The United Nations describes violence against women as a “pandemic in diverse forms.”[i] Thirty-five percent of women have experienced sexual and/or physical violence, often in intimate relationships. In some nations, an unimaginable seventy percent of women have suffered sexual and/or physical violence in intimate relationships.[ii] In every country in the world, the threat of sexual and physical violence is …
The Committee responsible for revising the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders has gone back and forth in their deliberations over Narcissistic Personality Disorder, but it looks like the diagnosis will remain. Never mind their concerns. I doubt omitting narcissism from psychiatry’s Bible would curb the common practice of hurling the label at foes …
Valentine’s Day is a day to celebrate love, and love certainly deserves celebration. Except, of course, when it is “crazy love”— a phrase Leslie Morgan Steiner gave to her memoir, Crazy Love, of domestic violence as well as to the TED talk below. Her brief, 16 minute account of her experience of domestic violence is …
What if there is something fundamental about empathy such that when we cannot act on it, we lose part of ourselves, perhaps even our humanity? What if we have unwittingly created a world in which we chip away at our capacity for empathy, and with it, one of the unique traits of humankind: the ability …
I typically ignore national awareness initiatives saddled to particular months. There are simply too many of them. For example, October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month; Crime Prevention Month; Health Literacy Month; Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender History Month; National Breast Cancer Awareness Month; National Cyber Security Awareness Month; National Disability Employment Awareness Month; National Family Sexuality …
In her documentary film, ‘Til Death Do Us Part (2008), Vita Lusty brings fresh insight to the plight of women languishing in prison for killing their abusive domestic partners. Rather than tackling the perhaps unanswerable question of whether or not killing is ever justified—even in the face of chronic, life-threatening violence—Lusty artfully reveals how justice …
