Never give up believing in a better world.
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I’ve been feeling a lot of sadness & anger over the repetitive violence towards women and minorities.
I’ve tried to understand why some men hurt women, so my daughter might not face the same experience & to raise my 2 boys in a way that they would NEVER hurt a woman.
Some of my findings are below, but first a few statistics:
- 1 in 3 women are subjected to physical or sexual violence.
- 1 in 7 women have been stalked by an intimate partner to the point that they felt they would be harmed or killed.
- 1 in 3 women have experienced sexual harassment at work.
- 1 in 5 women in the United States have experienced sexual assault/rape.
- Young women, low-income women & some minorities are disproportionately victims of domestic violence & rape.
This is the “normal” we women are living in.
From my experience, the men who do these sorts of things are not easily identifiable as “violent” or “criminal”. I’ve personally experienced most of that list above, & the men who did those things to me were, per mainstream culture, “normal”, from “good” families, financially well off, no criminal history, etc. So, what leads them to hurt another person?
Here are some of my findings OR what I call…Why Hurt People, Hurt Other People:
➡️ Men have lots of trauma from the enculturation of “toxic masculinity” & it lives in their bodies & festers into rage, violence. Some men have been taught that “emotions are weak” & use violence, anger & rage as a release. We need to help men learn to feel their emotions without violence.
➡️ Violence for men is glorified on TV, as is degradation of women. This sort of programming gets into men’s (& women’s) subconscious, even if they are consciously, “love women”. My advice – just turn off the TV.
➡️ Most men don’t feel “safe” in our hierarchical, patriarchal culture, & use power & control over others to try & feel “safe”. We need to change this narrative into something inclusive & safe for everyone.
Never give up believing that this violence will end one day. Like the butterfly who gets beaten back by the hurricane, there will be sun at the end of this storm.