# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Othello Shakespeare 1563-1616 Born in Stratford-on-Avon, England Wrote 37 plays Wrote about 154 sonnets Started out as an actor then turned author Shakespeare wrote: Comedies Histories Tragedies Key Facts Full Title: The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice Author: William Shakespeare Genre: Play (Tragedy) Setting (Time): 16th Century Setting (Place): Venice and Cyprus Tone · Dark, ironic, melancholy, passionate, desperate, violent Protagonist: Othello?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Oxford University Press has announced that its new edition of the complete works of William Shakespeare will credit Christopher Marlowe as a co-author on the three Henry VI plays.

Despite years of controversy about the authorship of some of Shakespeare's work, this is the first time a major publishing house has formally named Marlowe as a co-author.

Christopher Marlowe is a 16th century British poet and playwright. The extent of his possible influence on (or even collaboration with) William Shakespeare is the subject of much academic scholarship, as NPR has reported, but for many years, mainstream academics had mostly derided efforts of independent scholars who challenged the authorship of plays attributed to Shakespeare.

The new Oxford edition, which will be available in November, was edited by four Shakespeare scholars: Gary Taylor of Florida State University, John Jowett of the University of Birmingham, Terri Bourus of Indiana University and Gabriel Egan of De Montfort University.

Taylor tells NPR the conclusion that Marlowe should be credited as co-author is partly based on a combination of new and old research. In particular, Taylor cited 2009 research by Hugh Craig and Arthur Kinney that analyzed vocabulary from the Henry VI plays and compared it to plays known to have been written by Marlowe, and a 2015 article by John Nance analyzing the prose of Part 2 of Henry VI.

Taylor himself has published scholarly work on Marlowe and Shakespeare, including work from last year titled Imitation or Collaboration? Marlowe and the Early Shakespeare Canon, on which he collaborated with Nance.

"All these publications have been subjected to rigorous peer-review," Taylor told NPR in an email.

He said there is also new work by Craig and another Shakespeare scholar, John Burrow, that is specifically on Henry VI, Part 3, and will be published in a companion text devoted entirely to research on the authorship of work attributed to Shakespeare. The chapter on the third part of Henry VI is one of 25 chapters on authorship, written by 18 scholars in five countries, according to Taylor.

Oxford University Press told The Associated Press that "identifying Marlowe's hand in the Henry VI plays is just one of the fresh features of this project."

Much of the authorship analysis is quite technical because it involves analyzing every word of entire plays, looking for patterns and clues. For example, an article on Marlowe's presence in the Henry VI plays, due to be published in the next issue of Shakespeare Quarterly, is a collaboration between another of the Oxford project editors, Gabriel Egan, and a team of mathematicians from the University of Pennsylvania.

The addition of Marlowe's name to the Henry VI plays does not settle the question of Shakespearean authorship. Carol Rutter, a professor of Shakespeare and performance studies at the University of Warwick, told the BBC, "It will still be open for people to make up their own minds. I don't think [Oxford University Press] putting their brand mark on an attribution settles the issue for most people."

Rutter told the BBC, "I believe Shakespeare collaborated with all kinds of people ... but I would be very surprised if Marlowe was one of them."

As for how Marlowe's vocabulary and style could have made it into Shakespeare's work without direct collaboration, Rutter said: "It's much more likely that he started his career working for a company where he was already an actor, and collaborated not with another playwright but with the actors - who will have had Marlowe very much in their heads, on the stage, in their voices. ... They were the ones putting Marlowe's influence into the plays."

Although she disagrees with the conclusion reached by Taylor and his co-editors, she told the BBC she thinks the discussion of authorship is good for Shakespearean scholarship. "We have really stopped thinking about the richness of the writing experience in the early modern theater, and by crediting Marlowe, people like Gary Taylor are making us attend to that," she said.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Christopher Marlowe Officially Credited As Co-Author Of 3 Shakespeare Plays

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Oxford University Press has announced that its new edition of the complete works of William Shakespeare will credit Christopher Marlowe as a co-author on the three Henry VI plays. Despite years of controversy about the authorship of some of Shakespeare's work, this is the first time a major publishing house has formally named Marlowe as a co-author.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
If the Kennedy assassination doesn't interest you, and you've got a few extra years on your hands, you might want to look into the debate over who wrote William Shakespeare 's plays.

Welcome to the morass.

Though the Shakespeare authorship question has been a topic of lively controversy for nearly two centuries now, it's likely to generate some renewed debate this week. That's because of the release of the new movie (in theaters October 28), a period historical thriller, directed by Roland Emmerich ( The Day After Tomorrow, Independence Day) and based on the theory that someone else wrote the plays normally attributed to Shakespeare.

In the case of the new movie, that someone is Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (played by Rhys Ifans), a cultured aristocrat in the court of Queen Elizabeth I (played variously by Joely Richardson and Vanessa Redgrave).

There are websites and even whole societies devoted to the proposition that the Earl of Oxford wrote Shakespeare's plays. And among those who believe that Shakespeare didn't write his own plays, de Vere can be said to be the leading contender to unseat the Bard, but he's far from the only one - there have been dozens of candidates proposed and thousands of books and articles written on the so-called Shakespeare authorship question.

As in the plays themselves, there are many warring factions and charges of dark conspiracies to suppress the truth, so it's with some trepidation that we enter these waters at all.

But let's start with a little history.

Other than the plays themselves, we have precious little documentary evidence about Shakespeare. Among the meager items: a few signatures, a record of his marriage to Anne Hathaway, a strange three-page will, some papers detailing business transactions totally unrelated to writing, and just two portraits. No record of his schooling. Not one single manuscript in his own hand of even a fragment of his amazing body of work.

History abhors a vacuum, especially when it's in the form of a lack of written evidence about one of the world's greatest writers. Although scholars desperately searched for documentation to flesh out Shakespeare's biography in the decades after his death, they found very little, and, to make matters more confusing, much of what they found was fraudulent.

But it's especially interesting to note that for a span of more than two centuries after his death, no one even suggested that the Shakespeare of Stratford was not the author of his own plays.

In fact, the first person to make the argument did it as a joke, as Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro points out in his book Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? In 1848, a young Lutheran scholar from Pennsylvania named Samuel Mosheim Schmucker, dismayed about the academic trend of using historical and biographical evidence to doubt the existence of Christ, argued that the same approaches could be used to argue that Shakespeare never existed. But he meant it all as a parody.

Shapiro says that Schmucker's forgotten book, Historic Doubts Respecting Shakespeare: Illustrating Infidel Objections Against the Bible, foreshadows all the major themes of the Shakespearean doubters: the lack of documentary evidence, a distrust of disputed texts, the improbable success of an unlikely individual, and the notion that the "official" story can only be perpetuated by general ignorance and conspiracy by the establishment.

"Schmucker has a great time of it," writes Shapiro, "mostly because it never entered his head that his readers could seriously imagine that Shakespeare wasn't Shakespeare."

But, if anything, the joke was on Schmucker.

A mere few years later, the suggestion that Shakespeare's biography just didn't jibe with his amazing body of work was all the rage. How could an untraveled, poorly-schooled commoner have written so widely on topics about which he would have had no first-hand knowledge - court intrigue, the legal process, life in other countries, even stories and information that had never been translated into English?

The great minds who have asked these questions are legion.

Mark Twain, one of the most famous doubters, author of the essay "Is Shakespeare Dead?" wrote: "So far as anybody actually knows and can prove, Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon never wrote a play in his life."

"I am 'sort of' haunted by the conviction," wrote novelist Henry James, "that the divine William is the biggest and most successful fraud ever practiced on a patient world."

Sigmund Freud, whose own work is often equated with Shakespeare's in its cultural impact and who drew heavily on Hamlet for some of his own theories, also believed that someone other than the actor from Stratford wrote the plays. "It is undeniably painful to all of us," he said, "that even now we do not know who was the author of the Comedies, Tragedies and Sonnets of Shakespeare."

"I can hardly think it was the Stratford boy," wrote Charlie Chaplin of the plays. "Whoever wrote them had an aristocratic attitude."

Such famous doubters have been joined by everyone from Orson Welles to Helen Keller.

