How prevalent is violence against women in America?
To consider how pervasive violence is and what its impact is, is huge because I think we don’t know the answer to either of those questions yet. We’re just discovering how pervasive it is. For instance, it feels as if childhood sexual abuse or domestic abuse of women in the home has increased but actually if you ask women of 60 or 70 years old, the incidence is about the same. We just didn’t know it. So we are just discovering the tip of the iceberg here. But it certainly is the major cause of physical and psychological injury to women. The most dangerous place for a woman statistically speaking is not in the street. It’s in her own home. She’s most likely to be attacked by a man with whom she lives. It’s the trauma of it we’re just beginning to realize. There’s a wonderful book by Judith Herman in which she compares the trauma experienced by veterans in war to the veterans of domestic violence, and discovers that the veterans of domestic violence suffer far more. Q: Who is the author
