I attend a weekly group session with other domestic abuse survivors. During these meetings, we learn new things about ourselves and others. We talk. We laugh. We cry. We draw pics and do activities. In a recent meeting we had an activity to draw/write up a public service announcement. Something that was personal, if we were comfortable with it. It took me awhile to figure out what to write. It was much too wordy and and meandering. Here’s what I did:
Typically, men are physically stronger than women but that doesn’t necessarily make it easier to escape the violence or abuse from their partner. Abused men face a shortage of resources, skepticism from police and others, and major legal obstacles, especially when it comes to obtaining custody of children from an abusive mother.
Worst of all, there is tremendous pressure to keep it silent, to “man up”, and just take it.
Silence is the worst thing you can do. Do not suffer in silence. The more men that speak up about abuse, the strong we become.
You are worthy of support. You deserve to be treated as whole. You are no broken. Don’t keep it in. Don’t let shame prevent you from healing.
No Silence.
I liked parts of this, but it’s just too wordy to make it something that I could post online or use in social media formats like Instagram or Twitter. So I went home and did some image work on this. In the end, I created a few PSA’s concerning male survivors of domestic abuse and made a “No Silence” logo for them. To keep this more personal, and as a side effect, more difficult for me to write, I decided that all of the PSAs would use situations I have experienced from my own life.
Here are the first three I made.
I’m going to continue to create more and more of these. Who knows, maybe it will catch on and help spread awareness that abuse doesn’t care about your gender, neither should you.