If the government knew that al-Qaeda or Isis had infiltrated American law enforcement agencies, it would undoubtedly initiate a nationwide effort to identify them and neutralize the threat they posed. Yet white supremacists and far-right militants have committed far more attacks and killed more people in the U.S. over the last 10 years than any foreign terrorist movement. The FBI regards them as the most lethal domestic terror threat. The need for national action is even more critical.

Many traumatized individuals are too hypervigilant to enjoy the ordinary pleasures that life has to offer, while others are too numb to absorb new experiences—or to be alert to signs of real danger. When the smoke detectors of the brain malfunction, people no longer run when they should be trying to escape or fight back when they should be defending themselves. The landmark ACE (Adverse Childhood Experiences) study, which I’ll discuss in more detail in chapter 9, showed that women who had an early history of abuse and neglect were seven times more likely to be raped in adulthood. Women who, as children, had witnessed their mothers being assaulted by their partners had a vastly increased chance to fall victim to domestic violence.

Colombia’s advance to first rank among the criminal states in “our little region” is in part the result of the decline in US-managed state terror in Central America, which achieved its primary aims as in Turkey 10 years later, leaving in its wake a “culture of terror” that “domesticat[es] the expectations of the majority” and undermines aspirations towards “alternatives different to those of the powerful,” in the words of Salvadoran Jesuits, who learned the lessons from bitter experience; those who survived the US assault, that is.

When President Obama addressed the country on January 5, 2016, about his latest push for gun control, Bloomberg-funded research provided the “facts” that Obama cited: •​“Congress actually voted to make it harder for public health experts to conduct research into gun violence; made it harder to collect data and facts and develop strategies to reduce gun violence.” •​“After Connecticut passed a law requiring background checks and gun safety courses, gun deaths decreased by 40%. Forty percent.” •​“Since Missouri repealed a law requiring comprehensive background checks and purchase permits, gun deaths have increased to almost 50% higher than the national average.” •​“A violent felon can buy the exact same weapon over the internet with no background check, no questions asked. A recent study found that about 1-in-30 people looking to buy guns on one website had criminal records—one out of 30 had a criminal record. We’re talking about individuals convicted of serious crimes—aggravated assault, domestic violence, robbery, illegal gun possession. People with lengthy criminal histories buying deadly weapons all too easily.

One in every four women will experience domestic violence in her lifetime. An estimated 1.3 million women are victims of physical assault by an intimate partner each year. 85% of domestic violence victims are women. Historically, females have been most often victimized by someone they knew. Females who are 20-24 years of age are at the greatest risk of nonfatal intimate partner violence. Most cases of domestic violence are never reported to the police. Witnessing violence between one’s parents or caretakers is the strongest risk factor of transmitting violent behavior from one generation to the next. Boys who witness domestic violence are twice as likely to abuse their own partners and children when they become adults. 30% to 60% of perpetrators of intimate partner violence also abuse children in the household.

Some forms of abuse are not physical but they are emotional and spiritual in nature. These abuses, unlike physical assault, cannot be quantified or photographed. Emotional and spiritual abuses include attacking a target’s sense of self, public humiliation, denial, blame, withholding of words and affection, threats, and a raging temper among a host of other strategies. The effects of emotional and spiritual abuse are qualitative; they shatter the soul and break the hearts of targets but they do not place the target in immediate danger of losing her life.

The bottom line is this: "Married women are notably safer than their unmarried peers, and girls raised in a home with their married father are markedly less likely to be abused or assaulted than children living without their own father," they write. Of course, while playing the game of manipulating statistics, they pointedly ignore the fact that domestic violence rates have been falling at the same marriage rates are falling.

There is hardly any crime in this little village. There are drug-related crimes, like everywhere else, but not terribly newsworthy ones—crimes of petty theft, shoplifting, and of course domestic assaults, which are violent but statistically stem from addiction and poverty, America’s crimes of the broken heart and soul.

Wiebe Criminal Defence offers aggressive legal defence against all criminal offences including Assault & Theft, Drug Offences & DUI, Domestic Violence, & more.

