Author Topic: #WhyIStayed: How abuse victims rationalized their situations  (Read 3713 times)

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Offline Ultimate Paragon

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#WhyIStayed: How abuse victims rationalized their situations
« on: September 10, 2014, 12:33:54 pm »
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/

Quote
Beverly Gooden is one of the few people on the Internet who hasn’t 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 wasn’t this new video footage, but people’s 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 don’t realize, asking ‘Why doesn’t 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 husband’s 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 didn’t seem to.

So Gooden logged onto Twitter, and “almost without thinking,” she says, she typed three tweets in quick succession:

Once she started, she couldn’t stop. Gooden listed nearly a dozen reasons it took her a year to leave her ex-husband: “he said he would change”; “I thought love would conquer all”; “my pastor told me that God hates divorce.” She ended them all with “#WhyIStayed.” She wasn’t trying to justify remaining in an abusive relationship, she said, but to illuminate why it is so difficult for women to leave. The situations Palmer and Gooden found themselves in are all too common. The National Coalition for Prevention of Domestic Violence estimates that 25 percent of women experience intimate partner violence, and according to the National Domestic Abuse hotline, it takes an average of seven tries for a victim to leave an abusive relationship. There are many reasons for this listed in the thousands of responses to Gooden’s “#WhyIStayed” campaign:

“People don’t realize that we’re asking the same question everyone else is asking. We’re wondering why we’re still there and why we’re even trying,” Gooden said. “I really hope this will help move the conversation from ‘Why doesn’t she leave?’ to ‘Why does he hit?’”

I'd say this is a necessary hashtag.

Offline ironbite

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Re: #WhyIStayed: How abuse victims rationalized their situations
« Reply #1 on: September 10, 2014, 02:23:24 pm »
Too bad it'll be coopted by trolls soon.

Offline Kat S.

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Re: #WhyIStayed: How abuse victims rationalized their situations
« Reply #2 on: September 10, 2014, 02:43:44 pm »
Yeah, I wonder which way the MRAs are going to spin this.  The sad thing is, statistics out there prove them wrong and Beverly Gooden right, but MRAs and their sort don't care about "human rights".  They care only about themselves.

Offline I am lizard

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Re: #WhyIStayed: How abuse victims rationalized their situations
« Reply #3 on: September 10, 2014, 03:46:01 pm »
Most likely we'll get one of more of the following

-saying the beating wasn't that bad and trying to shift some blame to her.

-Blaming feminism somehow

-But men...

-This wouldn't have happened if she stayed with nice guys like me!

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Re: #WhyIStayed: How abuse victims rationalized their situations
« Reply #4 on: September 10, 2014, 06:31:21 pm »
Remember when complex issues weren't constantly dumbed down to a couple of sentences on Twitter? Those were the days...

Offline Witchyjoshy

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Re: #WhyIStayed: How abuse victims rationalized their situations
« Reply #5 on: September 10, 2014, 06:41:47 pm »
Remember when complex issues weren't constantly dumbed down to a couple of sentences on Twitter? Those were the days...

It's like you didn't even read it beyond "twitter" and "hashtag".
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Offline Cerim Treascair

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Re: #WhyIStayed: How abuse victims rationalized their situations
« Reply #6 on: September 10, 2014, 07:22:49 pm »
This gives me chills.

Why? Because a couple of my relatives have had to escape from abusive relationships.  And they used some of the same rationalizations at the start of it all.  It took the rest of the family intervening to get them to realize just what had happened.
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Offline Kat S.

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Re: #WhyIStayed: How abuse victims rationalized their situations
« Reply #7 on: September 10, 2014, 10:01:21 pm »
Many people haven't dealt with domestic violence up close and personal.  Sadly, it's so easy for people to ask, "Why doesn't s/he leave that (insert choice insulting word)?!"  Unfortunately, it's really not that simple because:

-The abuse comes gradually.  Many domestic violence survivors will tell you that their partner did not abuse them from day one.  If they did, the victim would have simply left the person before it even started.  Usually, the partner first appears warm, charming, intelligent, caring, maybe a bit insecure in a way that draws you in, and other positive attributes.  After the person gets in the relationship, their abusive partner begins the first steps of abuse by trying to control and isolate them. 