Even Malcolm X became "intrigued over the Shakespearean dilemma," as he referred to it in his Autobiography. "If Shakespeare existed, he was then the top poet around," the modern revolutionary leader wondered, asking why he didn't work on the King James Bible. "If he existed, why didn't King James use him?"

Since the mid-nineteenth century, Shakespeare authorship theories have maintained an upward trajectory in popular discourse, even if they've never gained even a foothold among establishment Shakespeareans.

Now, of course, authorship theories are going viral, with a host of websites dedicated to exploring the question.

Take, for example, the Shakespearean Authorship Trust, a society that's been around since 1922, whose current chairman, actor Mark Rylance, along with fellow doubter Derek Jacobi, appears in Anonymous.

There's the Shakespeare Authorship Coalition, which, under the website DoubtAboutWill.org, sponsors the Declaration of Reasonable Doubt about the Identity of William Shakespeare, a petition that has more than 2000 signatories.

So there are lots of people who feel there are lots of reasons to think Shakespeare didn't write his own plays. But who do they think wrote them? Let's take a look at the arguments for some of the most popular authorship contenders, beginning with Sir Francis Bacon.
NEXT: The case for Sir Francis

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Did Shakespeare Really Write His Plays? A Few Theories Examined | BBC America

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
If the Kennedy assassination doesn't interest you, and you've got a few extra years on your hands, you might want to look into the debate over who wrote William Shakespeare 's plays. Welcome to the morass. Though the Shakespeare authorship question has been a topic of lively controversy for nearly two centuries now, it's likely to generate some renewed debate this week.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Our discussion of Shakespeare's identity draws from a few sources. A great reference is Slate's episode, How Mathematicians Determine Authorship. Most claims in the video are based on a study by Craig and Kinney, Shakespeare, Computers, and the Mystery of Authorship.

What makes Shakespeare's prose so easy to memorize? Could it be the patterns found in Shakespeare's text? Check out David Freeman and Gregory Taylor's TED-Ed Original to learn more about "Why Shakespeare Loved Iambic Pentameter." These kinds of patterns made it easy for actors to memorize Shakespeare's verse. More about rhythm and mathematics can be viewed at A-rhythm-etic by Clayton Cameron. You can't help but count along with him! Try it.

Because of the transition from print media to digital media, stylometry has recently grown as a topic of interest for researchers. Some examples of tools used for visualizing words include Wordle and Poll Everywhere. Take some time and try them out, and create your own Wordle.

Learn more about stylometry by reading: " What's In a Word-list?" Do you think your writing could be identified by a word-list? How might stylometry be used in forensics? Can authors hide their identity anymore? Read this article from the Smithsonian and see what you think: How Did Computers Uncover J.K. Rowling's Pseudonym? Then listen to Science Friday to learn more about how this mystery was uncovered.

Interested in linguistics? Noam Chomsky challenged linguists with this phrase, " colorless green ideas sleep furiously." What about this phrase is so interesting and perplexing? Read about it and see what you think.

Natalya and Aaron would like to thank those who contributed to feedback for this piece, including Wendy Cho, Richard Lederer, Katerina Popova, and Rusanda Soltan.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Did Shakespeare write his plays? - Natalya St. Clair and Aaron Williams

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Some people question whether Shakespeare really wrote the works that bear his name - or whether he even existed at all. Could it be true that the greatest writer in the English language was as fictional as his plays? Natalya St. Clair and Aaron Williams show how a linguistic tool called stylometry might shed light on the answer.

# data[].attributes.body
Box 1-3 in the example is part of the Overview. You only need ONE Overview Box. The Overview DOES NOT count for the required 5-8 boxes — You need AT LEAST 1 box per Act

# data[].attributes.body
All of this is also located on Google Classroom

# data[].attributes.body
Complete with chosen source

# data[].attributes.body
Watch this video and complete the document analysis questions as you watch — Due in turnitin 11/29 (4th/5th); 11/30 (6th/7th)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: The danger of a single story

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice -- and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding.

# data[].attributes.headline
“The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.”          — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

# data[].attributes.subject
“The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.”          — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

# data[].attributes.headline
“You are growing into consciousness, and my wish for you is that you feel no need to constrict yourself to make other people comfortable.” ― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

# data[].attributes.subject
“You are growing into consciousness, and my wish for you is that you feel no need to constrict yourself to make other people comfortable.” ― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
I AM an opinionated woman so I am often accused of being angry. This accusation is made because a woman, a black woman who is angry, is making trouble. She is daring to be dissatisfied with the status quo. She is daring to be heard.

When women are angry, we are wanting too much or complaining or wasting time or focusing on the wrong things or we are petty or shrill or strident or unbalanced or crazy or overly emotional. Race complicates anger. Black women are often characterized as angry simply for existing, as if anger is woven into our breath and our skin.

Black men, like black women, are judged harshly for their anger. The angry black man is seen as a danger, a threat, uncontrollable.

Feminists are regularly characterized as angry. At many events where I am speaking about feminism, young women ask how they can comport themselves so they aren't perceived as angry while they practice their feminism. They ask this question as if anger is an unreasonable emotion when considering the inequalities, challenges, violence and oppression women the world over face. I want to tell these young women to embrace their anger, sharpen themselves against it.

If you really want to see my anger, you would have to join me in my car, when I am driving. I am afflicted by road rage. I have deeply held opinions on the driving habits of others. When I am alone in my car, and sometimes when I have passengers, I yell at other drivers. I gesticulate wildly. I mutter terrible things about the mothers of these others. I am not proud of this but it is cathartic to release my anger. There is no fallout beyond a rise in my blood pressure.

And still, it's scary to recognize how much anger I have roiling beneath the surface of my skin and how few outlets I have for that anger, how I don't feel entitled to that anger. I keep most of my anger to myself, swallowing it as deep as I can, understanding that someday, I won't be able to swallow it anymore. I will erupt and then there will be fallout.

There are countless other moments when I get angry. Some are trivial - when the phone rings and I don't want to answer, when my first name is misspelled, when someone says they don't read. There is also the anger I harbor over far more serious things - a recent law passed in Indiana, where I live, further restricting abortion rights, and how reproductive freedom is being challenged across the country; the light sentence Brock Turner received this month in the Stanford rape case and the reality that he will receive more punishment than most people who commit similar crimes; the fractious political climate as we head into the general election.

Anger is a significant part of our cultural conversation. Sometimes, I see people log on to Twitter and ask, "What are we outraged about today?" In this, there is dismissiveness suggesting that the asker is bored with the injustices, small and great, that inspire anger within us.

In these circumstances, anger becomes an emotion that needs to be controlled, an inconvenience and an irritant. It gets confused for rage, which also has its uses.

There are consequences for both expressing and suppressing anger. In northeastern Brazil, women refer to suppressing their anger as "swallowing frogs," which contributes to "emotion-based ailments," according to L. A. Rebhun, an anthropologist who studied the connection between anger and illness in the region. The physical manifestations of anger, Professor Rebhun writes, "may also be seen as symptoms of the pain of bridging gaps between cultural expectation and personal experience in emotion, a process neither easy nor simple."

In Dallas, a place called the Anger Room is set up explicitly for customers' destructive pleasure. Clients can release their anger by taking a bat to the room. In Toronto, there is a Rage Room. One of the options is a date night package, for two. The couple that rages together, perhaps, stays together.

Beyoncé's latest album chronicles heartbreak, betrayal and the anger that rises from those experiences. In the video for the song "Hold Up," Beyoncé strolls down a city street, a placid smile on her face, as she carries a baseball bat. And then, without warning, she slams that bat against car windows, a fire hydrant, a surveillance camera. With each blow, her face falls into a mask of concentrated rage and then she's on to the next target, with ever more bounce in her step.

In her keynote speech to the National Women's Studies Association in 1981, Audre Lorde said, "Every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought that anger into being."

Politics is one arena where anger is brought into being over oppression and other matters. President Obama is often accused of being angry. He is often accused of not being angry enough. Critics have written many pieces on why Mr. Obama cannot be or be perceived as an "angry black man" for fear he might alienate white voters who are, it would seem, so fragile as to be unable to handle human emotion. At the 2015 White House Correspondents Dinner, there was a comedic bit where Mr. Obama brought on Luther, an " anger translator " who expressed the anger that the president himself could not.

