Welcome to Litsy!

The lives of too many women, many of them mothers, feel like prisons due to domestic violence. A difficult, but important read.

#Imprisoned #MayMoms
@Eggs @Alwaysbeenaloverofbooks

The most dangerous place for a woman to be is at home - I read that sentence over and over and everytime my heart hurts. It's still does.

This book tackles domestic abuse from all angles, from the abused to the abuser. Why does she stay? Why does he stay? The escalation, the backwards and forwards. The police departments, the shelters, the advocates.

I have a full review on Goodreads, link on my profile.

I forgot to post this beautiful card from @AmyK1
Just love it....thank you Amy!❤️🤓
#septemberswap

Thank you and thank Amy. I'm not sure who sent this as I didn't see a Litsy handle 😬 But I love it!

#septemberswap
@BennettBookworm

Whatever we envision when we envision a victim, there is one universal truth to each and every one of those images: none of us ever picture ourselves.

“I played dead.” For victims of intimate partner terrorism, it‘s an autonomous survival response. They play dead, and play dead, and play dead again.

There is almost nothing more terrifying to a child than seeing an adult—who is meant to be in control, who is meant to have all the answers—break down sobbing.

... Victims who appear hostile and show solidarity with their abusers when the police show up are often taking a safety measure, sending a message not to the police but to their abusers. See my loyalty? Please don‘t kill me when the cops leave.

The very fact that intimate partner violence is so often addressed in civil court, rather than criminal court, gives insight into how we as a society still view it.

In a religion in which family killing is not only rationalized, but also celebrated as the ultimate form of love, devotion, and faith, perhaps the connection is not a stretch today.

Violence should be approached as a public health problem, which in its most radical form means that it is preventable. We talk as if once people are grown up they should be able to deal with whatever happens, but the fact is that human beings are so much more vulnerable and fragile than we recognize. Then we‘re surprised when we see how vulnerable and fragile they are that they break.

Please don‘t kill me. How many women across time? I think. How many have pled the same sentence? Women around the world, in a thousand languages, across the centuries, the span of human existence. Please don‘t kill me. See how polite we women are? We say ‘please‘ when we are begging for our lives.

Violence is a darkness that migrates into a community, infects it so that it multiplies.

I fed off women who had no dads, women who were sexually assaulted. And then I stole their souls.

Traffic is like violence: there‘s always another avenue to take to avoid it.

...called women “bitch.” Girlfriends, yes, but even sisters and mothers were bitches. Sometimes, “my old lady.” No woman had an identity; no woman had a name. “By calling her a bitch all the time,” he said, suddenly, “what I was really doing was taking away her humanity.”

Hurt people, hurt people. But...

Healed people, heal people, too.

It‘s not women who need to learn violence; it‘s men who need to learn nonviolence.

Read any news story today about domestic violence homicide and you‘re likely to see some version of the question ‘why didn‘t she leave?‘ What you almost surely won‘t see is ‘why was he violent?‘ Or better yet, ‘why couldn‘t he stop his violence?‘

Money followed its own cannibalistic logic on the streets. The more you got, the more you had to lose.

Even today, in this world of hyper-connectivity, where we can get a drone to deliver our toilet paper and a robot to vacuum our carpets, we still seem unable to create a database that speaks across state lines and across civil and criminal courts when it comes to violent people and their histories.

Abusers are simultaneously powerful and powerless. Both in control and out of control.

The question, isn‘t a matter of leaving or staying. It‘s a matter of living or dying. They stay because they choose to live. And they die anyway.

Leaving is never an event; it‘s a process.

I cannot stop buying books...anyone else a book addict? What books have you recently purchased? #books #tbr #bookhaul

Not a very cheery subject but a very affecting book that gives you an inside understanding of domestic abuse. I am wiser for having read it because there are many nuances to abusive behaviour that I hadn‘t ever considered. Especially regarding that age old question of Why Don‘t They Just Leave? I would recommend this to anyone interested in social issues.

It took me a couple weeks to read this. I absolutely believe everyone should read this. We‘re all touched by domestic violence somewhere in our lives. Such heavy subject matter but necessary to read. It tried to tackle questions such as why do victims side with their abusers? Why don‘t they leave? Can abusive partners change?

In a study released in October 2018, the researcher April Zeoli looked at states where anyone served with a restraining order is automatically required to relinquish guns, and found there was a 12% drop in intimate partner homicides, yet only fifteen states required that guns in such instances be turned in.

Nonfiction time #amreading

What do you do if a bear is coming at you? Do you rear up and scream to make yourself big or do you play dead? You certainly don't sit and consider the wildlife protection services that might be available to you if the bear would only give you a little time to gather yourself together. And there's this: the bear isn't just coming at you. It's coming at your children.
Victims stay because they know that any sudden move will provoke the bear.

Over and over I asked, during the years I was researching this book, whether a violent man could be taught to be nonviolent. The answers almost always fell along these lines: police officers and advocates said no, victims said they hope so, and violent men said yes. This last response felt less to me like a theory and more like an expression of their willingness.

I have to believe if the tables were turned--if women were beating and killing men in such vast numbers--fifty women a month in the United States are killed by their intimate partners using guns alone--the problem would be on the front page of every newspaper in this country. Vast pools of funding would surface for researchers to figure out what's wrong with women today.

I hate this argument. First of all, animals have no voice. Second, we don't dump women in homeless shelters and then murder them within 48 hours if we can't find them a home. I'll bail on this book if she continues to prove that she doesn't know how to think.

Currently reading

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I started reading this book because I work with children and I thought this might give me some context for what some of them unfortunately go through and witness. This book does a whole lot more than give a little context. Everyone should read this.