Interpersonal Violence

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This past week has been a harsh reality check for me. Interpersonal violence toward women is everywhere! I was reminded that even I'm not immune to it.

Saturday was my first day at my volunteer job. I'm working at a resale shop run by the local women's shelter. It's definitely rewarding, but it's hard being confronted with battered women.

Domestic violence comes in all types of forms. Emotional abuse is the one that bothers me the most. I think this is the one that none of us are immune to, and some women don't even realize it's happening. I witnessed and experienced this most as a teenager. Teenage boys will say and do such lovely things to keep you under their control. They'll say they will kill themselves if you break up with them. You break up with them anyways and they'll call you incessantly and harass you. (This is not only teenage boys. I've recently discovered that 40-year-old men will leave you 47 messages in under two hours.)

Teenage boys also have a tendency to tell their girlfriends that they can't hang out with their friends, coerce them into having sex and stalk them. It's not entirely the boy's faults. Society tells them these are romantic things to do.

In the movie, Valley Girl, Nick Cage's character gets dumped by his girlfriend. In an attempt to get back together with her, he randomly shows up at all her hangout spots and camps on her parent's front lawn. In real life, this would get him nothing but a restraining order, but he ends up getting her to go out with him again.

There is nothing romantic about emotionally abusing your girlfriend or ex-girlfriend. Stalking her and threatening her are not going to make her want to go back out with you. Showing up randomly at her job or at her hangout spots are not romantic and sweet! It's scary and intimidating.

I watched a Lifetime movie last night called "She's Too Young." It's the one where the whole school gets syphilis. In the movie, the main character gets asked out by "the most popular boy in school". He wants to have sex with her, but she tells him no. He then decides he no longer wants to hang out with her and wants to take her home. Instead of saying, "OK, going home and not hanging around with your loser ass sounds great", she decides to give him oral sex and gets syphilis in her mouth. This is a perfect example of emotional abuse and this situation happens all the time (minus the syphilis part).

I'm not really sure how comfortable I am talking about my experiences, but I know I'm not alone. According to the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, women experience about 4.8 million intimate partner-related physical assaults and rapes every year. My first experience with dating violence happened when I was 14-years-old. I consider myself lucky because I've learned from my experiences and use them to help empower other women to do the same. It's not my problem that these boys were totally screwed up, but I think it is a problem if I internalize it and don't help other women to do the same.

Interpersonal violence prevention should be taught in junior high and reiterated in high school health courses. Some young people don't know how to be in a healthy relationship and need to be taught. Parents could help, but I'm sure they this is where these kids learned this lousy behavior.

Until domestic and interpersonal violence is a thing of the past, you can find me at my volunteer job on Saturday afternoons.

For more information on Interpersonal Violence, please visit these websites:

http://www.now.org/
http://www.ncadv.org/
http://www.familyshelterservice.org/
http://feminist.org/


PS: Thanks to my women's studies degree and feminism, I learned about what happened to me and what I can do to prevent it. If you need someone to talk to, let me know.