In the Democratic primary this year, people flocked to Bernie Sanders because they were angry about campaign finance and excessive debt and too few opportunities to flourish. The candidate reveled in his anger, often wagging his finger and raising his voice. Together he and his supporters were angry. Their anger was celebrated, framed as passion and engagement.

Conversely, Hillary Clinton is not allowed to be angry though certainly some of her supporters are. Mrs. Clinton, once again, has shown how the rules are different for women. She cannot raise her voice without reprisal. When she appears as anything but demure, when she is passionate and sharp, she is attacked not for her ideas, but for her demeanor.

Amid all this anger, history is being made. She is the first woman who will serve as a major party's nominee for the American presidency.

The presumptive Republican nominee for president, Donald J. Trump, is the angriest from a large field of angry contenders.

Many of his supporters seem angry about so many things - a black president, their lot in life, not getting their piece of the American dream or having to share that American dream with people of color, women, gay, lesbian and transgender people. This anger is discussed with no small amount of compassion or curiosity. It is allowed to flourish. At many of Mr. Trump's rallies, this anger spills into violence.

Mr. Trump himself revels in his anger or the performance of anger. He often shoots off angry tweets, insulting anyone who doesn't submit to his petty worldview. Or he pulls out of a debate. On " Meet the Press," in March, Mr. Trump said that his supporters were angry at the state of the world, and he was "just a messenger."

There is a medical name for excessive anger - intermittent explosive disorder. A 2006 Harvard study suggested that up to 16 million people suffered from this disorder. When the study was published, there was a vigorous debate as to whether this disorder was real - discomfort in the idea that the inexcusable could be explained.

But anger is not an inherently bad thing. Most of the time, it is a normal and even healthy human emotion. Anger allows us to express dissatisfaction. It allows us to say something is wrong. The challenge is knowing the difference between useful anger, the kind that can stir revolutions, and the useless kind that can tear us down.

Roxane Gay is an associate professor at Purdue University, the author of "Bad Feminist" and the forthcoming "Hunger," and a contributing opinion writer.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter, and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
I AM an opinionated woman so I am often accused of being angry. This accusation is made because a woman, a black woman who is angry, is making trouble. She is daring to be dissatisfied with the status quo. She is daring to be heard.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Not all that long ago, an American statesman of considerable influence wrote an opinion piece for this very publication, about a political issue that directly affects women. It was perhaps the finest example of mansplaining ever published.

This election season, the idea of "mansplaining"-explaining without regard to the fact that the explainee knows more than the explainer, often done by a man to a woman-has exploded into mainstream political commentary. Hugo Schwyzer over at Jezebel noted its growth in September, writing that it has "moved beyond the feminist blogosphere." And, sure enough, these days pretty much every time a male politician opens his mouth about so-called women's issues he is dubbed, like so or like so, a mansplainer.

But the article in question wasn't written this year. Its author was Lyman Abbott, a prominent New England theologian, and it appeared in the Sept. 1903 issue of The Atlantic. The article was called " Why Women Do Not Wish the Suffrage." Abbott writes:

I believe it is because woman feels, if she does not clearly see, that the question of woman suffrage is more than merely political; that it concerns the nature and structure of society,-the home, the church, the industrial organism, the state, the social fabric. And to a change which involves a revolution in all of these she interposes an inflexible though generally a silent opposition. It is for these silent women-whose voices are not heard in conventions, who write no leaders, deliver no lectures, and visit no legislative assemblies-that I speak.

See, even though the women in question haven't said anything about it, Lyman Abbott totally knows what they want better than they do. Any woman in favor of suffrage just doesn't get the true female experience as well as he does.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Not all that long ago, an American statesman of considerable influence wrote an opinion piece for this very publication, about a political issue that directly affects women. It was perhaps the finest example of mansplaining ever published.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Domestic violence is not a problem that women can solve alone.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In the first version of her story, Grace Costa says that, on the night after Christmas, in 2012, her ex-boyfriend broke into her house, hid behind her bedroom door, and then attacked her as she and her two grown children-a son and a daughter-were about to eat dinner. In the second version, it's still the night after Christmas, but it might be 2013, and only her daughter is at home with her. There's a half-eaten apple on the floor of the kitchen; she remembers asking her daughter if she'd thrown it toward the garbage and missed. She also remembers thinking that she'd left the outside light on and then it was off.

Costa (whose name has been changed) describes the night in disjointed phrases. She cries and then stops. She spirals out from the story into another, and it takes some nudging to get her to return to the original. She knows she somehow got wrapped in a cord, and she comes back to this over and over. It was a phone cord, she thinks. "I don't know where that cord came from," she says. Then, later, "I don't know where he got that cord." Her hands were bound somehow, and then she fell to the ground. She was inside, and then she was outside. She remembers her ex-boyfriend punching her daughter in the face, blood spurting from her nose.

Local newspapers said the police arrived when she was on the ground. She was down, then up. Maybe down again. Thrown against the car, hard. Punched. Strangled. She was trying not to black out. There was blood, and that cord, and her daughter. The police weren't there, and then they were. The night comes in flashes, an image at a time-apple, blood, cord-but the pieces never fit together into a whole. Instead, they hang untethered in her mind. "I don't remember much of anything half the time," she says.

Costa has a mild brain injury from that night, though she does not recall this exact diagnosis. She also has vertigo, hearing loss, poor memory, anxiety, headaches, ringing in her ears (which she describes as a constant "electrical signal"), and a hip that causes her to limp sometimes, which she believes came from being hurled against her car. In light of her other injuries, she hasn't had her hip treated.

After the police arrived, Costa, her daughter, and her ex-boyfriend were all taken to the same emergency room. She remembers that the hospital was overwhelmingly busy, and that her attacker was still nearby. She had a sense of being in shock. She was released that same night, but for the next two weeks she had pain in her neck, her head, and her throat. She had difficulty breathing. She was covered in bruises, and her scalp ached. She saw her primary-care doctor in the days after the attack, had CT scans of her head and neck, and took a lethality-assessment screening at a local crisis center, where she was deemed high risk for domestic-violence homicide. Her ex-boyfriend was found guilty of attempted murder and is now in prison. But even with him gone, her life is a constant reminder of that night. She forgets to do things, and when and how things happened: when she lived where, when she moved, when she filed this or that paperwork. Concentration sometimes gives her headaches. She is able to work full time, in health care, but she spends most of her free time alone. Her ex-boyfriend will be out of jail in several years, and she lives in terror of that moment, caught inside her own disquieting anguish.

Fifty per cent of domestic-violence victims are strangled at some point in the course of their relationship-often repeatedly, over years-and the overwhelming majority of strangulation perpetrators are men. Those strangled to the point of losing consciousness are at the highest risk of dying in the first twenty-four to forty-eight hours after the incident, from strokes, blood clots, or aspiration (choking on their own vomit). Such incidents can cause brain injury-mild or traumatic-not only by cutting off oxygen to the brain but because they are often accompanied by blunt-force trauma to the head. Still, victims of domestic violence are not routinely screened for strangulation or brain injury in emergency rooms, and the victims themselves, who tend to have poor recollections of the incidents, are often not even aware that they've lost consciousness. This means that diagnoses are rarely formalized, the assaults and injuries are downplayed, and abusers are prosecuted under lesser charges.

Gael Strack, the chief executive officer of the Training Institute on Strangulation Prevention, is one of the domestic-violence community's most prominent voices on strangulation and its attendant issues. In 1995, when she was the assistant district attorney in San Diego, two teen-age girls were killed "on her watch," as she puts it. In the weeks before one of the girls' death-she was stabbed in front of her girlfriends-she had been strangled. The police were summoned, but when they showed up she recanted and no charges were filed. The other girl was strangled and set on fire. Both girls had sought domestic-violence services and had developed safety plans. Strack believed that San Diego was at the forefront of aggressive domestic-violence intervention. They even had a dedicated domestic-violence council and court. "We had specializations everywhere," Strack says.

