Quotes About Abuse

The second day of the book tour I stopped an interviewer and said, "Aren't you asking the wrong question?" The interviewer stared at me blankly. "The question is not really why I chose to share my experiences with other people. The question we should be dealing with is why does anyone mistreat their children? I think that's what we should be talking about.

Rape is as much of a weapon of war as the machete, club, or Kalashnikov.

You were breaking my bones and spirit and forcing your beastly love on me: a brute, a savage, a wild Indian wouldn't do what you did, slobbering round me and calling it love and filling me with children month after month and year after year while I hated and detested you and screamed in your ears to get away from me, but you wouldn't let me go.

Therapists hear horrifying stories of child abuse that never make the headlines. The media seem drawn to stories about children who die, as if the suffering of those who survive is any less terrifying.

The effects of parental abandonment, abuse, and neglect can be mitigated if children have access to a relationship with a loving adult such as a teacher, a minister, a neighbor, or a relative who is empathically attuned to the child's feelings.

Gjuha është një putanë, me të cilën kushdo mund të abuzojë si të ketë dëshirë.

A heavy drinker who suffered debilitating bouts of depression, Smith claimed that he had been raped not once but twice by one of Prince Charles's manservants. Smith also insisted that he saw the same manservant engaged in a sexual act with a senior member of the royal family.

Taking people away from the land where their families have lived for generations turns out to be politically destabilizing. Americans kind of perfected that model. They just never considered the possibility that it would happen to them, in no small part because of how they had abused that land.

People accuse therapists of seeing abuse where there isn't any; of fabricating memories for their patients. Maybe this is true. But if so, it's because neurosis without a perceptible cause is very hard to accept. How does one fix a problem that arose from nothing?

Men with high baseline levels of testosterone marry less frequently, have more adulterous affairs, commit more spousal abuse, and divorce more often.

Men with high baseline levels of testosterone marry less frequently, have more adulterous affairs, commit more spousal abuse, and divorce more often. As a man's marriage becomes less stable, his levels of testosterone rise. With divorce, his testosterone levels rise even more. And single men tend to have higher levels of testosterone than married men.65 The

the not uncommon sexual humiliation of priests as a prelude to their murder,

Torture when inflicted on children becomes indefensible. Even among those who believe that torture is a defensible practice to extract information, the case for inflicting pain and abuse upon children proves impossible to support.

Ultimately, these acts of abuse and aggression offer evidence of a new reality emerging in the United States that enshrines a politics of disposability, in which growing numbers of people are considered to be a dispensable drain on the economy and thus an affront to the sensibilities of the rich and powerful.

The arts of power and its minions are the same in all countries and in all ages. It marks its victim; denounces it; and excites the public odium and the public hatred, to conceal its own abuses and encroachments.

Our authorities leave us no doubt that the trust lodged with the oligarchy was sometimes abused, but it certainly ought not to be regarded as a mere usurpation or engine of tyranny.

Comic books, movies, radio programmes centered their entertainment around the fact of torture. With the clearest of consciences, with a patriotic intensity, children dreamed, talked, acted orgies of physical abuse. Imaginations were released to wander on a reconnaissance mission from Cavalry to Dachau. European children starved and watched their parents scheme and die. Here we grew up with toy whips. Early warning against our future leaders, the war babies.

White women who were raped were expected to die as a result of their abuse. Their degradation was expected to be totalizing, making postrape life unimaginable. But black female slaves survived their rapes and continued the work they were forced to do—a circumstance used as evidence that they were not properly feminine.11 According

I am overwhelmed sometimes and feel a great deal of wonder at words, just simple words and how deeply we can touch each other with them, though I know that most of the time language is the most abused of all human abilities or traits.

Their mouths were wet and soured with beer, and when they pushed themselves down on her, they felt small and soft between her thighs. She stared at the stains on the ceiling, and waited until they gave up or fell asleep, and then she rolled out from under them.

[Domestic violence is] a carefully laid physical, financial and psychological trap.

It's incredibly dangerous to leave an abuser, because the final step in the domestic violence pattern is: kill her.

Even the best truth tellers (like Jesus) are hated and abused by those who prefer darkness to light.

Emotional abuse systematically degrades, diminishes, and can eventually destroy the personhood of the abused.