From The New York Times:
Unwelcome Attention for John Kelly, the Man Enlisted to Bring Calm
President Trump is calling the chief of staff he pushed out, Reince Priebus, to complain about John Kelly, the chief of staff who took Mr. Priebus’s place.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/08/us/politics/kelly-trump.html
As an attorney with more than 35 years experience helping women cope with sexual violence, what appalls me most about the never-ending cycles of domestic violence, sexual abuse and sexual harassment is beyond the violence against and domination of women. What has appalled me most has been the ordinary social acceptance of this conduct, especially when it would “compromise” the reputation and social standing of the perpetrator, protecting the violator, as evidenced in the NYT article above.
It sickens me that violence against women has, for so long, been such a staple of district and family court dockets, ever since I have practiced law. It isn’t just the abuse syndrome of so many women I have represented, but the lessons this violence has taught their children that enrage me.
I once had a client whose husband would come home drunk from his local bar on a regular basis. At the time, my client had a daughter around six years old, and an infant son. Late one night, her husband came home, inebriated, spoiling for a fight. He woke her up and woke the children up, with his yelling and ranting. She stood outside her bedroom doorway, with her arm around her daughter, clinging to her Mommy’s nightgown, and holding her baby in her other arm, close to her chest. She asked her husband to please be quiet, so that she could put their children back to bed. His response was to slap her across the face, sending her glasses across the room, breaking as they landed on the floor.
She fled to her daughter’s bedroom with her two children nestled in her arms. She chose to sleep with them in her daughter’s bed, while her husband slept it off in their room. She didn’t sleep much that night, filled with anxiety, knowing that this would never change. The next morning, when she awoke, her infant son was still close to her, pressing into her breast, but her daughter was lying a few inches away, staring intently at her. Mother looked softly at daughter, feeling pained that this young girl had been swept into the fear of the night before. Her daughter lifted her head, gently brushed her mother’s hair from her forehead and said, “But, Mommy, he didn’t hit you that hard.”
“But, Mommy, he didn’t hit you that hard.”
This was the moment that changed everything. My client knew, when she saw her daughter’s acceptance of a pattern she has learned to live with, that she was teaching her daughter that violence was acceptable.
That is when she decided to leave.