Strack and Casey Gwinn, the co-founder of the Training Institute and her boss at the time, felt responsible for the girls' deaths in some way. What had they missed? What would have kept the girls alive? Strack went back and studied the case files of three hundred non-fatal domestic-violence strangulation cases. Strangulation turned out to be a critical marker. Not only did it dramatically increase the chances of domestic-violence homicide, but only fifteen per cent of the victims in the study turned out to have injuries visible enough to photograph for police reports. As a result, the officers often downplayed the incidents, listing injuries like "redness, cuts, scratches, or abrasions to the neck." And emergency rooms tended to discharge victims without CT scans and MRIs. What Strack and the domestic-violence community understand today is that most strangulation injuries are internal, and that the very act of strangulation turns out to be the penultimate abuse by a perpetrator before a homicide. "Statistically, we know now that once the hands are on the neck the very next step is homicide," Sylvia Vella, a clinician and a detective in the domestic-violence unit at the San Diego Police Department, says. "They don't go backwards."

In many of those three hundred strangulation cases, Strack also saw that the victims had urinated or defecated-an act she chalked up to their fear. She spoke to an emergency-room physician named George McClane who offered her a very different view. Urination and defecation are physical functions, like sweating and digestion, that happen below our consciousness, and are controlled by the autonomic nervous system. Sacral nerves in the brain stem-the final part of the brain to expire-control the sphincter muscles. So urination and defecation weren't a sign of fear, McClane showed Strack, but rather evidence that every one of those victims had been mere moments away from death. And each one of those cases had been prosecuted as a misdemeanor.

Strack made it her mission to train those in the domestic-violence field-from police officers to dispatchers to shelter workers to attorneys-on the signs of strangulation. Since the mid-nineteen-nineties, she and Gwinn have travelled the country holding trainings sessions that cover anatomy, investigation, prosecution, and victim safety in strangulation cases; Gwinn estimates that they've trained more than fifty thousand people. In 2011, Strack and Gwinn helped to launch the Training Institute on Strangulation Prevention with a grant from the Office of Violence Against Women. Based in San Diego, the Institute conducts four-day sessions to "train the trainers" with the help of an advisory group that includes doctors, nurses, judges, survivors, police officers, and prosecutors.

In 2013, Gwinn, Strack, and several other leading voices in the domestic-violence community submitted briefs to the Supreme Court sentencing commission outlining the particular danger of strangulation and suffocation. Last year, the Supreme Court added language to its sentencing-commission report that specifically addressed strangulation and suffocation, recommending increased prison time for those found guilty. Today, thirty-eight states prosecute strangulation as a felony, and "every jurisdiction that has prosecuted strangulation as a felony with a multidisciplinary team has seen a drop in homicides," according to Gwinn. Maricopa County, in Arizona, for example, saw its domestic-violence homicide rate drop by thirty per cent between 2012 and 2014. Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery told me, "When you look at the objective data, you could say where we have focussed on domestic-violence strangulation cases, and improved our ability to investigate, charge, and prosecute, we have also seen a significant corollary drop in domestic-violence homicides."

Still, for any kind of prosecution, both strangulation and brain injury need to be recognized and diagnosed. And, from a medical standpoint, those first twenty-four to forty-eight hours after strangulation are crucial for victims, according to Jacquelyn Campbell, the lead author on a new study that examines the effect of brain injuries from domestic violence on victims' central nervous systems. Sylvia Vella, who wrote her dissertation on strangulation, remembers a woman from her research who had such severe bruising around her neck and ear that Vella sent her immediately to the emergency room, where doctors discovered a dissected carotid artery. The woman called Vella from the hospital and said that she'd been put in a secure room under a pseudonym. "No one knows why she didn't have a stroke," Vella says. "The physicians were, like, 'I can't believe she survived.' "

While strangulation is now well documented in medical literature, traumatic brain injury is only starting to be addressed in the larger domestic-violence community. The vast majority of domestic-violence victims who show signs of T.B.I. never receive a formal diagnosis, in part because they rarely have visible injuries, and so emergency rooms don't generally screen them for it. "We're really good now ... if a kid comes in with an athletic injury, or someone's been in a car accident, about working people up for post-concussive syndrome," Campbell says. Such symptoms include vision and hearing problems, seizures, ringing ears, memory loss, headaches, and blacking out. "But somehow, we're not as good with victims" of domestic violence, she says. "We're not saying, 'O.K., did you lose consciousness for those bruises? Have you had prior strangulations and/or head injuries?' So we need to do a better job of applying that protocol to abused women."

There is an emergency-room screening tool that aims to identify victims of domestic violence with a potential T.B.I., called HELPPS, but its use is neither widespread nor standardized. Audrey Bergin, the director of a domestic-violence advocacy group called the DOVE Program, at Northwest Hospital, in Maryland, says that, while the HELPPS tool isn't used in their emergency room, a nurse reviews patients' medical records in their domestic-violence cases and looks for possible T.B.I. events. Such women would have been labelled "difficult" in the recent past, even by her staff members, she wrote in an e-mail. "The police may dismiss them as being drunk, the state's attorney may think they have mental illness.... Even the medical profession may dismiss them as being overdramatic. We have been able to intervene on their behalf to help other agencies understand that it is the T.B.I. that is causing some of these behaviors and symptoms."

The barriers to diagnosis and treatment are sometimes even more basic. Not every hospital is equipped with an MRI machine, and even those that are may not have personnel available at all times. Victims in rural or low-income areas would almost certainly have to be transported to trauma centers, which is prohibitively expensive. Add to this a lack of training and awareness among first responders and emergency personnel, and many victims spend their lives grappling with the consequences of an undiagnosed, untreated, unsupported injury, about which the narrative almost inevitably turns hostile: that they are crazy, or somehow to blame. Advocates talk of women who've lost jobs and custody of their children. Vella recalls one woman from her research whose "life was completely ruined" by brain injuries caused by strangulation. She'd lost her job, moved back in with her parents, and had to be escorted wherever she went. "She gets to the porch and can't remember where she was going," Vella says. She tells of another woman she studied who lost the ability to read and write; child protective services took her children because they felt she couldn't care for them. (Vella says that this woman is relearning the alphabet, reading simple newspaper stories, and has since regained custody of her children.)

It is not uncommon for victims of domestic violence like Costa to have trouble remembering the incidents that land their partners in trouble. They were in one part of the house and then suddenly another, and they can't remember the sequence of events. Their explanation of what happened is cloudy, and law enforcement and courtrooms put the burden of proof on them. To the untrained, they sound like liars. Often, they sound hysterical. What researchers have learned from combat soldiers and football players and car-accident victims is only now making its way into the domestic-violence community: that the poor recall, the recanting, the changing details, along with other markers, like anxiety, hyper-vigilance, and headaches, can all be signs of T.B.I.

Strack also points out how the emotional component of T.B.I. in cases of domestic violence complicates the lives of survivors. Veterans, for example, have the benefit of a support network when they're injured. Family, friends, medical personnel, and fellow-survivors are all explicit supporters of the injured party. But domestic violence continues to be seen as a mostly private issue. One woman I spoke with, whose ex had been found guilty of torture and was given a life sentence, talked about the shame she felt knowing that she'd ended up in an abusive relationship. "I was profoundly embarrassed," she says. "You think of someone who's poor, who's uneducated, who doesn't have resources. I thought if I could get him to change back, I wouldn't have to tell people about it." Strack says this emotional component can haunt victims for years. "That trauma of knowing someone you love is willing to take your last breath," she says. "How do you live with that?"

Rachel Louise Snyder is the author of the books "What We've Lost Is Nothing" and "Fugitive Denim." She first contributed to the magazine in 2013.
Read more "

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
No Visible Bruises: Domestic Violence and Traumatic Brain Injury

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In the first version of her story, Grace Costa says that, on the night after Christmas, in 2012, her ex-boyfriend broke into her house, hid behind her bedroom door, and then attacked her as she and her two grown children-a son and a daughter-were about to eat dinner.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Berryville, Arkansas - Two days before she died, Laura Aceves stood on the side of the road and frantically dialed the police for the last time.

It was early afternoon and the 21-year-old had finished her shift at the Berryville Tyson Foods plant, where she worked on an assembly line deboning chicken. Moments after pulling out of the parking lot, her car broke down. At the nearest service station, a mechanic identified the problem: Someone had poured bleach in her gas tank.

Laura knew who was responsible. Her abusive ex-boyfriend, Victor Acuna-Sanchez, was out on bail and had a history of destroying her stuff. "No one else would have done this," she told police.

