Awareness Without Action

Awareness is important, but awareness without action will not keep a woman alive. Domestic violence does not always begin with a black eye. It usually begins quietly, with control, isolation, humiliation, intimidation, financial abuse, monitoring, threats, coercion, or the slow dismantling of someone's independence. By the time the people around her realize how serious the situation has become, she may have been living in fear for years.

We need to become better at hearing women before their stories become tragedies.

We Need to Talk About the Children

We desperately need to talk about the children. Children living with domestic violence are not standing outside of the experience watching — they are living inside that home too. They hear the arguments. They feel the tension. They notice when someone's voice changes. They know when something isn't right. Some children become quiet. Others become angry. Some struggle at school, withdraw, become anxious, or try desperately to keep the peace around them.

And sometimes a child gives us the clearest warning:

Those words should matter. They have to matter. One of the greatest concerns driving my advocacy is what happens when children tell adults they are afraid and we fail to truly hear them. We have built complicated systems around families, custody, intervention, protection, and domestic violence. Those systems exist for important reasons, and the legal issues involved are rarely simple, but the complexity cannot become an excuse for ignoring a child's fear.

We should be able to acknowledge legal rights and due process while still asking difficult questions about whether our systems are doing enough to protect children after violence has entered a family. Those conversations need to happen.

An Unconventional Path to Advocacy

My own path into advocacy has been unconventional. My background includes public administration, public service and public policy, psychology, education, nonprofit and community leadership, and extensive work with children, youth, and families. I have completed specialized training in domestic violence, sexual assault, and human trafficking advocacy, as well as emergency shelter and volunteer operations. I also teach mathematics, write, advocate for children with autism and their families, and remain heavily involved in community work.

On paper, those things may look unrelated. To me, they have become part of the same purpose: people matter. The woman who is afraid matters. The child who says, "I'm scared," matters. The teenager who has stopped believing anyone is listening matters. The mother trying to figure out where she and her children will sleep matters. And they matter before something terrible happens.

Prevention, Not Just Mourning

I do not want domestic violence advocacy to become something we only talk about after another woman's name becomes a headline. We as a society want prevention. We need earlier intervention. We need women to know what abuse can look like before violence escalates. We need communities that know how to respond when someone asks for help. We need children to understand that love should feel safe.

Toward Policy: A Bill to Protect Children

My long-term goal is to take this advocacy further into public policy. I hope to research, write, and develop a proposed bill focused on strengthening protections for children affected by domestic violence. That work will require research, collaboration, legal expertise, survivor perspectives, mental-health professionals, advocates, families, educators, policymakers, law enforcement, and people willing to challenge assumptions.

I do not pretend that changing legislation is easy. It shouldn't be. Laws affecting families and children deserve careful research and thoughtful debate, but difficult does not mean impossible, and complexity does not mean we stop asking whether we can do better. We can.

I want to understand more deeply where the gaps are. I want to understand where children may remain vulnerable. I want to examine how their experiences and fears are considered after violence has occurred within their families. Most importantly, I want to be part of the conversation about what we can change, because behind policy discussions and statistics are human beings.

The People Behind the Statistics

There is a woman somewhere right now questioning whether what is happening to her is "bad enough" to ask for help.

• There is another trying to figure out how she could possibly afford to leave.
• There is a mother wondering whether anyone will believe her, and figuring out how she is going to stay alive to protect herself and her children.
• There is a child lying in bed listening to what is happening in another room.
• There is a teenager who has learned to recognize danger before the adults around them seem willing to acknowledge it.

Those are the people I think about.

What Happens Next Is Where Our Work Begins

Domestic Violence Awareness Month gives us an opportunity to bring attention to something that is happening every day of the year, but I hope we begin measuring our commitment by more than how much awareness we create. What happens after someone becomes aware? What happens when she asks for help? What happens when a child says, "I'm afraid"?

What happens next is where our work really begins.

I don't want to spend my life only telling women they deserve better. I want them to stay alive long enough to experience better. I want children protected. I want their voices heard. I want a woman experiencing abuse to know that asking for help is not weakness. I want communities to understand that supporting someone through domestic violence requires compassion without judgment, and I want the people responsible for shaping our institutions and laws to continue asking whether the systems we have created are actually protecting the people they were designed to protect.

Purple ribbons matter. Awareness matters. Sharing resources matters. But when October ends and the ribbons come down, women will still be living with domestic violence. Children will still be listening from the next room. Families will still be trying to find a safe way forward. Our concern for them cannot disappear on November 1.