Reunion Online

All survivors—women and men, boys and girls—have suffered enough. It's time we spoke openly, intelligently and compassionately about the men who have suffered the trauma of abuse.

Navigating the land of Oz and staying on the Yellow Brick Road.

What can the Wizard of Oz tell you about how to manage your recovery? A lot!

As we close out on 2013, I am enormously proud of the organization’s many accomplishments over the past 12 months and I look forward to the next!

Two weeks ago, eight men whose portraits and biographies appear on the Bristlecone website lent their portraits and statements to the gallery of survivors on the web site of the NO MORE campaign. These men, and their brothers at Bristlecone, have chosen to sit in front of a camera and to look directly into the camera’s lens.

Patti Giggans from Peace Over Violence speaks to the issues surrounding rape and sexual assault here in the USA.

Even a few years ago, who would have imagined that the opening plenary panel at the 2013 End Violence Against Women International (EVAWI) conference (last week in Baltimore) would focus on supporting men who have experienced unwanted or abusive childhood sexual interactions. It’s difficult to overstate the value of a shift in thinking that exposed nearly 1,200 conference participants—including advocates, investigators, prosecutors and clinicians—to the notion of engaging men as direct beneficiaries of efforts to end sexual violence. What a long way we’ve come!

This is probably the most complicated and least understood aspect of child sex abuse. 90 percent of all perpetrators are known to the victims, with 30 – 40 percent coming from the victim’s immediate family and only 10 percent strangers. The other 50 – 60 percent of perpetrators include older kids, babysitters, teachers, ministers, coaches and leaders in youth-serving programs. So to state the obvious, in most cases victims usually know their offenders and are related in some way before the abuse starts.

Even though 1 in 4 women and nearly one in 7 men are directly affected by domestic violence in the U.S., it remains a largely hidden epidemic. Because we all have a role to play in preventing violence—and because talking about it is one of the first steps to ending it—the Verizon Foundation and CBS Sportscaster James Brown are helping to get the conversation going during a special #YourVoiceCounts Twitter Chat before the Super Bowl on Thursday, January 31 from 4:00 – 5:00 pm ET.

What would it be like if we, collectively, really saw surviving abuse or assault without blame, stigma or shame? Unafraid to listen to someone's story and unafraid to say "NO MORE?"