I’d heard about this ad but hadn’t seen it yet, definitely graphic. I suspect it will be more powerful for those who aren’t anticipating the violence. Let’s hope it punctuates consciousness about the seriousness and all too frequent violence against women. Thanks for putting this one up, Christy.

Watched this one on the other ‘puter in the house. Tough stuff indeed. Good for Keira and good on the UK for being honest with the visuals. The good old USA doesn’t want to face this horror. Not as graphically. We have women with their boobies and booties right out there on every billboard and beer commercial, which pushes forward the idea that women are objects to be used, but we can’t see photos of coffins of our dear dead troops. Disgusting.

My lightbulb moment came in 1986, when I was in DC for a workshop and read an article in the Washington Post Sunday magazine about a woman whose SEC lawyer husband beat her up on a regular basis. She’d had several miscarriages from his abuse and had only escaped from him by taking her kids, running away and living in their family station wagon. She’d eventually had to call up his boss at the SEC to tell him what happened so that she could get food for the kids. She eventually wrote a book about it – and her ex-husband sued her for the income she’d gotten from the book. One of the reasons I recall this so vividly is that the cover of the magazine was a combined photograph/xray of her from her knees up and the xrays showed all the broken bones which had healed badly because her husband would not take her to a hospital. These were people who everyone in the neighborhood saw as ‘nice’ – well to do, private schools for the kids, big house, big time job for the husband. Before that moment, I was like everyone else in terms of who I thought suffered from domestic abuse.

Go for Keira to take on such a difficult subject.

Good Morning Christy,

Glad to hear this, I must say the Rianna– Chris Brown “incident” is very disturbing. Sure hope she doesn’t end up in the morgue.

And the usual media suspects turn to commentators with absolutely no expertise to ask, “is it too violent?”

http://jezebel.com/5197069/why…..so-violent

wherein one of the smiley-feel-good-in-the-am programs asks (!) Jerry Della Femina (!!!!) whether the ad is “too graphic.” He, of course, being an antedeluvian white male old as the hills with doubtless no experience whatsoever in the subject, says “yes! and why didn’t they just show the guy’s face instead of focussing on the actual beating?” (paraphrase, actually).

Sigh. Notice allthe commenters with any actual experience of DV say, “No! not too graphic. Just what’s needed.”

(I can’t seem to find the discussion where I first read about this, and the comments.
But in the search, I found that the NYT has a “Domestic Violence Navigator”, a list of resources from around the Web on the subject. Didn’t know that.)

Good luck to anyone who would treat my daughters in such a way as this !