First Step

Our November story on domestic violence (on newsstands now!) has struck a chord. The advocacy community praised it (though I received some understandable flak for not running the crisis hotline number: 251-4445). Survivors identified with it and took the time to let us know. But best of all, we’ve heard an anecdotal story or two about how it helped bring someone the courage to leave an abusive situation.

That’s exactly why we titled the article “Seeing is Believing.” If you see yourself or a loved one in one of those remarkable stories of survival, you might believe in yourself and your situation. You might acknowledge that it’s real, and happening to you, and that you need to get help.

The title was also intended to shed light on one of society's greatest failures because so often domestic violence goes unnoticed or ignored by friends, neighbors, employers and the media. It takes a village to recognize and refuse to allow chronic and dangerous emotional and physical violence. And when we do so, we take the power out of the hands of the abuser. It becomes a community problem—like homelessness, burglary, or jaywalking—that is no longer tolerated just because it goes on behind closed doors. It says to the abuser: what you are doing is wrong, even illegal. So stop, get help, or go to jail.

The subject has so deeply affected the author of the article, Maggie Ginsberg-Schutz, that she is building an online community of support for a new blog called Violence UnSilenced. Here’s Maggie’s latest update on her own terrific blog, which is spawning her new advocacy campaign.

When the domestic violence blog goes live, I’m going to ask survivors to speak out. And because they are brave enough to speak out, I’m going to ask the rest of us to pledge to listen. I hope you will take up that challenge. Please, keep listening.

A few days after Maggie’s article came out, I ran into my friend Bill at the Harmony Bar. Bill is a writer and a poet, a gadfly and a grandpa … an all-around good guy. Though I respect his politics, we usually disagree. And yet, when we got to talking about domestic violence Bill launched (as Bill is wont to do) into a diatribe about women’s liberation. If women are not free, healthy and educated, Bill told me, economies collapse, democracies fail and societies are ruined. The world needs more women in power, he continued, because they won’t let their sons go off to war without a fight of their own.

While Bill was pontificating I thought of the Taliban in Afghanistan and their oppression of women. I thought about how every nine minutes a woman in the U.S. is beaten. I thought about how women still earn substantially less than men, which is often why they can’t leave an abusive situation. I thought about my mom, who helped get my hometown’s first battered women’s shelter off the ground. How she would make me close my eyes when we drove there because even a little girl might tell the wrong person where it was.

But not everybody understands the fundamental truth about women like Bill does—he and I do agree on that one. Which is why we need more survivors telling their stories to Maggie and more Maggies launching blogs and more moms volunteering at shelters and more Bills spreading the gospel from barstool to barstool. We all have something we can offer the cause.

What can you do?