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Abuse is treatment that is harmful, cruel and / or violent

• Abuse: Treat with cruelty or violence, especially regularly or repeatedly.  Oxford Dictionary
• Abuse: To use something for the wrong purpose in a way that is harmful or morally wrong.  Cambridge Dictionary
• Abuse: To treat in a harmful, injurious, or offensive way.  Merriam Webster
• Abuse: To commit sexual assault upon. Dictionary.com
• Victimhood,  Bullying, Violence,  Cruelty, Healing,  Kindness,  Love

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One in four children are victimized or abused

• One in four children being victimized? That’s about seven children in every classroom. That’s a significant proportion of the population. Wendy Craig

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Much child abuse is preventable

• Child abuse does not go away, but 90 percent of child abuse is preventable. Karen Adams

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Screaming at children is abuse

• Screaming at children over their grades, especially to the point of the child’s tears, is child abuse, pure and simple. It’s not funny and it’s not good parenting. It is a crushing, scarring, disastrous experience for the child. It isn’t the least bit funny. Ben Stein
• Spanking and verbal criticism have become, to many parents, more important tools of child rearing than approval. Phil Donahue

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Hitting children is abuse

• I understand how a parent might hit a child- it’s because you can look into their eyes and see a reflection of yourself that you wish you hadn’t. Jodi Picoult

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Terrifying children is abuse

• To terrify children with the image of hell, to consider women an inferior creation—is that good for the world? Christopher Hitchens

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Putting children into the public eye is abuse

• I think it’s child abuse to have someone in the public eye too young. Society basically values wealth and fame and power at the cost of well-being. In the case of a child, it’s at the cost of someone’s natural development. It’s already hard enough to develop. Alanis Morissette

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Child abuse shuts down feelings

• Abuse manipulates and twists a child’s natural sense of trust and love. Her innocent feelings are belittled or mocked and she learns to ignore her feelings. She can’t afford to feel the full range of feelings in her body while she’s being abused—pain, outrage, hate, vengeance, confusion, arousal. So she short-circuits them and goes numb. For many children, any expression of feelings, even a single tear, is cause for more severe abuse. Again, the only recourse is to shut down. Feelings go underground. Laura Davis

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Abuse leaves scars

• The human race tends to remember the abuses to which it has been subjected rather than the endearments. What’s left of kisses? Wounds, however, leave scars. Bertolt Brecht
• But even when I stop crying, even when we fall asleep and I’m nestled in his arms, this will leave another scar. No one will see it. No one will know. But it will be there. And eventually all of the scars will have scars, and that’s all I’ll be– one big scar of a love gone wrong. Amanda Grace (But I Love Him)
• From every wound there is a scar, and every scar tells a story. A story that says, I survived. Fr Craig Scott

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Abuse leaves wounds

• There are wounds that never show on the body that are deeper and more hurtful than anything that bleeds. Laurell K. Hamilton
• It is unfortunate for our peace, that unmerited abuse wounds, while unmerited praise has not the power to heal. Thomas Jefferson

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Child abuse casts a long shadow, even into adulthood

• Child abuse casts a shadow the length of a lifetime. Herbert Ward
• Many abused children cling to the hope that growing up will bring escape and freedom. But the personality formed in the environment of coercive control is not well adapted to adult life. The survivor is left with fundamental problems in basic trust, autonomy, and initiative. She approaches the task of early adulthood――establishing independence and intimacy――burdened by major impairments in self-care, in cognition and in memory, in identity, and in the capacity to form stable relationships.  She is still a prisoner of her childhood; attempting to create a new life, she reencounters the trauma. Judith Lewis Herman
• You know all that sympathy that you feel for an abused child who suffers without a good mom or dad to love and care for them? Well, they don’t stay children forever. No one magically becomes an adult the day they turn eighteen. Some people grow up sooner, many grow up later. Some never really do. But just remember that some people in this world are older versions of those same kids we cry for. Ashly Lorenzana
• Often men who have been emotionally neglected and abused as children by dominating mothers bond with assertive women, only to have their childhood feelings of being engulfed surface. While they could not ‘smash their mommy’ and still receive love, they find that they can engage in intimate violence with partners who respond to their acting out by trying harder to connect with them emotionally, hoping that the love offered in the present will heal the wounds of the past. If only one party in the relationship is working to create love, to create the space of emotional connection, the dominator model remains in place and the relationship just becomes a site for continuous power struggle. Bell Hooks

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As a society, we must protect children at risk