After I was assaulted, I felt lost and unsure of how to move forward. And I felt that way again after reporting the crime to law enforcement, and again after the trial for my case concluded. This book was born out of that feeling of being lost, and out of my deep desire to help other survivors find their way.

Unfortunately, our situation was not all that uncommon. This country has a frightening epidemic of abuse, large and pervasive. The National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NCADV) reports that more than 10 million people are abused by their partners every year, that one in three women have been abused by a partner, one in five have been severely abused, that every nine seconds a woman is assaulted or beaten, and that domestic violence accounts for 15 percent of the crime in the United States.

The “domestic violence” label was attention-grabbing fodder for the media, though. Columnists rushed to compare Solo with Ray Rice and Greg Hardy—two male NFL players who had recently been accused of horrific assaults on their female significant others—and demanded that Solo be kicked off the national team. Once the details of the arrest started to make the rounds, Solo posted a message online apologizing for “an unfortunate incident” but vowing she would be cleared of the charges, even if she couldn’t share her side of the story:

Then there was the Black Liberation Army, which murdered seventeen American police officers in the 1970s, including six in New York City alone. There was the Symbionese Liberation Army, of Patty Hearst kidnapping fame. On the other side of the spectrum was the United States Christian Posse Association, a precursor of Aryan Nations, which preached violent white supremacy. It was domestic terror groups such as these that led the assault on the United States. In one poll taken at the time, more than 3 million Americans favored a revolution. The election of Ronald Reagan as president in 1980 and the strength of capitalism brought an end to the socialist insanity that marked the prior decades. Even Bill Clinton tried to ride the prevailing winds. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act he signed in 1996 sought to combat the cycle of poverty by putting limits on welfare. Still, under the surface, the cracks in the Democrats’ foundation spread and deepened.

Climate tugs at the individual threads of conflict too; personal irritability, interpersonal conflict, domestive violence. Heat frays everything. It increases violent crime rates, swearing on social media, and the liklihood that a major league pitcher, coming to the mound after his team mate has been hit by a pitch will hit an opposing batter in retaliation. The hotter it gets, the longer drivers will honk their horns in frustration. And even in simulations police officers are more likely to fire on intruders when the exercises are conducted in hotter weather. By 2099, one speculative paper tabulated, climate change in the United States would bring about an additional 22,000 murders, 180,000 rapes, 3.5 million assaults, and 3.76 million robberies, burglaries and acts of larceny.

Violence does not need to be used very often; it merely needs to be convincing when it is used.

He hit her again. “I’m sorry,” she said. The young woman was scared, but this strange, obedient part of her at that moment wanted to get nearer to him. She’d tested him, but now it was time to go home. He terrified her. She wanted to get under the monster’s large arms and look to it for help. While he often hit her, he was capable of sweet nights and being lovely sometimes. She wanted that part of him to return, and maybe she could bring that soft part back if she surrendered. The deep voice always commanded her. It told her what to think and what to do so that even when he caused her pain, she would look to him for pleasure.

Hawaii island has a history of police officers murdering their wives.

Alcohol can be an extremely destructive beverage. It is probably more damaging to society than all illicit drugs combined. Cirrhosis of the liver, strokes, breast cancer, oral cancers, domestic violence, and sexual assault have all been linked to alcohol abuse. In North America, there is an alcohol-related car accident every thirty seconds. And, as if that wasn’t frightening enough, excessive alcohol can shrink the genitals and have feminizing effects on men. The male drinker produces less testosterone, so his sex drive flags. But, for those who want to look on the bright side, less testosterone means less likelihood of baldness.

