Domestic Violence

Domestic violence fashion show 2013

Good evening and welcome to the DV fashion show. My name is Kimberly Arana and this is Sabrina Alvarez. As you can all tell this is not your typical fashion show, in fact it isn’t a fashion show at all and the DV stands for domestic violence. Let me explain to you what’s going on. Each of us are wearing a different colored shirt that represents a different form of abuse. The pictures and statistics displayed on the projector coincide with each form of abuse written on the girls shirts. There are eight different forms of abuse which include physical, mental, emotional, economic, sexual, isolation, verbal, and digital. I will be touching base with four of them and my partner will be discussing the other four.

So my four forms of abuse included sexual, economic, isolation, and digital. Let’s start with economic abuse. Often the term domestic violence evokes images of physical abuse. However, tens of thousands of women each year also experience of an equally devastating situation-economic abuse. Economic abuse or in other words financial abuse is when the spouse or domestic partner controls the victims’ finances to prevent them from accessing resources, working or maintaining control of earnings, achieving self-sufficiency, and gaining financial independence. The abuser can also interfere with or prevent education, job training, and the ability to find and keep a job. To better understand economic abuse and its impacts there were surveys done on 10 domestic violence service agencies about their experiences. Over 50 % of them, and we are looking at 25,000 survivors, were unable to meet basic household expenses as a result of abuse. One out of four of them had an abusive partner steal, withhold access to personal documents, and control their spending limit. Over 80% of them reported that they had to ask for permission to spend less than $50. Now imagine yourselves in a relationship were you couldn’t touch or see the money you have earned. That money you worked hard for wasn’t yours to keep and to spend. Every time you picked up your paycheck you had to give it to your spouse so that he or she could spend it on anything they wanted to. That would mean that all you men and women here tonight would not have the satisfaction of treating yourselves with a gift.

Digital abuse is pretty much another word for cyber bullying. I’m sure that everyone in here has heard about cyber bullying and the effects it has on individuals. Cyber bullying or cyber abuse if you will is the use of the Internet and related technologies to harm other people, in a deliberate, repeated, and hostile manner. As it has become more common in society, particularly among young people, legislation and awareness campaigns have arisen to combat it. Cyber abuse is perpetrated through threats, sexual remarks, Cyber stalking, sending