The following is excerpted from a Deseret News article by Jacob Hess. Read the article here.
Women around the world continue to face disheartening levels of violence from husbands, boyfriends, dates, colleagues and sometimes strangers.
I’ll never forget the day I passed a house in Brazil surrounded by police. Neighbors speaking on the street shared in hushed tones how they had heard the screams. Rather than a surprise, this woman’s violent death seemed to have followed years of torment at the hands of her husband – so much so that some who lived close-by admitted they had become used to it.
How was this even possible? Our own review of 285 risk factor studies provides some clearer answers to that question. The multifaceted patterns we found are a collective signal that both the problem and the solution to violence against women (including “domestic violence,” “spousal abuse,” “family violence” and “intimate partner violence”) go far beyond patterns specific to either the victim or perpetrator.
Sexual violence, our primary focus here, is one especially horrifying part of the larger picture of violence against women, and often takes place when other kinds of abuse are present. Perhaps if we understood — truly understood, at a deeper level — why such abuse was taking place, we could do something more about it.
Read the rest of the article here.