• Child abuse and neglect offend the basic values of our state. We have a responsibility to provide safe settings for at- risk children and facilitate permanent placement for children who cannot return home. Matt Blunt
• There can be no better measure of our governance than the way we treat our children, and no greater failing on our part than to allow them to be subjected to violence, abuse or exploitation. Jessica Lange
• In my view, there is nothing more vicious and outrageous than the abuse, exploitation and harm of the most vulnerable members of our society, and I firmly believe that our nation’s laws and resources need to reflect the seriousness of these terrible crimes. Bob Ney

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Listen to children

• The only reason why child abuse is alive today, is because we as adults fail our children when we fail to listen to them. Listen to a child today! Heather McClane
• Listening

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Don’t allow the cycle of abuse to continue

• Instead of treating your child like how you were treated, treat them with the same love and attention you wanted from your parents while growing up. Johnathon Anthony Burkett
• The healthy man does not torture others. Generally, it is the tortured who turn into torturers. Carl Jung

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Honour yourself, even if that means divorcing your parents

• Why isn’t there a commandment to “honour thy children” or at least one to “not abuse thy children”? The notion that we must honour our parents causes many people to bury their real feelings and set aside their own needs in order to have a relationship with people they would otherwise not associate with. Parents, like anyone else, need to earn respect and honour, and honouring parents who are negative and abusive is not only impossible but extremely self- abusive. Perhaps, as with anything else, honouring our parents starts with honouring ourselves. For many adult children, honouring themselves means not having anything to do with one or both of their parents. Beverly Engel, Divorcing a Parent
• Self-love

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More thoughts on child abuse

• I believe the best service to the child is the service closest to the child, and children who are victims of neglect, abuse, or abandonment must not also be victims of bureaucracy. They deserve our devoted attention, not our divided attention. Kenny Guinn
• Childhood should be carefree, playing in the sun; not living a nightmare in the darkness of the soul. Dave Pelzer
• …after all, who isn’t a survivor from the wreck of childhood? Nicole Krauss
• Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed. G. K. Chesterton

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Domestic abuse is also widespread

• Domestic violence causes far more pain than the visible marks of bruises and scars. It is devastating to be abused by someone that you love and think loves you in return. It is estimated that approximately 3 million incidents of domestic violence are reported each year in the United States. Dianne Feinstein
• Every woman who thinks she is the only victim of violence has to know that there are many more. Salma Hayek
• One in three women may suffer from abuse and violence in her lifetime. This is an appalling human rights violation, yet it remains one of the invisible and under-recognized pandemics of our time.” Violence against women is an appalling human rights violation. But it is not inevitable. We can put a stop to this. Nicole Kidman
• If the numbers we see in domestic violence were applied to terrorism or gang violence, the entire country would be up in arms, and it would be the lead story on the news every night. Rep. Mark Green

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Domestic abuse does not only happen to adults

• Domestic violence does not only happen to adults. Forty percent of girls age 14 to 17 report knowing someone their age who has been hit or beaten by a boyfriend, and approximately one in five female high school students reports being physically and/or sexually abused by a dating partner. Dianne Feinstein

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Domestic abuse can feel devastating

• Domestic violence causes far more pain than the visible marks of bruises and scars. It is devastating to be abused by someone that you love and think loves you in return. Dianne Feinstein

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People stand bad relationships because the abuse gets turned up by degrees

• I’ve heard that people stand in bad situations because a relationship like that gets turned up by degrees. It is said that a frog will jump out of a pot of boiling water. Place him in a pot and turn it up a little at a time, and he will stay until he is boiled to death. Us frogs understand this. Deb Caletti
• There’s a phrase, “the elephant in the living room,” which purports to describe what it’s like to live with a drug addict, an alcoholic, an abuser. People outside such relationships will sometimes ask, “How could you let such a business go on for so many years? Didn’t you see the elephant in the living room?” And it’s so hard for anyone living in a more normal situation to understand the answer that comes closest to the truth; “I’m sorry, but it was there when I moved in. I didn’t know it was an elephant; I thought it was part of the furniture.” There comes an aha-moment for some folks – the lucky ones – when they suddenly recognize the difference. Stephen King

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More thoughts on domestic abuse

