Tag: abuse

The inside story of author Blake Bailey’s grooming of middle-school girls.

“When you lay down to go to sleep, you better be prayed up, because there’s no guarantee you’re waking up.”

“She was always afraid of my voice. That was the defining factor of our relationship — fear of what I would say and write and do. She’s afraid of … the narrative that I possess.”

Amber Leventry recalls how getting sober forced them to confront and reveal important truths about their identity.

Beatrix M. Rooney discovers a tragic secret that may explain her brother’s descent into cruelty and violence.

Reema Zaman on deciding she would no longer live to please men, and how women’s self-esteem and self-love is a revolutionary act of dissent.

Max Harris didn’t cause the warehouse fire in which 36 people died, yet he’s being held responsible for it.

“In my family, love was the slow accumulation of moments in which I was not subjected to great harm.”

Chelsea G. Summers considers the ways in which outwardly ‘progressive’ men like former Attorney General Eric Schneiderman use kink as a cover for abuse.

Carmen Maria Machado discusses the nuances of “benevolent sexism,” who gets to define the #MeToo movement, and how it should progress.

Tricia Romano considers what speaking out about abuse at the hands of Eric Schneiderman has cost a close friend.

In the aftermath of rape, Alison Kinney discovers that a new lover who helps you to heal can just as easily betray you.

When industrial laundry workers weren’t touching human feces, they had to deal with third-world working conditions and sexual harassment.

Meeting an apparently less fortunate child in her daughter’s kindergarten class transports Amber Leventry back to her own painful youth.

Emily Van Duyne wonders why Sylvia Plath’s accounts of Ted Hughes’s violence toward her have been so frequently dismissed or minimized.

The rickety ’98 Volvo wagon didn’t look like much, but it provided Debbie Weingarten and her children safe passage to a new life.

Katherine Laidlaw recalls an abusive relationship in which her boyfriend threatened her with a boxcutter.

At Backchannel, Andrew McMillen writes on how one young Wikipedia admin fights back at trolls by raising the profile of notable women in science, one new Wikipedia page at a time.

In Oregon Humanities magazine, Loretta Stinson writes about her moment of clarity, the night when she saw her fifteen-year relationship to an abusive alcoholic for what it was, and decided to walk out on him.

It never fully leaves. Years later, you find yourself at a New Year’s party and idly ask a friend a question about dads, and after 10 minutes’ conversation you realize both of you are on the verge either of insensate bawling, or else ready to throw a chair through a window. Or you find yourself […]

In February, Mary Beard, a classics professor at the University of Cambridge, gave a lecture at the British Museum titled “Oh Do Shut Up Dear!” With amiable indignation, she explored the many ways that men have silenced outspoken women since the days of the ancients. Her speech, which was filmed by the BBC, was learned […]

“Sacha Coupet, a professor of law at Loyola University Chicago, who used to work as a guardian ad litem and as a psychologist, worries that the Adoption and Safe Families Act, by promoting ‘adoption as the normative ideal,’ has made it easier to avoid ‘dealing with the enormously complex root causes of child neglect and […]

“Domestic abuse is believed to be the most frequently unreported crime, and it is particularly corrosive when it involves the police. Taught to wield authority through control, threats or actual force, officers carry their training, their job stress and their guns home with them, amplifying the potential for abuse. “Yet nationwide, interviews and documents show, […]

“Escape.” Natasha Gardner, 5280 Magazine