Quotes About Violence

Mostly when people write about the trauma of gender violence, it's described as one awful, exceptional event or relationship, as though you suddnly fell into the water, but what if you're swimming through it your whole life, and there is no dry land in sight?

Women are afraid of being raped and murdered all the time and sometimes that's more important to talk about than protecting male comfort levels. Or

Violence is one way to silence people, to deny their voice and their credibility, to assert your right to control over their right to exist. About

confinement is always waiting to envelope you.) Some pranksters put up a poster announcing another remedy, that all men be excluded from campus after dark. It was an equally logical solution, but men were shocked at being asked to disappear, to lose their freedom to move and participate, all because of the violence of one man. It is easy to name the disappearances of the Dirty War as crimes

This should remind us that violence is first of all authoritarian. It begins with this premise: I have the right to control you.

When you say lone gunman, everyone talks about loners and guns, but not about men

In the fall of 2017, we began to consider anew how violence, hate, and discrimination push people out, and how the stories we have are haunted by the ghosts of the stories we never got.

Domestic violence, mansplaining, rape culture, and sexual entitlement are among the linguistic tools that redefine the world many women encounter daily and open the way to begin to change it.

about sixty-six thousand women are killed by men annually, worldwide, in the specific circumstances they began to call "femicide." Most of them are killed by lovers, husbands, former partners, seeking the most extreme form of containment, the ultimate form of erasure, silencing, disappearance. Such deaths often come after years or decades of being silenced and erased in the home, in daily life, by threat and violence. Some women get erased a little at a time, some all at once.

A woman is beaten every nine seconds in this country.

Violence is one way to silence people, to deny their voice and their credibility, to assert your right to control over their right to exist. About three women a day are murdered by spouses or ex-spouses in this country.

We have far more than eighty-seven thousand rapes in this country every year, but each of them is invariably portrayed as an isolated incident.

There are other things I'd rather write about, but this affects everything else. The lives of half of humanity are still dogged by, drained by, and sometimes ended by this pervasive variety of violence. Think of how much more time and energy we would have to focus on other things that matter if we weren't so busy surviving.

If that term [sexual assault] confuses you take out the word sexual and just focus on assault, on violence, on the refusal to treat someone as a human being, on the denial of the most basic of human rights, the right to bodily integrity and self-determination.

So many men murder their partners and former partners that we have well over a thousand homicides of that kind a year—meaning that every three years the death toll tops 9/11's casualties, though no one declares a war on this particular kind of terror.

nearly two-thirds of all women killed by guns are killed by their partner or ex-partner).

I think we would understand misogyny and violence against women even better if we looked at the abuse of power as a whole rather than treating domestic violence separately from rape and murder and harassment and intimidation, online and at home and in the workplace and in the streets; seen together, the pattern is clear).

We have an abundance of rape and violence against women in this country and on this Earth, though it's almost never treated as a civil rights or human rights issue, or a crisis, or even a pattern.

It's not that I want to pick on men. I just think that if we noticed that women are, on the whole, radically less violent, we might be able to theorize where violence comes from and what we can do about it a lot more productively.

Sulkowicz's genius was to make her burden tangible, and in so doing make it something others could share. Solidarity has been a big part of this feminist movement against violence. ("An Insurrectionary Year")

Women are afraid of being raped and murdered all the time and sometimes that's more important to talk about than protecting male comfort levels.

Women are instructed, by the way victims are treated and by the widespread tolerance of an epidemic of violence, that their value is low, that speaking up may result in more punishment, that silence may be a better survival strategy. Sometimes this is called rape culture, but like domestic violence, the term narrows the focus to one act rather than the motive for many; patriarchy is a more useful overarching term.

If that term confuses you take out the word "sexual" and just focus on "assault," on violence, on the refusal to treat someone as a human being, on the denial of the most basic of human rights, the right to bodily integrity and self-determination.

I felt hemmed in, hunted. Over and over women and girls were attacked, not for what they'd done, but because they were at hand when a man wished to. To punish is the word that comes to mind but for what might linger as a question. Not for who, but for what they were, we were. But really for who he was, a man who had the desire and believed he had the right to harm women. To demonstrate that his power was as boundless as her powerlessness.