-Love is an emotion, not a rational thinking process.  The abused partner has fallen in love with how the abuser initially portrayed him/herself.  So when the abuser says something like, "I'm so sorry I hit you, babe.  I promise not to do that again," his/her partner is more than willing to believe it.  Unfortunately, instead of going back to being "good", the abuser is back at point one on the Cycle of Abuse, and the abused partner is left still hoping for the abusive partner to "realize his/her errors" and change.  For a person or people trying to help the abuse victim, it can be very frustrating to witness a person not wanting to leave an abusive relationship at all.  It becomes a sit and wait game for the abused to realize that they're in an unhealthy relationship while you are giving them help and support through their problems.

-The abuser makes the environment and situation of the relationship very difficult for the abused partner to get out of, or at least creates that perception of such.  The abuser and abused may live in an area where the LGBT community is heavily looked down on and/or ignored, or may be a part of a religious group that does not agree with divorce whatsoever.  Sadly, many domestic violence incidents go unreported.  A huge part of the answer to the question of "Why does s/he stay?" is fear that if the abused leaves the abuser, his/her life will be ruined or worse, the abuser will kill him/her.  Statistics out there show that most domestic violence related deaths occur when the abused person is leaving or has already left the abuser.

Offline guizonde

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Re: #WhyIStayed: How abuse victims rationalized their situations
« Reply #8 on: September 11, 2014, 04:08:10 pm »
*grim laugh*


I wholeheartedly sympathize. I've been in a few, and god-damn, it never gets any easier to leave. Maybe it even gets worse. I almost gave up again. Just accepting that I deserve it all because I'm a bad person. Why am I a bad person? Because I got angry and said mean things. And I believed her. And her. And her.

It's tough, but not as tough as staying the whole nine yards.

An MRA would spin it into "men are abused as well". It's true. It's the minority (especially as it's underrepresented), but female-on-male abuse does exist. Does that mean we shouldn't talk about male-on-female abuse? According to the MRA's, yup. They're wrong. They're all wrong. There should be no difference. Abuse is abuse, and it's the sickest, wrongest thing ever. For the one that you love to make you endure hell... Nothing is more wrong.

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Offline Ultimate Paragon

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Re: #WhyIStayed: How abuse victims rationalized their situations
« Reply #9 on: September 11, 2014, 05:41:39 pm »
And it looks like DiGiorno Pizza completely missed the point:



I'll let the Joker sum up my feelings about this:

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFGens0_W-U" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFGens0_W-U</a>

Offline Kat S.

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Re: #WhyIStayed: How abuse victims rationalized their situations
« Reply #10 on: September 11, 2014, 06:03:42 pm »
Most likely we'll get one of more of the following

-saying the beating wasn't that bad and trying to shift some blame to her.

-Blaming feminism somehow

-But men...

-This wouldn't have happened if she stayed with nice guys like me!

Well, it certainly didn't take long for those from The Spearhead to start running their mouths, and yes, they basically used all the points above as excuses.  Link to article on We Hunted the Mammoth blog: http://wehuntedthemammoth.com/2014/09/11/leave-it-to-the-spearhead-to-come-up-with-the-most-repellent-take-on-ray-rice-ive-seen-thus-far/

Offline Beezlebub

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Re: #WhyIStayed: How abuse victims rationalized their situations
« Reply #11 on: September 11, 2014, 06:29:31 pm »
Quote
Maybe feminists think the patriarchy has secretly implanted little chips in women’s brains that lead them to seek out men who will beat them up.

Somehow, instead of choosing granola-crunching lesbians, these women make a beeline for musclebound athletes, beefy bikers and ghetto thugs.

It's people like these that made me stop identifying as an MRA.
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Offline solar.

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Re: #WhyIStayed: How abuse victims rationalized their situations
« Reply #12 on: September 11, 2014, 06:40:11 pm »




I'm not sure whether it's damage control or a sincere apology.

Offline Cerim Treascair

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Re: #WhyIStayed: How abuse victims rationalized their situations
« Reply #13 on: September 11, 2014, 06:49:26 pm »
My money's on sincere.
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Offline ironbite

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Re: #WhyIStayed: How abuse victims rationalized their situations
« Reply #14 on: September 11, 2014, 07:18:58 pm »
It is.  Whoever runs the twitter account completely misunderstood the hashtag.  When they realized their mistake, they deleted the tweet and offered up the apology.

Ironbite-good show there DiGiorno