Otherwise that cage of shame never gets broken and someone is trapped inside forever. I mean eww, who wants to talk about domestic violence? Well, all of us, ideally. The problem is that this information doesn’t get widely shared or talked about. The information is out there, thanks to people who work in the sector. They need to know what it looks like – because often it looks quite surprising – and how to respond when they do recognize it. That makes it even more crucial for people in the community – coworkers, friends, family, medical professionals – to have a better understanding of gender-based violence. It is profoundly underreported to authorities, often for very good reasons. Intimate partner violence is still a crisis cloaked in silence and shame. Most of the signals aren’t so overt, though, and certainly not as well known. There have been cases in the United States where a woman will call 911 pretending to order a pizza, hoping that the dispatcher understands the ruse. Other countries have similar campaigns where, for example, a person who’s being abused can approach a pharmacist with a safe word. Gunraj points out, the distress signal is only one of many signals that women experiencing violence might display. Interestingly, the young users of TikTok have been some of the distress signal’s best pollinators, creating clever videos to demonstrate its use.īut as Ms. They also realized that we’d be relying on video calls more, since we were trapped in our homes, and the distress signal could be used subtly in that context. “We saw that gender-based violence would probably be on the rise in the beginning of the pandemic, because it always rises in times of disaster and crisis,” said Andrea Gunraj, the foundation’s vice-president of public engagement. The Violence at Home Signal for Help was created in April, 2020, in anticipation of the dangerous conditions the pandemic would create. There are a few people to thank in this scenario: The quick-witted girl who used the signal, the alert motorist who recognized it, the deputies who decided to investigate, and perhaps above all the Canadian Women’s Foundation, which last year developed the sign so that people who were experiencing abuse could quietly ask for help without alerting their abuser. According to The New York Times, he’s also facing a child pornography charge. Something was wrong, and the 61-year-old driver of the car was arrested for unlawful imprisonment. The sheriff’s deputies didn’t know the signal, but they still stopped the car with the girl in it, realizing something might be wrong. If you saw someone holding out their hand, with the thumb tucked into the palm and fingers folded over the thumb, would you know what it meant?įortunately for a 16-year-old girl in Kentucky, who was making that hand sign while a passenger in a car, another driver recognized it as a signal of distress and called the police.
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