Preliminary research-most of it published outside the medical literature-indicates that a significant number of our patients have experienced some form of violence and abuse during their lifetime, including elder abuse, child abuse, gang-related violence, sexual abuse, and domestic violence.
There is no life to be found in violence. Every act of violence brings us closer to death. Whether it's the mundane violence we do to our bodies by overeating toxic food or drink or the extreme violence of child abuse, domestic warfare, life-threatening poverty, addiction, or state terrorism.
While I didn't grow up in a family where there was domestic violence I knew of families in my neighbourhood where abuse was happening. I wanted to be part of the Women's Aid Real Man campaign to send out the message that real men don't abuse their partners or their children.
This October, we renew the fight against domestic violence and abuse in America. Together, we can eliminate domestic violence from homes across the country and ensure that our children grow up in healthy, peaceful communities.
No matter how much you've sinned, no matter how much you've stumbled, no matter how much you fall, no matter how far you've got from God, don't give up. You can still be redeemed. As someone says, keep the faith.
I think we start suffering as soon as we come out of the womb. I think that people tend to stereotype. When they think of suffering, they think of abuse - physical abuse, emotional abuse, poverty, that kind of thing. There's different levels of suffering. I don't think that it has to do with how much money you have - if you were raised in the ghetto or the Hamptons. For me it's more about perception: self-perception and how you perceive the world.
Unmanageable waste has turned into a worldwide crisis. No matter how much local authorities do, no matter the level of public cooperation, no matter how much is recycled, the problem continues to grow.
I must remind you that starving a child is violence. Suppressing a culture is violence. Neglecting school children is violence. Punishing a mother and her family is violence. Discrimination against a working man is violence. Ghetto housing is violence. Ignoring medical need is violence. Contempt for poverty is violence.
Even child abuse specialists do not routinely screen for domestic violence. This shows how much more education we need to do, even among experts, to understand the known links between violence of the child and the parent.
When you grow up in poverty, suffer from abuse, live in a violent neighborhood, come from a broken home, lack positive role models, are told you'll never amount to anything, etc, the challenges are enormous.
There can be no better measure of our governance than the way we treat our children, and no greater failing on our part than to allow them to be subjected to violence, abuse or exploitation.
We think of violence as being conflict and fighting and wars and so forth, but the most ongoing horrific measure of violence is in the horrible poverty of the Third World... and the poverty in the United States as well. We have our own Third World here. And we have to first become aware of that and how to help and solve that.
Most violence is intra-racial, and much of the violence in African-American communities is a function of drug availability, joblessness and poverty.
The photographs of Iraqi prisoners being subjected to degrading and humiliating treatment by their captors, and the reports of acts of sexual abuse, physical abuse, and other acts of maltreatment shock the conscience.
During my eleven years as a New York City public school teacher, I saw firsthand the impact that poverty has on the classroom. In low-income neighborhoods like Sunset Park, where I taught, students as young as five years old enter school affected by the stresses often created by poverty: domestic violence, drug abuse, gang activity.
We think of violence as being conflict and fighting and wars and so forth, but the most ongoing horrific measure of violence is in the horrible poverty of the Third World... and the poverty in the United States as well.