According to family members and court records, Laura spent the last year of her life being terrorized by Acuna-Sanchez. He allegedly beat her with a baseball bat, dragged her behind a car, strangled her until she blacked out on the floor and told her over and over how he would kill her if she ever left him.

At the time, Acuna-Sanchez, 18, was awaiting trial for charges stemming from two prior attacks on Laura, including a felony for aggravated assault. He was out on bail, under court order to have no contact with Laura and to check in with probation by phone each week.

At the gas station, Laura told police where she thought Acuna-Sanchez might be staying and pleaded for their help. An officer said he'd search for him, but came up empty-handed. That evening, Laura, who had three young children, posted a vague message on Facebook hinting at her troubles: It is gonna be a long night.

Less than 48 hours later, she was found in her apartment with a gunshot wound to the head. Her four-month-old son was crying by her side, coated in so much blood that EMTs thought he'd been shot too. Laura had an open casket funeral. No amount of makeup could conceal her black eyes.

A year and a half has passed since her murder. On a clear day in April, her mother, Laura Ponce, drives to her last apartment and stands in the driveway, holding back tears.

The apartment complex is on the outskirts of town, on a steep, twisting ridge in the Ozarks. In the spring, the shrubs lining the road flush with tiny purple flowers. It's the road that leaves town, the path out of Carroll County.

"She was trying to get as far away as she could," Ponce says. "It wasn't enough."

As with many women who are killed in domestic violence homicides, Laura's death was foreshadowed by a documented trail of warning signs. But in this small town in rural Arkansas, those red flags went unheeded. Despite Acuna-Sanchez's history of brutal attacks and repeated violations of his bail conditions, the justice system failed to keep him away from the woman he vowed to kill.

"Everybody knew she was in danger," Ponce says. "A police officer came to my house and I told him everything in detail: How Victor beat her up, how he told us we were all going to be murdered, and that he had guns. Why couldn't anyone stop him?"

Robert Hancock, a neighbor, spots Ponce through his window and comes outside to talk. He was home the night Laura died. His mother owns the 12-unit apartment complex, which is now for sale. They haven't been able to rent Laura's unit since her death. Everyone knows what happened there.

"You have to trust that God will take care of it, one way or another," he says. "Are you a Christian -- do you believe in God?"

"I do," Ponce says, her voice strained. "But I don't believe in the justice of Berryville."

Sheriff Bob Grudek, 71, sits in his office at the jail where Acuna-Sanchez is being held on capital murder charges and rattles off a list of small-town problems facing Carroll County.

Theft, mostly of farm equipment. People stripping copper wire off the chicken houses and selling it. Kids stealing their parents' prescription drugs. DUIs. Some methamphetamine. And a lot of domestic violence.

In the last decade, Arkansas has frequently been ranked as one of the 10 worst states in the nation when it comes to men killing women, according to annual reports by the Violence Policy Center. The ranking is based on FBI data on incidents in which a sole male offender kills a single female victim, a typical indicator of domestic homicide.

In Arkansas, the combination of lots and lots of guns and lax firearm laws contributes to the problem. Research has shown if a batterer has access to a gun, the victim is eight times more likely to be killed. According to an analysis by the Center for American Progress, in 2010 Arkansas had the third-worst gun murder rate for women in the nation.

In the aftermath of Laura's gruesome murder, a blame game between the sheriff and prosecutor's office played out in the local press.

Acuna-Sanchez was out on bail at the time of Laura's death, awaiting trial for earlier assaults against her. In the month leading up to her death, he repeatedly broke the conditions of his pretrial release, but faced few consequences.

Just three weeks before she was killed, police arrested him for violating a no-contact order. Despite a record of escalating violence against Laura, he was released without bail the following day.

In a local newspaper, Grudek blamed Acuna-Sanchez's release on gaps in communication between the prosecutor and the judge. Since he had violated the no-contact order, prosecutors could have asked the judge to hold him pending trial, but they didn't.

Deputy prosecuting attorney Devon Closser said that was because they didn't know about his most recent arrest. She told The Lovely County Citizen that there was no procedure in place to inform prosecutors when protective orders had been violated - and that the system could use "fine-tuning."

In an interview with The Huffington Post, Closser declined to discuss the case, but said it was "not unusual" for offenders to be released quickly if they were arrested simply for violating a no-contact order.

Records also show that Acuna-Sanchez wasn't checking in with a probation officer, as he was ordered to do as a condition of bail, but no one noticed.

Grudek said he couldn't comment on Acuna-Sanchez's case specifically. But he shared his perspective on the problem of domestic violence, which he said he formulated by watching Dr. Phil.

"This is a very serious social problem," he said, speculating that the crime was related to the breakdown of the traditional family structure. "Maybe if our culture goes back to when we had different values ... I don't remember when I was a kid hearing about any domestic violence."

In fact, the opposite is true. Domestic violence has been on a steady decline in the U.S. for the past 20 years. Since the landmark Violence Against Women Act was passed in 1994, annual rates of domestic violence have plummeted by 64 percent. But the U.S. still has the highest rate of domestic violence homicide of any industrialized country.

Each day on average, three women are murdered by intimate partners - husbands and ex-husbands, boyfriends and estranged lovers. Compared to men, women are far more often murdered by someone they know. In 2010, 39 percent of U.S. female homicide victims were killed by an intimate partner. Just three percent of men suffered the same fate.

When asked how Carroll County could improve its handling of domestic violence cases, Grudek said he was unconvinced that a more proactive response - like setting high bail for serial abusers, or requiring GPS tracking for offenders who violate restraining orders - would make a substantial difference.

"The question you're asking me is what's wrong with the courts," he said. "I'm asking you, what's wrong with the women?"

Grudek said domestic violence prevention should focus on why women return to their abusers, and that it wasn't "logical or responsible" to think the criminal justice system could solve the problem.

But across the country, many people are hopeful that it can play a pivotal role to help reduce domestic violence deaths.

While one in four women will be victims of domestic violence at some point in their lives, only a small fraction of cases turn lethal. The trick, many experts now believe, is identifying which women are at highest risk of death so they can be targeted for intervention.

Twenty-five years ago, Jacquelyn Campbell, now viewed as the country's leading expert on domestic homicide, created a screening tool that helps police, court personnel and victim advocates identify the women who are at the greatest risk of being killed.

Victims of domestic abuse are asked 20 questions, including: Do you believe he is capable of killing you? Does he own a gun? Is he violently and constantly jealous of you?

"We now know enough about the risk factors that we need to assess perpetrators for risk of homicide," Campbell said in an interview.

At the time of her death, Laura would have scored an 18 - in "extreme danger" - on Campbell's lethality screening test, according to calculations by The Huffington Post. "The system might have worked best together to identify that perpetrator as high-risk and manage that case in a more proactive way," Campbell said.

Jurisdictions in at least 33 states are now screening domestic violence victims, in a process dubbed "lethality assessment." A number of different screening tools are in use, all stemming from Campbell's seminal research in the 80s.

States that have adopted some form of lethality assessment are showing impressive progress. Over the past six years, an ambitious lethality assessment program in Maryland reduced its domestic violence homicide rate by 25 percent. A team in Newburyport, Massachusetts, has intervened in 129 high-risk cases since 2005 and has had zero homicides.

Last year, encouraged by these success stories, the U.S. Justice Department began funding 12 pilot programs across the country to train police in lethality assessment. In a speech announcing the initiative, Vice President Joe Biden hailed the approach.

"Lives are being saved - we know how to do it," Biden said. "We know what risk factors put someone in greater danger of being killed by the person they love - and that also means we have the opportunity to step in and try to prevent these murders."

Legislators in Oklahoma recently passed a bill requiring police to screen victims with an 11-question checklist to determine if they are at high risk of being killed or severely assaulted. Once a woman is determined to be at high risk, police inform her about the danger she is in, encourage her to seek help and connect her with key resources.

In neighboring Arkansas, police are not currently being trained to screen women using lethality assessment. When asked about the value of identifying high-risk victims, Grudek said he would use a screening tool if the state introduced it, but expressed skepticism.