• Why is it that men can be bastards and women must wear pearls and smile? Lyn Hecht Schafren
• Men say they love independence in a woman, but they don’t waste a second demolishing it brick by brick. Candice Bergen
• A woman must not depend upon the protection of man, but must be taught to protect herself. Susan B. Anthony
• All marriages are sacred, but not all are safe. Rob Jackson
• When you are with someone who is never pleased, it is time to stop trying to please him.
• It’s not fair. It’s not fair that he lets his rage take over, that he lets it rule him. I don’t know why he has to let it rule him. I don’t know why he has to be two people. I don’t know why he gets to be two people, and I only get to be me, the one who is here to take what he has to give, and who is here to pick up the pieces afterward. Amanda Grace, But I Love Him
• If you give me any problem in America I can trace it down to domestic violence. It is the cradle of most of the problems, economic, psychological, educational. Salma Hayek

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When abused, never judge yourself

• Don’t judge yourself by what others did to you. Kennedy

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When abused, remind yourself you’re not responsible for another person’s actions

• The next time the abuser tells you that the reason he is abusive towards you is something you have done, remind yourself that no one is ever responsible for another person’s actions. The next time the abuser tells you that he wouldn’t get so angry with you of you would just try harder, remind yourself of how hard you have been trying and how little effect your efforts have had on his actions. And most important, the next time you are lying in bed crying over something the abuser has said or done, remind yourself of who you were before you met him.  Darlene Lancer
• Responsibility

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When abused, don’t surrender your dignity

• One’s dignity may be assaulted, vandalized and cruelly mocked, but it can never be taken away unless it is surrendered. Michael J. Fox
• Dignity

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When abused, give yourself the benefit of the truth …

• You can bend it and twist it… You can misuse and abuse it… But even God cannot change the Truth. Michael Levy
• You’ve given him the benefit of the doubt long enough. Now it’s time to give yourself the benefit of the truth.  Darlene Lancer
• Often things are as bad as they seem. Sheldon Kopp
• Truth

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… recognising that love is about freedom and power, not about control and possession

• Love is about giving freedom and power, not about gaining control or possession. Jeffrey Fry
• After a while you learn the subtle difference between holding a hand and chaining a soul and you learn that love doesn’t mean possession and company doesn’t mean security. And you begin to accept your defeats with your head up and your eyes ahead with the grace of an adult not the grief of a child. And you learn to build your roads today because tomorrows ground is too uncertain for plans and futures have ways of falling down in mid-flight. After a while you learn that even sunshine burns if you get too much, so you plant your own garden and decorate your own soul instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers. And you learn that you really can endure. That you really are strong and you really do have worth and you learn and you learn… Veronica A. Shoffstall
• No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow. Alice Walker
• You can have a pet zebra and put that zebra into a small cage every day and tell the zebra that you love it, but no matter how you and the zebra love each other, the fact remains, that the zebra should be let out of that cage and should belong to someone who can treat it better, the way it should be treated, someone who can make it happy. Joy Bell C.
• They don’t like the thought of someone else making demands on the person whom they see as belonging entirely to them. Jodi Picoult
• If someone loves you, it should feel like they love you.
• Love, Freedom,  Power

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Don’t tolerate abuse by allowing it to be repeated over and over

• … you don’t have to wait for someone to treat you bad repeatedly. All it takes is once, and if they get away with it that once, if they know they can treat you like that, then it sets the pattern for the future. Jane

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Break your silence on your abuse …

• Abuse changes your life…Fight back and change the life of your abusers by breaking your silence on abuse! Patty Rase Hopson
• The consequences of your denial will be with you for a lifetime and will be passed down to the next generations. Break your Silence on Abuse! Patty Rase Hopson

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… by telling your abuse stories to others

• The worst part of holding the memories is not the pain. It’s the loneliness of it. Memories need to be shared. Lois Lowry
• Reflect on how much pain you’ve suffered, and remember your abuser’s broken promises. Consider the fear you feel and how your children are being affected. Gather your courage to take action. Realize that God offers you real hope for a life free of abuse. Take stock of trustworthy people with whom you may safely share your story. Start by telling one person as soon as you can. Then reach out to others so you’re not relying on just one person to meet all your needs. Whitney Hopler
• Vulnerability

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Gain strength and courage by looking at your fear in the face

• You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, “I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along… You must do the thing you think you cannot do.” Eleanor Roosevelt
• Real courage owns up to the fact that we face a terrifying task, admitting that we are appropriately frightened, identifying sources of help and strength outside and within ourselves, and then going ahead and doing what needs to be done. Dr. Alla Renne Bozarth
• Many survivors insist they’re not courageous: ‘If I were courageous I would have stopped the abuse.’ ‘If I were courageous, I wouldn’t be scared’…Most of us have it mixed up. You don’t start with courage and then face fear. You become courageous because you face your fear. Laura Davis
• Fear, Strength, Courage

