Reunion Online

Our friends at the Verizon Foundation recently launched a new campaign called Your Voice Counts. The campaign is helping to break the silence around the issue of domestic violence by equipping bystanders?especially men?with tools to begin speaking up to prevent and end domestic violence.

 As a visitor to State College Pennsylvania last week, I was deeply moved, by both the awareness of their tragedy and their determination to heal. The community showed a dogged commitment to squarely face and to nurture a path to recovery from the chaos that's surfaced since the arrest a year ago of former Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky on multiple charges of sexual abuse.

We are proud to announce our first awareness campaign, 1BlueString. This campaign is aimed at raising awareness for the 1 in 6 men who are survivors of childhood sexual abuse. Our 1BlueString campaign is simple. We are asking guitarists at all levels to replace their low E guitar string (one of six strings) with one of our free, blue guitar string to symbolize the 1 in 6 men who have had unwanted or abusive sexual experiences in childhood.

Today, we have the first post in a new mini-series from Brynn Foster. Brynn shares her joyful heart with us, as well as her tips and tricks on being well, from Honolulu, Hawai'i. Brynn has been involved with Joyful Heart for years as a member of the Hawai'i Hearts, a group of volunteer women who raise awareness and funds for Joyful Heart's work in Hawai'i, our birthplace.

For several days, one sentence has continued to trouble me: "I'll never forgive you." Those words were spoken by the man identified only as Victim 4 at the Jerry Sandusky sentencing on October 9, 2012. His words say several things to me.

Men who were abused as boys were abused by individuals, not by a caricature. I find it disheartening that some have suggested we have to work hard to protect our children from other "Sanduskys."

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the phrase "the personal is political" became the mantra of the women’s movement.

On tonight's episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, you'll hear the SVU squad talking about a topic few people do, something called tonic immobility. It sounds complicated, but it's one of the body's most basic responses?the "freeze response"?that happens when an individual is in danger. In today's post, Dr. Rebecca Campbell, professor of community psychology at Michigan State University, discusses tonic immobility in the context of sexual assault.

After The LA Times reported that between 1965 and 1985 The Boys Scouts of America took very little or no action about suspected child sexual abuse, it announced it would review 5,000 cases spanning the past fifty years. The Times investigation found that Scouts’ officials did not report to police hundreds of cases of alleged sexual abuse and that as many as 1,662 male child victims were impacted. This scandal will continue to make headlines as hundreds of files are released from the BSA’s own collection of cases known as "perversion files."

Throughout history, we have watched visionaries change the world. Eli Whitney. Henry Ford. Steve Jobs. Not only did these people isolate a need, but they also found the right way to communicate how their innovation would benefit the world.