Jimmy Barnes Quotes

I was brought up in a very poor and very violent household. I spent much of my childhood being afraid.

It's extraordinary what children put up with. I happened to see two of my uncles put my father up against the wall of my grandmother's house and knock his teeth out, because he'd been unpleasant to my mother. The next day I went upstairs and found my father making a rather half-hearted attempt to gas himself.

I was an abused kid.

If we are to save our children then we must become people they will look up to. Children need heroes now more than ever because the poor children of this nation live with monsters every day. Monsters deprive them of heat in the winter, they don't fix their sinks and toilets, they let garbage pile up in their hallways, they kick them out of their homes, they beat them, shoot them, stab them-sometimes to death-they rape their bodies and their minds. Sometimes they lurk under the stairs. They scuttle around in the dark; you hear them in the walls gnawing, squeaking, occasionally biting a little finger.

After my father died when I was seven and my mother entered into an abusive relationship, I shuffled between houses - staying with friends, families from church, and relying on the kindness of teachers and people throughout my community to help me grow up essentially without parents.

I pretended I was living with a television family and there was no yelling at home and no one hit me.

My mind boggles at the amount of violence inflicted upon children in today's society.

Every single person in jail for a violent crime had a nightmare childhood.

More than 90 percent of all the prisoners in our American prisons have been abused as children.

I loved my parents... but that can never change the fact that my father's violence ruined my childhood.

The only thing my old man ever gave me was a beating.

Mother beat the hell out of us. She'd have wild outbursts.

My mother would beat me so bad, I wouldn't be able to sit down. And I would never snitch.

My father was so very afraid. I felt it in the sting of his black leather belt, which he applied with more anxiety than anger, my father who beat me as if someone might steal me away, because that was exactly what was happening all around us.

We recognize that violence is a learned behavior. One of the best classrooms for learning violence is in the home.

Most incarcerated women have stories that are similar to mine. They suffered great trauma as children.

I don't want to get punched all my life.

Violence is violence. Trauma is trauma. And we are taught to downplay it, even think about it as child's play.

When I was a kid, my mother's parenting style teetered between benign neglect and intense bouts of violence.

One in four children being victimized? That's about seven children in every classroom. That's a significant proportion of the population.

Looks like she's been slapping the kid again.

I grew up in an abusive home and was told on a daily basis by my father that I would never amount to anything and that I looked like a boy.

So many people suffer from abuse, and suffer alone.

I think anybody who has been abused as a kid - and I was abused as a kid, by various people - will say it's irrational because violence is irrational.

You know, what we do know is that there is a high frequency of violence in the home of those who bully.