Violence Against Women Quotes

“No amount of me trying to explain myself was doing any good. I didn't even know what was going on inside of me, so how could I have explained it to them?”
― Sierra D. Waters, Debbie.

“We have an abundance of rape and violence against women in this country and on this Earth, though it's almost never treated as a civil rights or human rights issue, or a crisis, or even a pattern. Violence doesn't have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me

“Today I wore a pair of faded old jeans and a plain grey baggy shirt. I hadn't even taken a shower, and I did not put on an ounce of makeup. I grabbed a worn out black oversized jacket to cover myself with even though it is warm outside. I have made conscious decisions lately to look like less of what I felt a male would want to see. I want to disappear.”
― Sierra D. Waters, Debbie.

“If we are to fight discrimination and injustice against women we must start from the home for if a woman cannot be safe in her own house then she cannot be expected to feel safe anywhere.”
― Aysha Taryam

“It was much easier to explain the veil than to answer questions about the wounds.”
― Pawan Mishra, Coinman: An Untold Conspiracy

“Intimidated, old traumas triggered, and fearing for my safety, I did what I felt I needed to do.”
― Sierra D. Waters, Debbie.

“But people like the doll guy who sells women and the dog guy who buys women, and other guys who, say, rape women, or maybe don’t go as far as violent rape but treat women like objects instead of people—sure, there’s a difference in the level of crime, but it’s all the same thing, where women become a canvas for throwing emotional baggage, Jackson Pollock style.”
― Taylor Stevens, The Doll

“Self respect by definition is a confidence and pride in knowing that your behaviour is both honorable and dignified. When you harass or vilify someone, you not only disrespect them, but yourself also.
Street harassment, sexual violence, sexual harassment, gender-based violence and racism, are all acts committed by a person who in fact has no self respect.
-Respect yourself by respecting others.”
― Miya Yamanouchi, Embrace Your Sexual Self: A Practical Guide for Women

“This moment would define my memory of that night, and of the many nights like it, for a decade. In it I saw myself as unbreakable, as tender as stone. At first I merely believed this, until one day it became the truth. Then I was able to tell myself, without lying, that it didn't affect me, that he didn't affect me, because nothing affected me. I didn't understand how morbidly right I was. How I had hollowed myself out. For all my obsessing over the consequences of that night, I had misunderstood the vital truth: that its not affecting me, that was its effect.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“I wish we'd be able to deliver our message at the global level on the need to recognize the past genocides in order to prevent new ones. Our message of peace and justice will hopefully reach every corner of the world.”
― Widad Akreyi

“He told me that if I hung up, he'd do it. He would commit suicide. He told me that if I called the cops he would kill every single one of them and I knew that he had the potential and the means to do it”
― Sierra D. Waters, Debbie.

“Women ain't hood ornament.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Himalayan Sonneteer: 100 Sonnets of Unsubmission

“Behind every man alive and kicking, there is a woman. Behind every woman abused and killed, there is a man.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Aşk Mafia: Armor of The World

“A man hits you once and apologizes and you think it will never happen again. But then you tell him you're not sure you ever want a family, and he hits you once more. You tell yourself it's understandable, what he did. You were sort of rude, the way you said it.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

“Who knows, what I could become, if Leroy would stop goddamn hitting me.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Help

“Violence against women occurs when the conditions are being enabled to facilitate it and when the system - the state and the society excuses it”
― Shalu Nigam

“In the commercialized world, marriage is monetized, the marital relationship is commoditized, and the abominable practice of dowry is institutionalized.”
― Shalu Nigam

“The discriminatory practice of coercive dowry demands and dowry violence not only persists with impunity despite legal reforms, but it is belligerently expanding in terms of magnitude, the severity of violence, and outreach.”
― Shalu Nigam

“The culture of senseless violence with impunity is growing because, ironically, though the practice of dowry is illegal on paper, socially and culturally, it is accepted, endorsed, and celebrated with zeal. The religion promotes the evil practice of dowry. The patriarchal culture encourages it, and the market benefits from it. The lives of young women are simply of no significant value. Women are considered as `perishable’, and `disposable’ commodities without dignity or agency by the state, the market, and their families.”
― Shalu Nigam

“Butler described some lives as `ungrievable’ which cannot be mourned for because they never lived and remained uncounted. Perhaps, women who are dying due to dowry violence in homes are such ungrievable, uncounted lives – the lives that no one wants to protect, no one wants to mourn, and no one wants to remember.”
― Shalu Nigam

