I know I said I wasn’t going to blog while I was taking classes, but this came to my attention today, and I want to do my part to spread it. It’s a talk that took place in Melbourne (here’s a link to the text HERE) by Dr. Ken Lay, a former police commissioner.

Here are a few quotes for starters, but I encourage you to read it for yourself. The more exposure I get to the thousands of personal stories of women all over the world, the more I see the reality of this problem on a massive scale. And the Church is not innocent in this regard, either.

“Attitudes can be difficult to change because after a while they become invisible – they are as natural as breathing.”

“Knowingly or not, we give our boys license to act abusively, and we develop in our girls deference to that behavior.”

“Boys are taught to blame circumstance for their aggression…girls to contemplate how they might have provoked it.”

“Boys learn by acting out…girls by simply enduring their experiences. This leads to boys externalizing their behavior—when things go bad it’s because of other people or other things. But we encourage girls to internalize their experiences—to imagine the fault lay inside them. This research reveals mothers asking their boys, “What did the girl do?” because they’re hoping it wasn’t their son’s fault. Can we see what we are doing here? The deck is stacked against women. We’re encouraging our girls to feel complicit in their own abuse.”

Read the rest HERE. Alternatively, you can watch the speech HERE.