The Anarchist does not want to destroy all existing institutions with a crash and then inaugurate the substituting process on their ruins. He simply asks to be let alone in substituting false systems now, so that they may gradually fall to pieces by their own dead weight. He asks the humble privilege of being allowed to set up a free bank in peaceable competition with the government subsidized class bank on the opposite corner. He asks the privilege of establishing a private post office in fair competition with the governmentally established one. He asks to be let alone in establishing his title to the soil by free occupation, cultivation, and use rather than by a title hampered by vested rights which were designed to keep the masses landless. He asks to be allowed to set up his domestic relations on the basis of free love in peaceable competition with ecclesiastically ordered love, which is a crime against Nature and the destroyer of love, order, and harmony itself. He asks not to be taxed upon what has been robbed from him under a machine in which he has practically no voice and no choice. In short, the Anarchist asks for free land, free money, free trade, free love, and the right to free competition with the existing order at his own cost and on his own responsibility,— liberty. Is there any violence in all this? Is there artificial levelling? Finally, is there any want of readiness to substitute something in the place of what we condemn? No, all we ask is the right to peaceably place Liberty in fair competition with privilege. Existing governments are pledged to deny this. Herein will reside the coming struggle. Who is the party of assault and violence? Is it the Anarchist, simply asking to be let alone in minding his own business, or is it the power which, aware that it cannot stand on its own merits, violently perpetuates itself by crushing all attempts to test its efficiency and pretensions through peaceable rivalry?

Cheryl was a domestic abuse victim. She was in court eleven times because her husband had assaulted her. She felt terrible shame. Every time he beat her he screamed about it being her fault because she was so heavy. She felt the accusations were true. She knew she had problems with food and that she needed to do something. But it helped her get through the day. Besides, it was the one thing he could not control. There was an added dividend: Being fat made her sexually unattractive. She hated sex. She was an incest victim. Food was protection. Food was comfort.

The landmark ACE (Adverse Childhood Experiences) study, which I’ll discuss in more detail in chapter 9, showed that women who had an early history of abuse and neglect were seven times more likely to be raped in adulthood. Women who, as children, had witnessed their mothers being assaulted by their partners had a vastly increased chance to fall victim to domestic violence.

The landmark ACE (Adverse Childhood Experiences) study, which I’ll discuss in more detail in chapter 9, showed that women who had an early history of abuse and neglect were seven times more likely to be raped in adulthood. Women who, as children, had witnessed their mothers being assaulted by their partners had a vastly increased chance to fall victim to domestic violence.15

The instinctual response today is to sue. This is so ingrained in our culture that our pop media mocked the knee-jerk reaction of litigation decades ago. To call in the sanctioned arbiters of fault and justice is the modern man's immediate response to challenge or a severe offense. No one dares knock down the doors of the offending party and seek immediate justice. That is barbaric. We are a nation of laws forgetting to check the men behind those laws. Men have been domesticated so quickly to shun all instincts and cry barbaric at the thought of beating someone who has wronged them. A child is stomped in school. Out of nowhere and for no reason. Eyewitness accounts from other students support the victim. What were the monitors and teachers on watch doing? The school gives poor excuses for not preventing it or breaking up the assault earlier. Parents are angry and the school-assigned cop even states that the family is making a big deal.

especially when they did so with sadistic glee, later turned out to be capable of anything. Which was why he wanted to throw the book at Kirby Thomas. But he never found out whether he’d overcharged him or not because days afterward the young man was arrested for beating his live-in girlfriend to a pulp and was later sent to the Wyoming State Penitentiary in Rawlins for domestic assault. Despite pleas from Kirby’s outfitter father, Earl, Joe didn’t drop his case against his son. Earl maintained that the hunting violations, whenever they were to be adjudicated, would damage his reputation as a prominent guide and outfitter in the area. Instead, Joe held the charges in reserve for when he could serve them in person. He did it

Many women in the area complained of feeling unsafe, and local statistics supported their fears. Cases of assault, harassment, domestic violence, and rape had risen dramatically since the once-sleepy region began attracting thousands of male workers. Women spoke of carrying concealed weapons when they shopped at the grocery store and avoiding the bar scene, teeming with lonely males looking for female company. Rumors were rampant about where the next attack might occur—I frequently overheard women chatting about which areas to avoid or where a friend of so-and-so was attacked while walking to her car.