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Get out of abusive relationships

• It´s never too late to do the right thing. E. Matthewson
• Standing alone is better than standing with people who hurt you.
• Find the strength inside yourself to value your own worth more than staying with someone who only keeps you down.
• The journey to leave begins on the inside.
• I realize now I am a survivor. I am a stronger woman for opening my eyes and stepping away from someone who didn’t respect themselves and would never respect me. Lori
• I was heart broken, scared, I had a lot of anxiety, I was worried, I felt weak, and I had no idea how I was ever going to come up with the strength. But I just closed my eyes, and took a blind leap. I knew I had to get out of there. Casey
• One of the most difficult tasks in life, is removing someone from your heart.
• As painful as it is to admit that we are being abused, it is even more painful to come to the conclusion that the person we love is someone we cannot afford to be around.
• We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. E. M. Forster
• The first step toward success is taken when you refuse to be a captive of the environment in which you first find yourself. Mark Caine
• When it comes to abuse, you believe there’s no way out. There is always help. There is always a way out. Rev Donna Mulvey

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Leaving an abusive partner is difficult, scary and painful …

• Leaving an abusive partner is a very difficult thing to do. It frequently feels like you are failing, or destroying your family, or not trying to work things out, or not giving your partner “a second chance.” It hurts, and it’s scary. Blaine Nelson
• It hurts, and it’s scary. Blaine Nelson

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… but you owe it to put yourself out of harm’s way

• All too often women believe it is a sign of commitment, an expression of love, to endure unkindness or cruelty, to forgive and forget. In actuality, when we love rightly we know that the healthy, loving response to cruelty and abuse is putting ourselves out of harm’s way. Bell Hooks

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You have a right to a peaceful and free existence

• Everyone has a right to peaceful coexistence, the basic personal freedoms, the alleviation of suffering, and the opportunity to lead a productive life… Jimmy Carter
• Peace is not just mere absence of violence.
• None who have always been free can understand the terrible fascinating power of the hope of freedom to those who are not free. Pearl S. Buck
• Freedom, Peace

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Don’t be scared to press charges

• …when a wife wouldn’t testify, little punishment was meted out. Alex came to understand that only those who pressed charges ever became truly free, because the life they were leading was a prison, even if most of them wouldn’t admit it. Nicholas Sparks

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Writing can help you heal

• Remember that you own what happened to you. If your childhood was less than ideal, you may have been raised thinking that if you told the truth about what really went on in your family, a long bony white finger would emerge from a cloud and point to you, while a chilling voice thundered, “We *told* you not to tell.” But that was then. Just put down on paper everything you can remember now about your parents and siblings and relatives and neighbours, and we will deal with libel later on. Anne Lamott
• So often survivors have had their experiences denied, trivialized, or distorted. Writing is an important avenue for healing because it gives you the opportunity to define your own reality. You can say: This did happen to me. It was that bad. It was the fault and responsibility of the adult. I was—and am—innocent.” The Courage to Heal by Ellen Bass & Laura Davis. Ellen Bass
• Writing,  Reflection

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Forgiveness can help you heal

• Forgiveness is the only way to heal. We can choose to forgive because we feel compassion for ourselves. We can let go of the resentment and declare, “That’s enough! I will no longer be the big Judge that goes against myself.  I will no longer beat myself up and abuse myself/ I will no longer be the Victim.” Don Miguel Ruiz
• Anger makes you smaller, while forgiveness forces you to grow beyond what you were. Cherie Carter-Scott
• The price of hating other human beings is loving oneself less. Elderidge Cleaver
• For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind. Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Forgiveness

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Words of encouragement for those in abusive relationships

• Things don’t go wrong and break your heart so you can become bitter and give up. They happen to break you down and build you up so you can be all that you were intended to be. Charles Jones
• There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. Anaïs Nin
• Survivors of abuse show us the strength of their personal spirit every time they smile. Jeanne McElvaney
• In the end these things matter most: How well did you love? How fully did you love? How deeply did you learn to let go? Buddha
• If you can’t be thankful for what you have, be thankful for what you have… escaped. Menard’s Catalog
• I was never one to patiently pick up broken fragments and glue them together again and tell myself that the mended whole was as good as new. What is broken is broken — and I’d rather remember it as it was at its best than mend it and see the broken places as long as I lived. Margaret Mitchell

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Nobody abuses us more than we abuse ourselves

