Free Yellow Wallpaper Essays: Physical and Mental Abuse :: Yellow Wallpaper essays

Physical and Mental Abuse in The Yellow Wallpaper What is Abuse? Abuse is not just being hit. Abuse is any action that is harmful or controlling and that affects the well being of another person. Many people use the term "Abuse" to signify physical abuse, but there are many more ways of abusing someone than beating them. Physical abuse is the most horrifying and most noticeable of them all, but it is only one of the many types of abuse. Here are some of the names for different categories of abuse: Physical abuse, Sexual abuse, Psychological and Verbal abuse, Forced confinement, abuse towards pets or property, Financial abuse, and Child abuse. The two abuses that I will be focusing on will be physical and mental abuse. I decided to pick the topic of abuse after viewing the movie The Yellow Wall- paper. After watching the movie and seeing how badly Mary Wollstonecraft was treated, it made me want to know more about abuse on women and what could be done to break the chain of abuse. I believe that no abuse is acceptable and that any man that has ever abused a woman in anyway should face major consequences. That is my main point to this paper, that the laws are not strong enough and that more effort should be done so that no women is ever abused in anyway shape or form again. To start, I will give some statistics about police and how they handle calls from wives that have been abused. "Police were more likely to respond within five minutes if the offender was a stranger than if an offender was known to the female victim" ("Response"1). Also, it has been recorded that once a women in Boston called in that her husband had beaten her and the policeman's response was, "Listen, lady, he pays the bills, does n't he? What he does inside of his house is his business"(Straus, Gelles, and Steinmetz 301). With a response like this, why even bother calling the police. That is why we must come together and start over from the inside out. We need to make every one in any position of power know that any abuse on women is wrong. The truth is that, "90% of all family violence defendants are never prosecuted, and one-third of the cases that would be considered felonies if committed by strangers are filed as misdemeanors (a lesser crime)" ("Response"1).