“Centuries ago, when Karl Marx wrote exhaustively about the callous exploitation of workers by the capitalist class, he may not have imagined how in South Asia, women as brides would be treated as commodities, pitilessly exploited, and violently murdered in their own homes by their abusive husbands for extorting wealth. As the ruthless oppression of the toiling masses could not be prevented by laws or policies, the merciless torture and murder of women could not be regulated despite establishing a legal mechanism in place. Over the decades, predatory capitalism has irrevocably acquired an altered form, and the free-market approach has devised a new mechanism of manipulation. Similarly, the viciousness of the neoliberal forces, clubbed with patriarchy, feudalism, conservatism, rampant materialism, and excessive consumption propelled by extensive consumerism, is aggravating the desire among men and their families to accumulate quick wealth using marriage as a tool to extract resources from women and their families. The bourgeoisie-proletariat categorization, in the situation of dowry practice, is expanded to include the classification of savagely privileged men versus women – rich or poor, and in urban or rural areas. Women from all backgrounds dreadfully suffer for the material gains of men and their families in a harsh and hostile environment fuelled by the neoliberal, Brahmanical capitalist patriarchy.”
― Shalu Nigam

“When Gary Becker, an American economist, in his celebrated `Treatise of Family’ imagined a household as a primary site of production of goods and sustenance in the form of child care, meals, and shelter, besides a range of commodities such as health, happiness, self-esteem, security, sexual pleasure, and so on, he disregarded the fact that a family is also a site of reproducing inequalities and sustaining patriarchal values. Becker proposed the theory of a rational `economic man’ who makes choices based on his self-interest, but he has not contemplated the dire situations of exploitation, blackmail, and extortion within marriages in South Asian patriarchal, hierarchical societies where self-interest would turn into insatiable greediness to create an antagonistic situation where an `economic man’, driven by irrational voracity, ends up torturing and murdering `his wife’, and destroying his own family when his arbitrary demands remain unfulfilled”
― Shalu Nigam

“When Karl Marx elaborated upon the savage exploitation of workers by the capitalists, he described that due to extensive mechanization and division of labour, the work of the proletarians lost its exclusive character and became dull and monotonous increasing the repulsiveness of work while decreasing the wages. However, in the case of dowry extortion, the women are oppressed in multiple ways. The authoritative Brahminic ideology that propagates the dowry, forcibly extorts wealth from a woman and her family, mercilessly exploits her labour, and simultaneously deprives of her any wages or any monetary compensation for her extensive contribution behind the veil of labour of love and the rhetoric of sacrifices for the sake of family.”
― Shalu Nigam

“Often after work, I wander aimlessly around the city. I sit in bars and look at women's faces, searching for a piece of myself. I want to return to a different home, a home where he isn't. I guzzle champagne and savour the bravado and false hope it gives me. The bars eventually close and it's time to stagger back to Cell 208, where my lover awaits me, with clenched fist and gritted teeth.”
― Vanessa de Largie, Don't Hit Me!

“I am hiding in the unused fridge in the shed, curled up like a foetus. My heart is running a marathon. My breath can't keep up. I may die tonight from fear - or his hands.”
― Vanessa de Largie, Don't Hit Me!

“Some people chalk up every violent act against women to a boy who never got kissed in Middle School...I hate that framework because it implies it's somehow every teenage girl's responsibility to dole out just enough romantic attention to not get murdered.”
― Daniel Sweren-Becker, Kill Show

“As he struck her, he felt his chest suffocating under waves of desperate sadness, like a child abandoned by its parents.”
― Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, The Siren’s Lament: Essential Stories

“On entend dire que le sexe est bon pour la santé, mais la moitié du monde autour de moi a été violée.”
― Julie Delporte, Corps vivante

“Gail leapt from bed and went to sit in the tiny bathroom, seething with grief and anger. Then tears began to roll down her cheeks. To consider that her husband was arousing her as he spoke of his betrayal made her want to jump into the shower. That he expected this kind of arousal from her in a culture so far flung, confused her. The fact that he was not a virgin and further, that he hadn’t bothered to tell her this before the wedding, felt shameful.
Waves of rage washed over the building layers of regret for marrying Rich. The way he played with her in the telling of it!
His physical foreplay had readied her to try again, but now a sick feeling of remorse and hatred claimed her body. Gail stepped into the shower and steamed away her confusion, her disgust.
Gail wiped her tears and asked Rich to go sleep on the couch while in the same sentence informing him that she would be seeking counsel in the morning. She omitted saying what kind of counsel she would seek. She hardly knew herself.”
― Lynn Byk, The Fearless Moral Inventory of Elsie Finch

“It is in the imperative, inescapable, overwhelming demand that the victim be blamed and that you blame yourself with her. It is in the imperative, inescapable, overwhelming demand to exonerate the murdered at all costs. One does not learn to be silent: one is forced to shut up. One is forcibly silenced.”
― Cristina Rivera Garza, Liliana's Invincible Summer: A Sister's Search for Justice