Help Stop Domestic Violence


What you can do to help stop domestic violence

PROTECT YOURSELF:
  • From emotional and physical abuse in your own relationships.
  • With a personal support network; friends, neighbors, minister/priest, family, co-workers, and domestic abuse advocates.
BREAK THE SILENCE:
  • Demand accountability from the system and from the individual perpetrators.
  • Listen to and believe women and children.
  • Look for warning signs that a woman or child is in trouble.
  • Support battered women's advocacy programs and/or shelters, sexual assault crisis centers, and other grass roots organizations fighting violence.
HONOR AND RESPECT SURVIVORS OF ABUSE:
  • Honor individual women and children in every step of their struggle to escape abuse.
  • Respect each survivor's timing and process in the journey of healing.
TAKE A STAND AGAINST EVENTS AND MATERIALS THAT:
  • Minimize battering (such as jokes about "keeping her in line").
  • Confuse sex and violence.
  • Demean women and children, and, in doing so, diminish men.
SUPPORT EDUCATIONAL PROGRAMS THAT:
  • Teach non-violent ways to resolve conflict.
  • Distinguish between sex and violence.
  • Recognize the connections between violence against women and the sympathetic oppressions of racism, sexism, ageism, able-bodyism, anti-Semitism, militarism, and homophobia.
ORGANIZE COMMUNITY ACTION:
  • Plan a fund-raiser for a battered women's advocacy program to raise needed funds and educate the community about available services.
  • Hold a candlelight vigil or ceremony to remember the victims of domestic abuse, to honor the survivors, and to celebrate those working to end violence against women and children.
  • Promote religious services that speak out against the use of violence in the home.
  • Present a school/college/university program that focuses on prevention curriculum and teach peace.
  • Ask librarians and bookstores to set up displays of literature about domestic violence.
  • Keep issues before the public. Write letters to newspapers; perhaps editorials or comments to print media as well as TV and radio.
  • Organize inter-agency activities with police departments, PTA's, community colleges/universities, women's clubs, girl and boy scouts, other social and civic groups or human service agencies.
  • Have a speaker, or facilitate discussion, at a Brown bag lunch.
  • Donate time, used cell phones, money, clothing, furniture, hygiene and personal care products.
DEMAND LEGISLATIVE ACTION THAT WILL:
  • Increase funds for existing programs to continue or expand their services.
  • Designate funds for new services or special projects.
  • Support legislation that enforces existing statutes to protect battered women and their children.
  • Create services that are linguistically and culturally appropriate.
source: http://wadt.org/wadtcorporation/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=28&Itemid=87
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