Battering Quotes

“The guarantee of safety in a battering relationship can never be based upon a promise from the perpetrator, no matter how heartfelt. Rather, it must be based upon the self-protective capability of the victim. Until the victim has developed a detailed and realistic contingency plan and has demonstrated her ability to carry it out, she remains in danger of repeated abuse.”
― Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

“Battered women who were physically abused as children develop an active coping style as adults, typically with obsessive-compulsive tendencies. It is as if she can "just get things right" then the battering will stop. Those who were sexually abused as children tend to be severely depressed and a more passive coping style.”
― Debra Crown LPC-S Journal of Family Violence 2006

“Some women chose to embody this new form of physical empowerment & transformed their words into actions. Exhibition boxer Minnie Rosenblatt Besser had spent years training in the manly art of boxing. She promised to meet any willing opponent, male or female, in the ring. Besser specifically called out several famous male boxers but insisted that she was most anxious to meet Brooklyn boxer Eddie Avery, who had been arrested for wife-beating. Besser explained, 'Any man who will strike a helpless woman I believe to be a coward. Should Avery pluck up enough courage to meet me I think I will prove the truth of this proposition to the world at large.”
― Wendy L. Rouse

“Abuse is defined as any behavior that is designed to control and subjugate another human being through the use of fear, humiliation and verbal or physical assaults. In other words, you don’t have to be hit to be abused. In physical battering the weapons are fists; in psychological battering the weapons are words. The only difference between the two is the choice of weapons.”
― Susan Forward, Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them: When Loving Hurts and You Don't Know Why