Joseph R. Biden Jr. Quotes

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

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.

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.

Domestic violence was a way of life in my home growing up, my brother and I watched helplessly numerous times as my mother was beaten and knocked unconscious while we dialed 911.

Much is made of the accelerating brutality of young people's crimes, but rarely does our concern for dangerous children translateinto concern for children in danger. We fail to make the connection between the use of force on children themselves, and violent antisocial behavior, or the connection between watching father batter mother and the child deducing a link between violence and masculinity.

It's shocking that so many children still live in fear as a result of violence in the home, and don't know who to turn to for help and support. As a child survivor of domestic violence I can remember the fear and isolation. I'm delighted to support the Hideout, the new Women's Aid website for children and young people. I know it could have made a real difference to me and will provide great comfort and support to thousands of children.

My Papa's Waltz: The whiskey on your breath Could make a small boy dizzy; But I hung on like death: Such waltzing was not easy. We romped until the pans Slid from the kitchen shelf; My mother's countenance Could not unfrown itself. The hand that held my wrist Was battered on one knuckle; At every step you missed My right ear scraped a buckle. You beat time on my head With a palm caked hard by dirt, Then waltzed me off to bed Still clinging to your shirt.

I punched my mother out once.

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

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

If family violence teaches children that might makes right at home, how will we hope to cure the futile impulse to solve worldly conflicts with force?

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.

My mother was the most wicked mother ever seen in life when it came to beating. Oh-la-la! Every time I would say, 'This is the end of me.' Oh, how she would beat me.

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

No matter how much poverty you grow up with, you shouldn't be subjected to violence and abuse.

one blow in anger [would] kill, probably, a child from aged two to eight. Those over eight would take two blows to kill.

The knowledge that you were beaten and that this, as your parents tell you, was for your own good may well be retained (although not always), but the suffering caused by the way you were mistreated will remain unconscious and will later prevent you from empathizing with others. This is why battered children grow up to be mothers and fathers who beat their offspring

I was raped when I was very young. I told my brother the name of the person who had done it. Within a few days the man was killed. In my child's mind--seven and a half years old--I thought my voice had killed him. So I stopped talking for five years.

As a child, I heard in my home doctors and ambulance men say, 'Mrs. Stewart, you must've done something to provoke him.' 'Mrs. Stewart, it takes two to make an argument.' Wrong. Wrong! My mother did nothing to provoke that - and even if she had, violence is never ever a choice that a man should make. Ever.

He beat me like he beat the children. Cept he don't never hardly beat them. He say, Celie, git the belt. The children be outside the room peeking through the cracks. It all I can do not to cry. I make myself wood. I say to myself, Celie, you a tree. That's how come I know trees fear man.

I do not support child abuse. It's a disgusting crime of which I am a victim.

When we hear a story of the abuse of a child or the abuse of women almost all people are appalled by instances of that kind.

Obviously, the urge to molest children comes from some experience the person has had as a child, and he or she never worked it out. Watching Raymond Buckey describe how he loved working with the kids, I could sense this 11-year-old who'd stopped and never grown further on a sexual level.

World, they have taken the small children like butterflies and thrown them, beating their wings, into the fire--

I'm not saying that all women are blameless - all women are not. There are women with despicable characters who are cruel and terrible and some of them are mothers. But why do we blame our mothers more than our fathers? We let our fathers get away scot-free. We hardly even knew who they were in many cases, given the way this culture raises kids, and they may have been quite cruel. They may even have raped us as children, but even if they raped us, we will blame our mothers for not protecting us instead of blaming our fathers who actually did it.