Survivors and Victims are important

I have read alot of survivor and victim accounts overall but particularly recently. It is so important that all of us see both the statistics and the people. We need to see beyond number to the real people being maimed, raped and murdered by husbands, partners, fathers, brothers...

If you are lucky enough to survive, the mental and emotional scars don't really leave you. Even when you are years into recovery and living a balanced and positive life, triggers are just lurking. They can be very innocuous - this Saturday I was gardening with my lovely family, in the undergrowth I was clearing lay the head of a garden fork. Not the same one that had once been held at my throat by my father many years ago, (that one had been thrown away years ago). Nevertheless, this normal occurrence in safe company was very triggering. Even I said nothing at the time to anyone other than my brother. Why? Because I was embarrassed, ashamed of my reaction. Essentially ashamed that this abuse had even occurred to me, let alone that it still affected me all these years after in safe company.

If a stranger had come up to me in my garden and held a weapon at my throat would I have felt the same levels of guilt and shame? Unlikely. Yet because what occurred was 'family' even I, who know academically the theory and the practice of abuse, and am vehement about survivors being able to speak out, still carry not only a shame but a shamed silence about much of what happened. Including to safe people who know what happened.

We as society and as individuals must stop seeing domestic abuse as somehow only a 'family' affair, it IS a crime, theft, stalking, verbal assault, physical assault, sexual assault, rape, murder - ALL criminal acts in UK laws.

We as survivors and victims must also STOP blaming ourselves. And you guys out there NEED to STOP blaming us too. There is NO excuse for abusing another person. NONE! We do NOTHING to deserve what those abusers do to us.

There is a wonderful, though moving and triggering, piece in the Independent newspaper covering the urgent need for humanising victims and survivors of DV and seeing beyond the 'domestic' aspect to the abuse and related crimes.

My friend the murder statistic ~ article link