Life After Abuse Pod Dr. Lisa Johnson Pratt

Victims of sexual abuse are unfortunately getting younger, as are their perpetrators. Despite the depiction of adolescents as “young adults” in our media, we must remember that they are not. They are children. A 17-year-old assault victim is a child who has been assaulted. The distinction between adults and children is critical. We must remember that the human brain is not fully developed until the early 20s. Although we often use the rhetoric that children are “resilient”, this is not ...

Sheila Weir is a life coach who has a special passion for helping victims of abuse. She practices Core Energy coaching, which is focused on helping her clients create and maintain the energy that they need to live a life filled with abundance and purpose. In this episode Ms. Weir discusses her practice, what she sees as the challenges that abused women face and how she works with them to take back their power. Ms. Weir is the founder of The Elephant Mofit. You can expl...

It takes a village to protect victims of abuse and assault. That village by necessity requires the strong support of men who care deeply about the lives of women. These are men who recognize that they were born of women, that women are the glue that keeps families together and are often the strength of communities. They know that without strong and healthy women and girls, we imperil our future.I had the privilege to interview one such man who has been working hard for over a deca...

An extraordinary woman can do extraordinary things out of horrific circumstances. Hellen Tanyinga is such a woman. In 2009, Ms. Tanyinga started the Rape Hurts Foundation (RHF), an NGO in Uganda to help girls and women who have suffered abuse in its many forms and to stop human trafficking. She understood the impact of rape. She was raped as a child while getting water for her family. As she told me “I named the foundation ‘Rape Hurts’ because rape hurts.” The Rape Hurt...

The road to bringing perpetrators to justice can go through the criminal and/or civil justice system(s). Considering the relatively small percentage of assault cases that are brought forward by district attorneys, especially in the case of intimate partner abuse, the civil legal system is an avenue to punish perpetrators. The impact on the victim of assault and abuse are high. There is a substantial physical, emotional and economic cost to untreated trauma. The victim m...

"New parents with college students believe that there is this safe order around all the colleges [and] that everything is going to be fine because the college is a safe environment. Well I would tell you that there is no place that is a hundred percent safe.” In my interview with Michael Bicking, find out what you should do if you are a victim of a sexual assault on a campus. Mr. Bicking also discusses the obligations that colleges have under title IX and VAWA to both prevent assault and supp...