A Possible World

In 2001 four women were murdered daily in the United States by their spouses. Nearly a decade later there has been a sharp rise in family violence, with women as the primary target. It is evidenced by more than double the calls to hotlines, hospital emergency rooms and crisis shelters overflowing with victims.

Walk-ins are up 240 percent in 2009 compared to 2008, while the number of women and children staying in shelters has increased by more than 70 percent.

Invariably, when poverty rises, domestic violence and specifically wife abuse also rises. Even in so-called civilized nations such as the United States, millions of wives are beaten and raped by their spouses.

Hardly discussed is the psychological torture meted out to women around the world by narcissistic husbands. To get free of the trap of wife abuse, we need to break it down, analyze it and confront it, so as to understand that it begins in the mind - first of the perpetrator, then of the victim.

We can pass laws, but how do we change minds? How do we liberate minds from the insidious spread of emotional and psychological abuse that ends in physical abuse?

While the number of women suffering physical abuse is in the tens of millions, those suffering mental torture at the hands of men number more than one hundred million.

With the rise of fundamentalism in an era of a new Great Depression and growing fascism, this is not a minor social issue. How long will you continue to tolerate it?

When will you face the endless vivisection of women's minds and bodies? When will you accept your responsibility to reclaim your humanity by ending their agony once and for all?