They were in the kitchen. It was a small, minor disagreement, but he was frustrated and didn’t like her tone. He hit her. She was shocked; there was blood. That’s…
12 ways women are pressured, persuaded, and sometimes punished for refusing to organize their lives around men. Women are human beings in our own right. Yet across cultures, religions, families,…
If your vision of justice requires Black women to accept more danger, you have not finished thinking about justice. When Black women ask to be protected, we are not asking…
Emotional abuse can be difficult to explain in a society that struggles to respect women’s safety boundaries in the first place. So much of emotional abuse involves someone knowing what…
Why women’s refusal, independence, and desire for safety are so often treated as offenses against men. There is something deeply troubling about a man hearing a woman say no and…
When a woman asks for safety, listen to the danger she is describing before you begin searching for something wrong with her character. We absolutely must reflect on how we…
The crime was the perpetrator’s choice, not the victim’s failure to behave perfectly. There is something deeply troubling about the way we expect women and girls to behave after sexual…
“It was ‘that’ kind of man who harmed you, not this kind.” But how can we prevent harm in the future? What did we miss? What went wrong? The burden…
You know, none of these problems are new. The problem has always been getting the funding to serve everyone who needs safety. When we talk about domestic violence, sexual assault,…
Some ideas about sexual violence have been around so long that people repeat them without recognizing what they are. A woman says she was drinking before an assault, and somebody…