I’m the mother of two daughters, one of whom is chronically ill. I’m also a historian, and I teach classes at a small college in the Boston area. This semester I’m teaching a course on Women in American History, where I have twenty-five women as students.
Well, I had twenty-five last week, this week I have twenty-four.
One of my students was killed last weekend by her boyfriend.
She was stabbed over twenty times in her torso, more than half of those in the back. Her boyfriend had suffered from some sort of psychotic break, had checked himself out of the mental health facility where he was being treated, and less than 48 hours later stabbed my student to death.
It is still fairly early in the semester and I didn’t know her that well. She was beautiful and inquisitive and earnest with her answers during class discussion. Her papers were well written. Her last paper, a critique on Linda Kerber’s Women of the Republic, a book about women during and directly after the Revolutionary War, talked about how women took incremental steps to be increasingly active in the public sphere, to be accepted in political life, to be able to enter into legal contracts. They slowly strove to be perceived as equals.
They still are.
According to the National Coalition against Domestic Violence, 1 in 7 men have been victims of severe domestic violence in their lifetime, while the number of women who have experienced severe domestic violence is 1 in 4. Twenty five percent of women have experienced severe physical domestic violence in their life time. That’s hardly equal.
Additionally, 72% of all murder-suicides involve an intimate partner; 94% of the victims of these murder suicides are female.
It’s too many, it blows the mind.
I’m reminded that it can happen to anyone, that the Rob Porter scandal proves this. He was violent not with one women, but with both of his ex-wives, and the White House has known about it and has kept him on as a staff member until pictures were released where one of his ex-wives had a black eye from his fist. I’m reminded of the Ray Rice episode where the NFL knew he had been charged with domestic assault but didn’t do much about it until the video was released to the public showing him knocking his wife out cold in an elevator and then dragging her body into the hotel lobby. These men were protected by silence, and their wives were punished by the Exact. Same. Silence.
As a historian, I started recording oral histories of women who attended the 2017 Women’s March on Washington, interviewing women from across the country. Many women said the reason they attended was because they had been sexually or physically assaulted, and having a man who bragged about sexual assault and then called it “locker room talk,” hit them at a visceral level. And I can’t help but determine that the #MeToo movement has everything to do with the Women’s March, it was the genesis. But it also goes to show that even from my student’s words, even from the Revolutionary War, women strive to be seen and to be protected equally under the law.
Women are now exhausted and angry. I am exhausted and angry.
My daughters saw me upset as I picked them up from school and I had to tell them why. A student of mine had been murdered. I had to go to class the next day and talk to my students in that class, some of whom shared their own encounters with domestic violence. I shared the news story on facebook, and along with multiple messages of support, I got more messages from friends who had survived domestic abuse and I never knew it.
And yesterday morning I talked to my fourteen year daughter old about domestic violence. I told her it’s never ok for a boy to touch you in ways that you don’t want to be touched, in a sexual way or in a physical way. It’s never ok for a man to hit you. Never . Never. That her father and I will always support her, no matter what, no matter how old she is, that she can always come home. That this is important, remember it. And I hope she will. And I’ll tell her younger sister when she gets a little older. And I’ll tell them again as time goes on. It’s never OK.
I debated whether or not to write this blog post, and put it on this site, a site for caring for chronically ill kids. But it’s important. We need to talk about it. We owe it to the women who have suffered domestic violence. To those who lost their lives. To those who currently live in fear.
Our silence protects the abuser and punishes the abused. We cannot stay silent.
Brave Fragile Warriors: Caring for Kids with Chronic Illness 