Quotes About Abuse

For decades (really centuries), the Roman Catholic Church, the Jehovah's Witnesses, and the ultra-Orthodox Jews, among others, have handled reports of clergy abuse as though the public good were not their problem and have insisted on silence as they refused to report the crimes to authorities.

Second, because of their ignorance, some refused to believe a child who tried to tell them about the abuse. Indeed, in some circumstances, the abused child was beaten by a parent for having the nerve to suggest their beloved clergy would do something so heinous, so abuse piled on top of abuse.

The abuses by individual clergy in religious organizations are evil; the persistent cover ups by religious organizations, which empowered clergy pedophiles to get ever more victims, is worse; but the Roman Catholic hierarchy's lobbying against access to justice for all child sex abuse victims is about as cynical as it gets.

After being arrested in June 2000, Reardon pleaded guilty of 75 counts of abuse, including rape, of 24 boys, and received up to 50 years in prison for his crimes. The YMCA quickly settled the boys' claims against it; but the church held out for another year.46 The Boston Archdiocese finally paid $85 million to settle the claims of 552 victims, including Reardon's, in September 2003.

This has been a repetitive pattern in the United States, where the Roman Catholic Church, the Jehovah's Witnesses, Orthodox Jews, and other denominations have had evidence that one of their own was a predatory pedophile, yet they responded by ignoring the problem, ultimately endangering thousands of children.

For example, it is commonplace for the states to impose mandatory reporting requirements on professionals who have regular contact with children and suspect abuse. An obvious category would be clergy. The Catholic Church's bishops, however, invested in lobbying to obtain exemptions for clergy so that they would not have to report child abuse (knowing as it did that many of its priests were in fact abusing children).

The Vatican even today, under the popular Pope Francis, continues to prevaricate as it says that bishops should report abuse…if the law requires it. This year, the Italian bishops disclosed that they will not report clergy abuse to the authorities, because Italy does not require it. The Vatican knows full well that the law often does not require clergy to report, because its own bishops lobby to ensure it doesn't!

Not all freedom from the law occurs as a result of legislation. Sometimes there is religious "liberty" from the law when prosecutors fail to enforce the law and instead pander to religious leaders, ergo, perceived voting blocs. For decades, prosecutors across the United States knew about the abuse in the Catholic dioceses, but hesitated to prosecute for fear of Catholic backlash.

Every year, 4,744,000 women in the United States are physically assaulted by their partners.

Every day, three women are murdered by their male partners.

You wanted to believe that the sniper had a reason. That he wasn't just a broken guy who'd been abused by his uncle or whatever. Wanting to believe that there's a logic behind insanity.

When you have no basis for an argument, abuse the plaintiff.

Le dijo a Nariño que Colombia era un campo militar[6] y no una sociedad funcional. Mientras peleaba en solitario contra los abusos del gobierno, había visto cuan sobornables y corruptos podían ser los políticos y cuan incapaz había sido de controlarlos.

the emphasis Scripture (COL. 3:19) places on instructing husbands to care for and respect their wives just as Christ did the church leaves no room for excusing a husband's violent and abusive behavior toward his wife

Adolescence is a stressful passage for even the most well-adjusted teenagers. It is the stage at which we must come to terms with our sexual bodies and all the anxieties and responsibilities of becoming an adult. This task is especially difficult for children who have been sexually abused, who feel ashamed and disgusted by their bodies and fear that becoming more sexually desirable will only put them at greater risk of victimization.

Among self-injurers, at the root of dissociation and behind all of the symptoms of traumatic stress, from numbness to loss of control, is a range of painful childhood experiences, including emotional deprivation, physical neglect, emotional abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, and childhood loss. Because the combination of pain, shame, and grief from these early experiences often remains unresolved, feelings of dread and emptiness can build up and quickly grow to unbearable proportions.

Children who are blamed for their own abuse also have great difficulty trusting their perceptions. "When adults say 'It didn't happen,' or 'You wanted it'—those kinds of comments really eat away at a kid's sense of reality," says psychologist David Frankel. "Cutting grounds you; the pain is real. In that light, self-mutilation can be an effort to avoid a state of disorganization where you don't know what reality is.

Naming is an exercise of power. Renaming involves a transfer of power. Unnaming is a stripping of power from the unnamed and often an abuse of power on the part of those who presume to reduce names to numbers, for instance. It takes courage to name what is being deliberately and defensively obscured. Plain language is not always welcome.

And there are so much easier ways to destroy a woman. You don't have to rape her or kill her; you don't even have to beat her. You can just marry her. You don't even have to do that. You can just let her work in your office for thirty-five dollars a week.

FOOD is the most widely abused anti-anxiety drug in America, and EXERCISE is the most potent yet underutilized antidepressant.

Forgiveness is created by the restitution of the abuser; of the wrongdoer. It is not something to be squeeeeeezed out of the victim in a further act of conscience-corrupting abuse.

We have freedom to do good or evil; yet to make choice of evil, is not to use, but to abuse our freedom.

Better a thousandfold abuse of free speech than denial of free speech.

Freedom doesn't become 'lost' through abuse; freedom is lost through our failure to exercise it.