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In reply to the discussion: Has this ever happened to you? No? Then I am glad. [View all]calimary
(80,693 posts)experienced that kind of horror you did, sheshe2. Thank you for sharing this. I can only imagine the anguish, day after day after day.
The VAWA simply MUST be passed. It amazes me to watch the republi-CONS stand so firmly against legislation like this - and then in the next breath they're turning around and scratching their heads, wondering why they're stuck in the ratings basement with women voters. NO DUH!!! And every last one of them has women in THEIR lives too. More infuriating, republi-CON women are against this too. It just doesn't compute for me. I don't get it. I do not get it. What the hell are they THINKING??????????
I am grateful every day that I never went through that or was exposed to it. My mother's father beat her and was abusive to her siblings, too. She'd tell me stories about going to school and feeling her skirt stick to the back of her thighs because he'd beaten her so badly she had weeping sores on the back of her legs. BASTARD. I always found it rather remarkable that, as scarred as she surely was by that, she never hit me. It stopped with her and never got passed on to me. She could be verbally abusive, and I realized early-on that the nursery rhyme "sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me" - is NOT true. Words CAN hurt. But she NEVER hit me. And for that I'm grateful and actually kind of proud of her. So many batterers learn it from their own parents and then pass it on.
And it just stunning to think - that somewhere in this country, at this moment I'm writing this or you're reading it - some woman is being beaten by someone close to her.