General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThe woman who started #WhyIStayed on Twitter:
Beverly Gooden is one of the few people on the Internet who hasnt watched the graphic, grainy video of Baltimore Ravens linebacker Ray Rice assaulting his wife (then fiance) Janay Palmer in an elevator. After all, she was in that situation herself four years ago. She knows what domestic violence looks like well enough not to need this disturbing reminder.
What got her blood boiling wasnt this new video footage, but peoples response to it.
The overwhelming tone was, Why did she stay? Gooden, a human resources manager from Charlotte, N.C., told The Washington Post. I felt that people just dont realize, asking Why doesnt she leave? is such a simple question for a very complex issue.
Gooden should know. She survived a violent relationship with her college sweetheart, a man she describes as attractive and talented, who could romance me and say all the right things, but who regularly verbally and physically abused her.
Isolated from her family, feeling responsible for her husbands anger and still desperately in love with the man she had met at school, it took her a year to realize that the relationship might kill her and another two months for her to plan her escape. She can understand why Palmer has stayed with the man who knocked her unconscious in an elevator in February why she might have shouldered the blame for that violent incident. But as she saw it, the commenters on television and Twitter didnt seem to.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/09/09/whyistayed-she-saw-herself-in-ray-rices-wife-janay-and-tweeted-about-it-so-did-thousands-of-others/?tid=trending_strip_4
tblue37
(65,477 posts)IdaBriggs
(10,559 posts)geek tragedy
(68,868 posts)Orsino
(37,428 posts)...just one with a lot of varying and complex answers, as Gooden says.
It's worth examining how and why for so many people staying becomes, or is perceived as becoming, the least bad of all options.
Borchkins
(724 posts)I am on the board of a nonprofit advocating for deaf men, women and children who are the victims of domestic violence. It can take someone 5 times to leave an abuser before they stay away for good.
Read the book "Little Fish" by Shelli Manning. It's a fictionalized account of her break away from her abuser.
B
catrose
(5,071 posts)one of the articles said it took 7 times. If it's down to 5 now, that's progress! <not sarcasm>
Dont call me Shirley
(10,998 posts)Violence against women and partners is a sick disease permeating the pyches of people all over the world.
We must begin to promote the opposite to violence, debasement and hatred.
Spread compassion, kindness, peace, understanding
ChisolmTrailDem
(9,463 posts)BlancheSplanchnik
(20,219 posts)If it helps even just a few people who didn't get it, it'll be a good thing.