"It doesn't make any difference what kind of training officers get. You can tell that person they are at risk. But they will keep going back," he said. "Women continue to live in that environment. Why don't you do a study on why victims go back to these abusers? Why do they do that?"

There are many complex reasons why women stay with abusive partners. Leaving can be economically impossible, as well as dangerous. Research has shown that women are at greatest risk of homicide at the point of separation or after leaving a violent partner.

Fixating on that question - why doesn't the woman just leave - reveals a fundamental misunderstanding about the realities of domestic abuse, said Kim Gandy, president of the National Network to End Domestic Violence.

"So often, when people say, 'Why didn't she just leave?' the reality is that she did leave, or tried to," Gandy said. "Often she has reached out for help repeatedly, to the police, to the courts, sometimes to friends or family. Often she has a protective order and he assaults her anyway."

Blaming the victim for not leaving indicates ignorance about the power and control that is an integral part of domestic abuse, she said.

"If these kinds of police attitudes are common - the idea that it's really the victim's fault for being in that situation - then it would certainly deter a victim from seeking police help or protection," she said. "These kinds of attitudes are one of the reasons that abusers feel they can do whatever they want, and not have to answer for their violence."

Linda Tyler, a former state representative who fought to strengthen domestic violence laws in Arkansas, said that police, prosecutors and judges across the state aren't adequately educated about domestic violence and don't do a good enough job protecting victims from abusers.

"We consistently have no-contact orders violated, and victims subsequently assaulted or killed," she said in an interview.

In 2009, she spearheaded a bill that gives judges the power to put GPS tracking on offenders who violate restraining orders. Keeping tabs on domestic abusers during the pretrial period has shown to be effective -- a 2012 study found that when offenders out on bail are made to wear GPS trackers, they rarely try to contact their victims.

As Tyler traveled the state seeking support for the bill, she was dismayed by what she found.

"There were so many cases, over and over, where law enforcement just didn't believe the victim," she said. "I had prosecutors tell me that women made this stuff up. It's unfortunately still an environment of -- I'm a husband and I think I have the right to beat my wife, if that's what I feel like I need to do. That goes with marital privileges."

Her bill passed but has not been embraced by Arkansas' judges. She said she knew of only three counties out of 75 that have used GPS tracking in response to the bill.

"I'm frustrated that it's not used more often," she said. "It may not be the only tool to use to curb domestic violence, but it is at least a tool and we seem to have so few of them, so we should really consider using it more than we do."

Tyler said more training is urgently needed for police, prosecutors and judges, as is increased data gathering on domestic violence.

"We don't effectively collect data on a statewide basis that allows us to compare performance from one jurisdiction to the other," she said. "We should identify the areas where we have significant issues of violations of protective orders and hold those jurisdictions accountable, or at the very least make the information public so that the voters are informed. As you know, we do elect our county prosecutors, judges and sheriff."

Laura was two years older than Acuna-Sanchez, and the two didn't move in the same circles. But Berryville is a small place. In 2011, at a friend's birthday party, they connected and started dating.

She was 19 and had two kids from a previous relationship. He was just 17. Within days, they were a couple.

From the very beginning, Ponce said, Acuna-Sanchez was violent. As is often the case with batterers, his methods of abuse went far beyond physical beatings. Ponce described a harrowing cycle of harassment, where he would brutally assault Laura, steal or destroy her belongings - a form of economic abuse - and threaten to kill her and her kids if she left him.

"He beat her on a weekly basis," Ponce said. "She suffered like you wouldn't imagine. Daytime, nighttime. It was a living hell."

Acuna-Sanchez had a reputation around town for violent behavior.

According to a woman who went to high school with him, he "wasn't ever afraid to fight." In a court-ordered mental health evaluation, he told a psychiatrist that he fought in school constantly, starting in elementary school, where he was eventually expelled. At 11, he said he was ordered to receive mental health treatment due to "anger problems." He said his father hit him a lot, "hard enough to where you're bleeding," and his mother married a string of violent men who beat her in front of him.

A woman who witnessed the relationship and who asked to remain anonymous said Acuna-Sanchez was deeply controlling. "Laura acted like she always had to do what he wanted and if she didn't, there'd be hell to pay," she said. "Sometimes they were happy but most of the time she was scared of him."

In one case, Laura fled to her mother after an assault and asked her for a copy of her passport. Acuna-Sanchez had destroyed the original by burning it in the kitchen sink, along with her social security card and birth certificate.

"She had her hair over her eyes. I grabbed her, tipped her face up - all purple," Ponce said. "I screamed and said I was going to call the cops. She said, 'Please, no mama, he will kill us all.'"

In March 2012, less than a year after they started dating, Laura became pregnant with Acuna-Sanchez's child. She filed a restraining order soon after.

"I have tried to leave him before, but he always finds me and makes my life miserable by taking my things or my mom's things until I get back with him," she wrote in the restraining order. "He told me he wouldn't leave me alone."

Researchers are split on how effective restraining orders are at protecting victims. At the most basic level, they serve as documentation of misbehavior that can be used to arrest offenders. But they are often ignored - abusers violate restraining orders an estimated 40 percent of the time - and there's no way to track how many domestic abuse homicide victims had restraining orders against their killers at their time of death.

Even after filing a restraining order, Laura struggled to separate from Acuna-Sanchez. The two briefly rekindled their relationship, though Ponce describes Laura's participation as involuntary.

"I don't like to call it 'dating,'" she said. "Laura did not want to continue the relationship. He was forcing her to be with him. If she didn't do what he said, she had to pay."

Each time she tried to leave him, he would intimidate her with threats, beat her and destroy her belongings. "She was so exhausted," Ponce said. "Every time he would ruin her things, and she had to start over. She didn't have much money."

At the court hearing to make the restraining order permanent, Laura declined to pursue it and the petition was dismissed.

But after Laura gave birth to their baby boy, Jordan, the abuse accelerated.

A week after Jordan was born, on Sept. 1, police responded to a 911 call at Laura's house. She told police that Acuna-Sanchez had hit her in the face, then smashed her car with a hammer and destroyed the baby's car seat by tearing all the stuffing out.

He was arrested for domestic battery that day. On Sept. 4, he was released on bail with a protective order to have no contact with Laura. But two days later, Acuna-Sanchez returned to her apartment.

In the police report, Laura said she heard a noise outside and opened the door to peek out. Acuna-Sanchez pushed his way in and tried to kiss her. When she refused, she told police, he tackled her to the ground and strangled her. She blacked out. When she regained consciousness, she said, her newborn baby was lying by her side and Acuna-Sanchez had fled, stealing her cell phone and car keys. When police arrived, "she was crying and holding her two-week-old child," the officer wrote.

It took over a month for Acuna-Sanchez to be arrested. It is not clear why police did not apprehend him earlier.

On Oct. 3, he was arrested and charged with aggravated assault on a family member, a felony, and with violating the no-contact order. This time he was held in jail for a month. On November 15, he was granted bail, and told he wasn't allowed to contact Laura. He was also ordered to call the probation office two times a week.

But due to an apparent error at the courthouse, the probation office was never notified that Acuna-Sanchez was on probation and therefore required to stay in close contact with an officer. He never once called in.

In a letter sent to prosecutors, Kent Villines, assistant area manager of the Arkansas Department of Community Correction, confirmed the Berryville office had been unaware of the order. "I checked with all the personnel ... and no one knew anything about this situation," he wrote, "therefore Victor Acuna has not been checking in with this office at any time."

Villines told The Huffington Post that it was the prosecutor's responsibility to send over the order, and that it was "rare" for an order to fall through the cracks. "Usually, with this system we have set up, things don't disappear, but sometimes they do," he said.

In early December, Acuna-Sanchez was arrested for violating the no-contact order once more, after police spotted him in a car with Laura. The next day, Berryville District Judge Scott Jackson released him on his personal recognizance; no bail. That was the last time he was in police custody while Laura was still alive.

At Christmas, Ponce said, Laura told Acuna-Sanchez that she was leaving town. She had been saving money and was planning to rent an apartment in Missouri with her best friend.

"That was her biggest mistake, telling him," Ponce said. "He wasn't going to just let her go."

Laura didn't make it to the New Year.

