Young couple goes on van tour of US, boy comes back with van - no girl
I am having a thought. I love all of you guys here. But this discussion brings up the thought of me wondering if there are men here on this message board (not necessarily in this thread) who have abused just thinking about what the statistics are. And, okay, maybe not here because you're all great; but I also wonder sometimes about just the people we come across either in our worklife or church life or gym life, etc., etc. You KNOW we all know someone who abuses we just don't know it and sometimes I just look around like maybe at a restaurant and think, Which one of you is it? I've had the thought when in a group of woman because I know the statistic is 1 in 4. So if I'm in a random group of, say, over 20 women I know there has to be at least 1 or 2 cos I know it's not me.
In college I had a - what would now be described as a toxic relationship - with a young woman. There was a party at our house (maybe 4 other roommates at the time), she pulled me into our room to fuss at me about something about the party. She was getting pretty heated, I was drunk and did not want to be yelled at anymore so I turned to walk away. She grabbed my elbow to pull me back and I just spun and pushed her without even realizing it
i got pretty disgusted with myself and we just stayed in the room after that
thats the only time I’ve ever ‘laid hands’ on a woman (but I’ve also never been in a fight with a guy since 5th grade)
and Marsha what I was implying before about the gun is that dealing with DV by coaching girls seems like fixing gun violence by teaching people how to dodge bullets - obviously we want to teach girls/women* how to protect themselves, but stopping someone before the become abusers seems much more effective
..
I never really heard much about DV - aside from anecdotes here and there - until I started teaching (so mid 30s), and I was SHOCKED by how much of it there was, but I only heard about it bc classes were mostly girls feeling safe enough to tell their stories
pretty sure it would have been very effective if, at my all boys high school, we heard stories from victims and then got counseled about warning signs, et al
the * was to acknowledge that DV can and does happen in same sex relationships as well - male, female, et al