So I read the article. Flabbergasting. Sickening really. Sorry... I'm just one of those people who speak my mind.
There is a section on this forum that highlights bullying. Online bullying - in particular. We've all read the recent accounts. They're heartbreaking. Rational adults speak against it. No one considers the slander, horrific and even threatening comments by online bullies as "free speech". I'm lost as to why that could even be a question???
Regardless of what someone things of Jodi Arias - Alyce LaViollette is a hero. She's a woman who's dedicated her life to highlighting domestic abuse. Changing the way society thinks about it. Creating programs that address the problem.
I'm a woman who was never abused. Independent, headstrong (but funny) and very self-aware.
My sister is not.
Today I live with her after a terrible incident that ended 10 years of domestic violence and abuse. The kind that would make most people's hair stand on end. She was battered, raped, degraded and broken in every way you can break a human being. She escaped one night with her kids when her husband tried to kill them all. I came - the big sister. Moved in - helped and stayed and am still helping.
We went through the court process while her (now ex) was charged, tried, convicted and sentenced. The sentence never undid the harm. It never will.
The day Alyce LaViolette took the stand I listened. 5 minutes in - I ran to get my sister. She had to hear what this woman was saying. We stayed glued to the trial during her testimony. We have her book on order at our local book store (currently sold out).
What my sister learned from that testimony was more than she learned from 4 years of reading, therapy, talking, discussing, trying to work things out in her own head and heart.
The trial part - the Jodi Arias issues - they all faded into the background.
I know there are many others out there - abused and abuser alike who heard all that and maybe, just maybe are beginning to understand abuse a bit better.
I don't know Ms Arias. I wasn't present in that bathroom. I don't know what happened. The Prosecutor doesn't either. Nor does Ms Wilmot, nor Kurt Nurmie, nor the doctors who testified, nor the friends, family, police officers. They're all just doing their best to give their insight in the course of justice.
But I do know this. Alyce is an amazing woman. SHE'S not on trial. SHE didn't kill anyone. She gave her professional opinion, in a court of law - and she is certainly entitled to do so - without expecting harm to come to her. I hope she can put the bullies behind her and I wish her all the strength.
A very large proportion of those 'bullies' are women like your sister, abused and battered women. They certainly don't share your opinion of AL. We live in an insane asylum, this culture is insane. Well it's not just this culture, domestic violence occurs all across the globe.
I am 53, grew up poor, raised by a single Mom raising six children ages 12-2. Four females, and of the four of us, one was abused. We are all headstrong women, my sisters and I, but only one of us got into an abusive situation. Looking back my sister says she should have filed for divorce the morning after the wedding. But she didn't. She had dozens of instances where she should have left, all along the way, but she didn't. Even before children were born, but she didn't. Hearing her reasons why, I can't come away with anything other than, 'that's stupid'. I just find it impossible to understand why anyone, man or woman, could use any rationale to steadfastly remain in a situation where they know they are being hurt. How can love and beatings/abuse/hurt occupy the same place in the human mind?
To me it's like willingly walking into a lion's den to be mauled over and over and then decry it with "Why is this animal continuing to maul me over and over?" It doesn't matter that it all began with the lion growling at you, then roaring at you, then batting at you with his paws, and so on and so on. The general direction is clear, and that is in the direction of more serious battering.
I know these observations aren't politically correct, but you can't say I haven't 'walked in their shoes' as I walked very closely and intimately next to a battered woman. No one deserves to be abused or battered, but when you don't leave NO MATTER the reason, you are tacitly giving your abuser permission to mistreat you. And at some point the abused person runs to the government and demands that they 'fix' the situation, the situation that they have refused to alleviate of their own free will. The govt: We will press charges. The battered person: Oh no, don't do that. Wash, rinse, repeat. It completely defies logic or rational thinking.
So feel free to pile on and call me heartless and without compassion towards victims of domestic violence. I'm just at a loss as to why it continues, and in fact, seems much more prevalent today than at the dawn of feminism. There have always been brutal and bullying men, but where are the strong women that feminism promised? Why did my sister behave in a way that her three sisters would NEVER have behaved? We had identical parentage, identical environments, we got the same messages from our Mother, it is just baffling to me.
And I know it's a complex issue, and one battered woman is very different from the next battered woman. Getting back to AL, she has worked her whole life to offer someone to listen, a hand to hold, a resource for aid to battered women. But in terms of this trial, all she offers are fanciful excuses and an imagined boogie man to attempt to get a cold-blooded killer released from the murder charge the defendant so rightfully deserves.
All of the above: MOO