On New Year's Eve, 2011, police found her dying on the floor of her apartment. Hours later, they arrested Acuna-Sanchez at his mother's house. He was found hiding in the shower, armed with a 22-caliber handgun. In the pocket of his overalls were 39 bullets and the key to Laura's apartment.

He is now awaiting trial on capital murder charges. If convicted, he will face death or life imprisonment without parole.

On a Saturday night in early April, locals gather outside the courthouse for a memorial for Laura.

Little has changed in Carroll County since her death. As far as Ponce can tell, there's been no real effort to reform how domestic violence cases are handled. And there's been no acknowledgement that anything went wrong.

"The only thing I've been told is the system needs 'fine-tuning,'" Ponce says. "Nothing is different."

She says she's dejected by the lack of progress and alarmed that no steps have been taken to prevent this kind of tragedy from happening again. That's her biggest fear. Ponce organized the memorial -- plastering the town with posters and posting an ad in the local newspaper -- hoping to raise awareness about domestic violence in the community. She doesn't want Laura's death to be for nothing. It has to mean something.

At dusk, she pulls up in a minivan with Laura's three kids in tow. After Laura's death, she abruptly became the caretaker of a newborn, as well as Laura's two school-aged children.

"I had no baby clothes," Ponce recalls. Now, her life revolves around the kiddos, as she calls them.

Jordan, who will be 2 in August, still wakes up screaming most nights. Christopher, Laura's other son, is 6. And then there's Josie, her only daughter, who is 8.

All three are in therapy over their mother's brutal death. Research has shown that kids who grow up witnessing domestic violence suffer lasting emotional effects and are more likely to have behavioral problems.

The kids sit on the ground and wait quietly for the memorial to start. The crowd is mostly Latino, but there are at least a dozen Caucasians in the crowd of around 40. Kids outnumber adults two to one.

Someone hands out purple ribbons. An oversized sketch of Laura, donated by a local artist, is displayed on an easel. Pamphlets about domestic violence support are scattered across a table.

There is no shelter for battered women in all of Carroll County. The director of the closest shelter, The Sanctuary, located 30 miles away in Harrison, speaks to the crowd about their services: temporary accommodation, a 24-hour crisis line, support groups and assistance with protective orders and court advocacy. The director of community outreach translates afterwards in Spanish.

Ponce chokes up when it's her turn to take the microphone.

"I want to turn Laura's tragedy into a way to help other people," she says. "If anyone is in that situation, do not wait. A restraining order is just a piece of paper. Leave, get into a shelter, move out, don't wait."

Her point is clear -- Women won't get help here. The only recourse is to flee. She offers to drive them.

Ponce directs her harshest words toward the local justice system, which she says failed her family.

"They have to do their jobs more seriously and they need to communicate," she says. "I'm just going to keep fighting and fighting until I see justice served."

Josie, Laura's firstborn, tries not to cry. She prefers to remember the good times with her mom. They used to bake cookies together and play in the park. And whenever her mom got sad, she'd play "Don't Worry, Be Happy," and the two would dance around and everything would be better.

She stays very still while her grandmother talks. She listens.

When the 21 balloons are released -- one for each year of Laura's life -- Josie cranes her head upward and watches the purple spheres become smaller and smaller in the distance, until they are just little dots and then nothing at all.

Lead photo provided by Laura Ponce. Other photography by Melissa Jeltsen. Photo editing/design by Phillip Nessen. Need help? In the U.S., call 1-800-799-SAFE (7233) for the National Domestic Violence Hotline.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
This Is How A Domestic Violence Victim Falls Through The Cracks

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Berryville, Arkansas - Two days before she died, Laura Aceves stood on the side of the road and frantically dialed the police for the last time. It was early afternoon and the 21-year-old had finished her shift at the Berryville Tyson Foods plant, where she worked on an assembly line deboning chicken.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Australian Government - Domestic Violence - ‘Stop It At The Start’ - BMF

# data[].attributes.body
From a child's perspective

# data[].attributes.body
Deborah Tannen

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
It's a frame of mind with deep roots in the family and playground. Let's stop using it.

What do Sonia Sotomayor, Hillary Clinton and Sheryl Sandberg share with innumerable other prominent women? They've all been called bossy. And why, with all the important issues women deal with, should anyone pick a fight over a word, as Sandberg's Lean In team, together with the Girl Scouts, have just done?

The campaign, called " Ban Bossy," claims that the word holds women back.

How can a word - especially a weak one like "bossy" - do that? It isn't even as virulent as that other word that starts with "b," which is also hurled at women.
What's in a word?
Sotomayor and Clinton are Exhibit A for why the word matters: that others had called them bossy was used to argue they were ill-suited for the public offices they sought.

But the way this word can work against women in public life has roots that go deep - way back to the family and the playground.

When I wrote You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation, I was struck that girls and women are so often called "bossy." Don't men tell others what to do just as often, if not more often? I encountered the same question when I wrote a book about sisters, You Were Always Mom's Favorite! Again and again, women told me that their oldest sister was bossy.
Sandberg an oldest sister
So I wasn't surprised to read in Sandberg's book - right up front - that she is an oldest sister. This family dynamic throws into relief the injustice of the label: Oldest sisters are put in the position of boss in relation to younger siblings, but when they behave as that position requires, they're resented for it - and called bossy.

Why does this happen to sisters more than brothers, and to prominent women but not prominent men?

Research on children at play holds a clue. Children tend to play with others of the same sex and learn to play, and talk, differently. Girls tend to use language to maintain and negotiate closeness - who's in, who's out? - by telling secrets and reassuring each other that they're the same, that no one thinks she's better than the others.

Boys tend to use language to negotiate their status in the group - who's up, who's down? - by taking center stage or by talking about who's best at what. If a boy tells other boys what to do and they listen, he's the leader. That's why boys are free to - no, they're expected to - say things such as "Gimme that!"

A girl who tells other girls what to do is not liked, and girls who aren't liked are often locked out. If boys aren't liked, they might be mistreated but are still allowed to play.
Difference in language
Given this risk of being locked out, girls have to find other ways to get their way, such as making suggestions starting with "let's." When girls and boys become women and men, those same ways of talking carry over into the workplace.

I once had high-ranking women and men record everything they said for a week, then shadowed them and interviewed them and their co-workers. I found that women in authority, more often than men in similar positions, used language in ways that sounded a lot like what researchers observed among girls at play. Instead of "do this," women managers would say "let's ..." or "what you could do," or soften the impact by making their statements sound like questions.

In short, women at work are in a double bind: If they talk in these ways, which are associated with and expected of women, they seem to lack confidence, or even competence. But if they talk in ways expected of someone in authority, they are seen as too aggressive.

That's why "bossy" is not just a word but a frame of mind. Let's agree to stop sending girls and women the message that they'll be disliked - or worse - if they exercise authority.

Wait. I'll put that differently: Think twice before calling a woman at work, a girl on the playground - or your oldest sister - bossy.
Deborah Tannen is a professor of linguistics at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. In addition to its own editorials, USA TODAY publishes diverse opinions from outside writers, including our Board of Contributors. To read more columns like this, go to the opinion front page or follow us on twitter @USATopinion or Facebook.

Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1iy02v4

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
'Bossy' is more than a word to women: Column

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
It's a frame of mind with deep roots in the family and playground. Let's stop using it. What do Sonia Sotomayor, Hillary Clinton and Sheryl Sandberg share with innumerable other prominent women? They've all been called bossy.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
For whatever reason, a large portion of the human race decided at one point that something as trivial as a neckline, the height of a heel, or the length of a skirt could determine a lot about a woman. A piece of fabric can dictate not only people's assumptions about your personality or perceived promiscuity, but in some countries, can even be used as evidence against you in cases of rape. The human rights group Terre Des Femmes is challenging these misguided notions about women's bodies with ads that use labels to "measure" a woman's worth, showing just how absurd and offensive the notions are in the first place.

The ads are simple but extremely powerful in their message. Designed by Theresa Wlokka and a group of students at Miami Ad School in Hamburg, Germany, they depict a faceless, exposed woman whose image is cast behind a layer of measurements. All of them range from "prude" to "cheeky" to "whore," and none of the measurements are complimentary in nature, showing just how impossible it is for women to satisfy the intense societal judgment that is cast for something as simple as what they put on before they leave the house in the morning.

