DARE TO RISE UP

Violence is a complex phenomenon. When power is leveraged over the mind, body, and spirit, where in the galaxy can the survivor of domestic violence escape? Domestic violence mutates and traverses every major component of humanity. This book provides an in-depth discussion of culturally specific issues and systems of oppression impacting the diverse spectrum of domestic violence survivors. Healing from domestic violence requires that we question, interrogate, understand, accept, and then love the parts of ourselves that society and our abuser diminish. All efforts to end violence against women ultimately have to return to this question: How do we change societal values so that women's rights to live free of insults, invasion, disempowerment, and intimidation are respected?

Domestic violence is not uniquely intersectional. In fact, most things are related in some capacity to ours and other social identities. We can and should apply intersectionality to everything we do. More than a theory, intersectionality offers a way of living with, thinking about, and contributing to the world around us. As members of a global community, it's essential to understand each other's nuances and instrumentalize those nuances in global problems. The goal of this book was to express some of the differences in our experiences of violence. Topics like Islamophobia, Antisemitism, disability rights, Christian cults, abuse in domestic violence shelters, modern slavery, and welfare politics are also relevant to our discussions. While it's not possible to get to everything in a book of this size, I hope you are engaged and ready to take on those topics individually. If this book is your introduction to domestic violence, I hope you will continue to “do the work” as they say, and think about what wasn't covered here, or what you'd like to learn more about.

And furthermore, as we hope this book respects, domestic violence is not solely an issue of heteropatriarchy or male supremacy…