Abuse Must Stop

I saw a banner ad on a website that basically said “To stop an abusive man, teach him violence is wrong when he is a child.”

So I went to the site and wandered around a while. Family Violence Prevention Fund works to prevent violence within the home, and in the community, to help those whose lives are devastated by violence because everyone has the right to live free of violence.

They have a program called “Founding Fathers” and this pledge:

We call ourselves Founding Fathers because we intend for this crucial beginning to give way to a new kind of society – where decency and respect require no special day on the calendar, where boys are taught that violence does not equal strength and where men stand with courage, lead with conviction and speak with one voice to say, “No more.”

Domestic violence is not fiction.

• Estimates range from 960,000 incidents of violence against a current or former spouse, boyfriend, or girlfriend per year to three million women who are physically abused by their husband or boyfriend per year.
• Around the world, at least one in every three women has been beaten, coerced into sex or otherwise abused during her lifetime.
• Intimate partner violence is primarily a crime against women. In 2001, women accounted for 85 percent of the victims of intimate partner violence (588,490 total) and men accounted for approximately 15 percent of the victims (103,220 total).
• While women are less likely than men to be victims of violent crimes overall, women are five to eight times more likely than men to be victimized by an intimate partner.

Perhaps what I found most disturbing was an article from June:

12 Nations Cited for Human Trafficking
June 29, 2006

The U.S. State Department’s 2006 annual Trafficking in Persons Report estimates that 800,000 people, most of them women and children, are victims of human trafficking. This year’s report looks at slave labor as well as sex trafficking, noting that a child trafficked into one form of labor may be further abused in another. “The brutal reality of the modern-day slave trade is that its victims are frequently bought and sold many times over,” it says.

(snip)

This year’s congressionally-mandated report looks at 149 countries; others were omitted because not enough information was available. To produce it, the State Department examined concrete government actions, rather than statements and plans, and divided nations into three tiers. Tier 1 countries have governments that comply fully with the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000. Tier 2 countries do not comply fully with the Act, but are making an effort to do so. A Tier 2 Watch List includes weak Tier 2 countries that are in danger of falling to Tier 3 — countries that are failing to make significant efforts to stop human trafficking.

The new report places 12 worst offender nations in Tier 3: Belize, Burma, Cuba, Iran, Laos, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Uzbekistan,
Venezuela and Zimbabwe.

The State Department dropped Indonesia, Malaysia and South Africa from Tier 2 to the Tier 2 Watch List this year. The Watch List includes 32 nations in all, including Brazil, China, Egypt, India, Kuwait, Mexico and Russia.

full article

Slavery is a common theme in fiction but most of us here in the US believe it is just that in this modern age – fiction.