• But nobody abuses us more than we abuse ourselves, and it is the Judge, the Victim, and the belief system that make us do this. Don Miguel Ruiz
• Humans punish themselves endlessly for not being what they believe they should be. They become very self- abusive, and they use other people to abuse themselves as well. Don Miguel Ruiz
• Your best is going to change from moment to moment; it will be different when you are healthy as opposed to sick. Under any circumstance, simply do your best, and you will avoid self-judgment, self- abuse and regret. Don Miguel Ruiz

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Self-abuse comes from self-rejection

• Self-abuse comes from self-rejection, and self-rejection comes from having an image of what it means to be perfect and never measuring up to that ideal. Our image of perfection is the reason we reject ourselves the way we are, and why we don’t accept others the way they are. Miguel Ángel Ruiz
• Self-acceptance, Self-love, Self-forgiveness

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Self-abuse opens us to abuse from others

• If someone abuses you a little more than you abuse yourself, you will probably walk away from that person. But if someone abuses you a little less than you abuse yourself, you will probably stay in the relationship and tolerate it endlessly. Don Miguel Ruiz
• In your whole life, nobody has ever abused you more than you have abused yourself. And the limit of your self-abuse is exactly the limit that you will tolerate from someone else. Don Miguel Ruiz

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Open your eyes to the abuse of domestic and sexual slavery

• We are asking people to understand that slavery still exists today; in fact, according to a recent New York Times article, if you count the number of women and children in bonded labour, domestic slavery or sexual slavery today, there are more slaves in the world than at any other time in history. Charlotte Bunch

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Open your eyes to the abuse of genital mutilation

• Female genital mutilation targets little girls, baby girls – fragile angels who are helpless, who cannot fight back. It’s a crime against a child, a crime against humanity. It’s abuse. It’s absolutely criminal and we have to stop it. Waris Dirie

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Open your eyes to the abuse of animals

• Abuse yourself all you want – just leave animals out of it. Don’t wear fur. Steve-O
• Wild animals never kill for sport. Man is the only one to whom the torture and death of his fellow creatures is amusing in itself. James Anthony Froud

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Open your eyes to abuses of power

• The greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse. Edmund Burke
• What I fear most is power with impunity. I fear abuse of power, and the power to abuse. Isabel Allende
• I believe the root of all evil is abuse of power. Patricia Cornwell
• Anyone entrusted with power will abuse it if not also animated with the love of truth and virtue, no matter whether he be a prince, or one of the people. Jean de La Fontaine
• Power is what men seek and any group that gets it will abuse it. Lincoln Steffens
• Power without abuse loses its charm. Paul Valery

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Open your eyes to our abuse of the earth

• The earth we abuse and the living things we kill will, in the end, take their revenge; for in exploiting their presence we are diminishing our future. Marya Mannes
• We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to see it with love & respect. Aldo Leopold
• Environmental care

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Open your eyes to the ways we abuse our bodies

• You only get one body; it is the temple of your soul. Even God is willing to live there. If you truly treat your body like a temple, it will serve you well for decades. If you abuse it you must be prepared for poor health and a lack of energy. Ollie Hille
• Body image

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Be there for people who are abused

• There are far too many silent sufferers. Not because they don’t yearn to reach out, but because they’ve tried and found no one who cares. Richelle E. Goodrich

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Don’t passively allow abuse to happen

• Bullies may be the perpetrators of evil, but it is the evil of passivity of all those who know what is happening and never intervene that perpetuates such abuse. Philip Zimbardo

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Stand up for those who are abused

• To those who abuse: the sin is yours, the crime is yours, and the shame is yours. To those who protect the perpetrators: blaming the victims only masks the evil within, making you as guilty as those who abuse. Stand up for the innocent or go down with the rest. Flora Jessop, Church of Lies

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Some forms of abuse are best met with forbearance

• We should meet abuse by forbearance. Human nature is so constituted that if we take absolutely no notice of anger or abuse, the person indulging in it will soon weary of it and stop. Mahatma Gandhi
• Abuse if you slight it, will gradually die away; but if you show yourself irritated, you will be thought to have deserved it. Tacitus
• If you cannot endure abuse from another, just say a simple word or two, or else leave. Sri Sathya Sai Baba
• I do not waste my time in answering abuse; I thrive under it like a field that benefits from manure. Henry Labouchere

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• Everyone has a right to be stupid; some people just abuse the privilege.
• Never join with your friend when he abuses his horse or his wife unless the one is to be sold, and the other to be buried. Charles Caleb Colton
• I don’t have to take this abuse from you – I’ve got hundreds of people dying to abuse me. Bill Murray
• Self-abuse is the sincerest kind. David Gerrold

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