Gary Chapman Quotes

Few people who are hit once by someone they love respond in the way they might to a singular physical assault by a stranger.

I know what it feels like to be a victim of domestic violence.

I know just about everything that really goes on with domestic violence.

I grew up with an extremely abusive father. As a mother, I wanted to protect my own children from exposure to violence. When I found out one of my daughters was in an abusive relationship, it broke my heart. Finally, she left him ?- but only after his abuse started spreading to the children.

Women were victims. Their husbands could beat them up when they wanted to. They couldn't work. They could be maimed and killed by their husbands.

There are battered husbands. Apparently this happens when the woman is real big, the man is very small, and they each drink a quart of whiskey a day.

Afterward, I curl around her. We lie in silence until darkness falls, and then, haltingly, she begins to talk...She speaks without need or even room for response, so I simply hold her and stroke her hair. She talks of the pain, grief, and horror of the past four years; of learning to cope with being the wife of a man so violent and unpredictable his touch made her skin crawl and of thinking, until quite recently, that she'd finally managed to do that. And then, finally, of how my appearance had forced her to realize she hadn't learned to cope at all.

I know all about violence and physical abuse because my first husband used to beat me severely when he got drunk. Once, I can remember coming home from a party and walking up our vast marble staircase at the Fifth Avenue house while he was striking me. I thought, If I just gave him one shove down the staircase I would be rid of him forever.

I have a scar on my right arm from my ex-husband. He was cooking and he had a hot pot and he turned around and went right into my arm.

And of course we are familiar with the English common law rule of thumb that said a man could in fact use a stick no bigger than his thumb to discipline his wife and family.

Domestic abuse happens only in intimate, interdependent, long-term relationships - in other words, in families - the last place we would want or expect to find violence.

Nearly one in four women will experience domestic violence during her lifetime. And slightly more than half of female victims of domestic violence live in households with children under age 12.

I'm very anti-domestic violence.

The violence complained of would without question have constituted a battery if the subject of it had not been the defendant's wife …. It will be observed that the ground upon which we have put this decision is not that the husband has the right to whip his wife much or little; but that we will not interfere with family government in trifling cases… We will not inflict upon society the greater evil of raising the curtain upon domestic privacy, to punish the lesser evil of trifling violence.

Wives, even in the most extreme and protracted cases of bodily ill-usage, hardly ever dare avail themselves of the laws made for their protection

When working at Women's Aid, I met countless women whose families had not believed them when they spoke of their abuse at the hands of another loved one.

We have a zero tolerance policy here at Bellator when it relates to any form of domestic violence.

Since I was probably eight years old, just about everyday, all the way until I was 14 or 15 years old, just about everyday my mom and my stepdad would roll around in the living room fighting.

There's no battered woman alive who didn't know in advance that the man was bad.

Battered Women: sounds delicious. Doesn’t make it right.

Well, sometime Mr —— git on me pretty hard. I have to talk to Old Maker. But he my husband. I shrug my shoulders. This life soon be over, I say. Heaven last all ways. You ought to bash Mr —— head open, she say. Think bout heaven later.

The biggest challenge is to convince a woman that it's not her fault. My daughter is 25; my stepdaughter is 22. As a mother, I want them to know that if a boyfriend is abusive, you cannot ignore it ?- 'Oh, he's been drinking,' or 'He had a bad day.' There is no excuse for a man hitting a woman. Ever.

The question, 'Why does she stay?' is code for some people for, 'It's her fault for staying,' as if [domestic violence] victims intentionally choose to fall in love with men intent upon destroying us.

It's still hard for me to talk about the day I visited a shelter for children who were victims of a domestic-violence household. The kinds of abuse they had suffered, and what it had done to them physically and emotionally ?- I don't have words for what I saw. This has to stop.

I dealt with men who had tempers, and who could get violent-Lord knows how I had to defend myself against Howard Hughes and Frank Sinatra, and from Artie Shaw's verbal abuse. But George [C. Scott] was a different category of animal when he got drunk. He'd break into my hotel room, which he did in Italy, London and at the Beverly Hills Hotel, attack me to where I was frightened for my life, and scream, 'Why won't you marry me?' Well, I would never marry a man who couldn't control his liquor. Me, I'm a happy drunk. I laugh, I dance. I certainly don't break bottles and threaten to kill.