What’s Not Talked About…

Domestic violence is something that is never talked about, you only hear about it in whispered over a coffee or at the hair dressers… “Did you hear about what happened to Jane?” “Oh how horrible!”

We are a gasped when we see Ray Rice hit his then girlfriend in the elevator. We blame the victim and we don’t understand why they don’t leave. Take a look at what the NFL did at first; they just gave him a two game suspension, it wasn’t until the public outcry that the league took stronger action.

We have stereotypes of the victim, low income, a minority, and female, but all this are wrong. DV is not limited to anyone race or income, men are also victims of DV. DV happens in same-sex couples and it happens to trans-people as well. When I first got involved with the Connecticut TransAdvocacy Coalition it was after they were contacted around 2000 by a DV shelter in Massachusetts where they were looking for a shelter for a trans-woman who was a battered by her partner. They couldn’t find anywhere that would accept her and CTAC could find a shelter anywhere here in Connecticut that would take her. She finally found a shelter in New York City that would take her in.

In the blog xojane there is a post about domestic violence…

I’ve never publicly talked about the abuse I suffered in my first relationship.

It was being transgender and being a sex worker that has stopped me. I am afraid that because I am trans, my story will be trivialized. A trans woman getting beat up by a man is a practically a pop culture trope at this point. I don’t want to give anyone the opportunity to validate a negative assumption about my mental health, either as a trans woman or porn performer. Transitioning and doing porn are two of the healthiest things I have ever done.

I’m not a caricature, I’m not a morality tale, I’m not a two-minute back-story at the opening of a crime show. I was a little girl from Richmond, VA, who fell in love with her first boyfriend.
[…]
Without missing a beat, he cracked me across the face with his open hand. I sat there stunned. The backseat was stunned as well. They slowly slunk out of the car and went into the house. Jack theatrically sped out of the gravel driveway, driving like Cruella De Vil, barreling down the road in hysterics with my hands clenched to the passenger's seat, bracing for disaster. This sort of tantrum would become routine over the next few years. To this day I cannot argue with my current husband when we are in a car.

I didn’t even realize I was becoming an “abused woman,” in part because I had too much self-loathing to consider myself a “real woman.”

She is typical of many battered spouses, they live in fear for their or their kids’ lives if they leave and that fear is justified.