someone’s little girl? so what?

[dichroic]

This article irritates me a bit, in the same way that Kipling’s “Unknown Female Corpse” from “Epitaphs of the War” does:

Headless, lacking foot and hand,
Horrible I come to land.
I beseech all women’s sons
Know I was a mother once.

If the idea that a woman was someone’s little girl once, or someone’s mother, makes observers more likely to help a woman escape abuse, then I’ll take it – I’m a pragmatist. But it isn’t the reaction I want to see. Both leave me wanting to say, very gently to the women concerned and loud, straight and very clear to their abusers:

No.

That isn’t why a woman matters.

She is somebody’s me, and that is why she’s precious; it has nothing to do with her value to other people.

It doesn’t matter if she was a mother of sons, or a wife, or daddy’s girl once. She is somebody’s me right this minute, and for that she deserves decent human treatment, as we all hope we do.

Mirrored from Dichroic Reflections.