The campaign's slogan is, "Don't measure a woman's worth by her clothes." The ads were recently shared to Facebook, where commenter Loli Maeght summed it up just as powerfully: "Don't measure a woman at all: she's unmeasurable."

Beyond this powerful campaign, we have seen other ads making huge strides for gender equality and women's rights. The Salvation Army recently piggy-backed on the viral craze of "The Dress," releasing an unsettling and impacting ad featuring an abused woman wearing it.

Pantene's Strong Shine ad also threw a gem into the ring last year, encouraging women to stop apologizing unnecessarily for things they shouldn't be sorry for.

And by now most of us have seen Always' eye-opening "Like A Girl" campaign, which got some more recent airplay during this year's Super Bowl.

While all of these ads are rallying toward a different goal, they are all striving for the same ultimate end result: creating a space where women are respected as equals, not just in the workplace but in every aspect of their lives, and feel empowered enough to expect what they deserve.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Proof It's Insane To Judge A Woman By Her Clothes

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
For whatever reason, a large portion of the human race decided at one point that something as trivial as a neckline, the height of a heel, or the length of a skirt could determine a lot about a woman. A piece of fabric can dictate not only people's a...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Few things are more confusing than America's relationship with sex. We puritanically disavow sexual activity, for example, yet allow erotica to dominate our screens both in and in . Such hypocrisy places women in an especially precarious position, as they must walk the subjective, ever-changing line between "prude" and "slut," often expected to embody purity and sexuality at once - and then chastised if they lean too far in either direction.

But while women and girls are routinely shamed for their sexuality, this practice has nothing to do with sex, regardless of how much or how little of it they're having.

Mic talked to some of the most prominent anti-slut-shaming crusaders to learn what "slut" actually means. These activists, who span three generations and various economic and social backgrounds, agree that labeling someone a "slut" is nothing more than an attempt to control women and police their personal agency.

Here's how "slut" does just that:

It enforces gendered double standards.

One of the most pervasive gender-based double standards with which women must contend is the "virgin-whore dichotomy." This paradox prescribes that women be sexy but not toosexy, chaste but never prude. Calling women sexual slurs is a way to rein them in, in a sense, by making them adhere more strictly to these boundaries or risk facing social consequences.

Leora Tanenbaum, author of I Am Not a Slut: Slut-Shaming in the Age of the Internet, further describes this dichotomy as the cultural acceptance of men as active sexual agents and women as passive recipients. Thus "even when a man and a woman behave absolutely identically [in a sexual situation], the male will be rewarded and the female will be punished," Tanenbaum told Mic. This mindset, she says, can be summed up by the adage, "Boys will be boys and girls will be sluts."

It reduces a woman to her sexuality.

Beyond being patently sexist and unfair, sexual double standards like this limit women by dismissing "everything else that makes a woman a complete, whole person, besides her sexuality," UnSlut Project founder Emily Lindin told Mic. "You can't be "a 'slut' and also a doctor and also a kind person and also a mother. You're just a 'slut.'"

The "slut" identity not only impacts women on a personal level, but it also prohibits women's progress toward equality more broadly. The amount of sex a woman has should have no bearing on the other aspects of her life, but it's easier to control women when they can be defined - and then judged - by what happens between their legs. Thus the idea of a woman actually claiming an authentic sexual self is seen as "somehow threatening and as out of control," Lindin said.

It's a way to silence outspoken women.

Regardless of their actual sexual activity, outspoken or powerful women regularly are labeled "sluts" on everything from public media to personal social networks. Tanenbaum said there is "so much discomfort and anxiety over the idea of girls and women being in control, being agents, having power" that deriding them as sluts is "a way to police them."

Take, for example, prominent conservative figurehead Rush Limbaugh's attack of Sandra Fluke. Because Fluke spoke in favor of women's basic right to access birth control, Limbaugh attempted to silence her by her a "slut" and a "prostitute."

Fluke was talking about something related to sex, but the subject at hand doesn't make a difference - a woman's sexuality is still often the main point of attack. According to the StopSlut Movement, the youth-centered anti-sexual bullying organization led by Katie Cappiello and Meg McInerney that created the recently published SLUT, this is a type of backlash teens know well. One such teen told Mic that she was called a slut for saying that Grand Theft Auto 5 glamorized violence against women; another was labeled a slut for cursing.

It turns women against one another.

Using accusations of sluttiness as a tool to curb others' voices isn't just wielded by men against women. Women slut shame other women too. Tanenbaum said girls label other girls sluts as a "protective measure" - that is, a way to deflect pressure from or elevate themselves. Calling a female peer a slut also "takes away that girl's power and gives it to you," according to the StopSlut team. "You're the one declaring her worthless, and that makes you powerful."

It's used to justify sexual harassment and violence.

"If a girl is seen as a 'slut,' the implication is that she cannot be raped," Lindin told Mic. "This works on an individual level, in that her rapist uses his opinion of her to justify his actions in the moment, but also on an institutional level, in that if she chooses to report, her sexual history will come up as a way to discredit her account."

Tanenbaum agrees, telling Mic that because reporting an assault is an undeniable act of agency, the default response is to undermine that act of empowerment and to doubt and discredit the individual. This is why we insist survivors "must have done something to provoke that assault" says Tanenbaum, and suggest "that either she wasn't really assaulted at all, that it wasn't coercive - or that it was coercive but who cares because she's a slut and was behaving inappropriately in the first place."

One teen cast member of SLUT experienced this personally. At 14, she was sexually assaulted by her doorman. When she spoke out, the other tenants of her apartment building not only sided with the doorman but paid his legal fees and shamed the teen as a "short-shorts wearing, midriff baring, flirtatious slut," according to Cappiello, who relayed this story. "Her 'sluttiness' justified his behavior," she told Mic, and "even more accurately, solidified his innocence."

It's a way to justify racism.

Though slut shaming impacts women of all backgrounds, African-American women have a particularly fraught history with the concept. Whereas white women may only be given two options for their sexuality - virgin or whore - black women often aren't afforded even this choice. "Black women have always been labeled as hypersexual beings unworthy of respect, love and justice," Lutze B. noted in Salon "'Slut' is the default position of black women."

The concept of sluttiness is undeniably racialized based on the legacy of slavery, in which black women were denied ownership of their own bodies and seen as available for domination. We're still feeling the effects of such thinking today: One 18-year-old member of StopSlut said, "As a black young woman, I'm sick of it all. I feel like our bodies and the image of black women in general have been culturally fetishized and slutted for centuries, and it gives people the permission to be racist toward us and to treat us without respect. It feels like we're hated."

Black women aren't the only racial minority that face racism tied to their sexuality. Asian women are also sexually stereotyped in ways that expose them to sexual harassment and violence. "It's like guys think I'm gonna be their obedient geisha girl or subservient China doll," said one 15-year-old StopSlut activist. "I'm not their anime fantasy, you know? And even white female friends of mine will comment on how all guys love Asians."

notoriously face sexualized stereotypes based on their race as well, such as being called "fiery" or regarded as inherently more sexual than other women. Feminspire quoted Tu Vez writer Jack Thomas saying, "When white women are prostitutes, they are usually the 'hooker with a heart of gold' ... when a Latina is a whore, she's just a slut."

The way in which women of color are seen as inherently slutty or sexualized is not only disempowering but is also a single element in a much larger project of discrimination: racism.

Why this matters

Talking about slut shaming is about so much more than one's personal sex life or petty interpersonal insults. Slut shaming reflects broader systems of power that continue to demean and harm women and prevent us all from achieving true gender equality.

That doesn't mean it doesn't sting. A culture that primes women to internalize their own sexual objectification, values their bodies and sexuality over their intelligence and opinions and punishes those who transgress a sexual narrow norm is undoubtedly harmful to the fight for progress.

Luckily, there are courageous activists educating the world through powerful documentaries and and speeches. Let's listen. As the wise teens featured in this piece encourage us to do, let's "stop slut" today.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Calling a Woman a Slut Has Nothing to Do With Sex - It's About Control

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Few things are more confusing than America's relationship with sex. We puritanically disavow sexual activity, for example, yet allow erotica to dominate our screens both in and in . Such hypocrisy places women in an especially precarious position, as they must walk the subjective, ever-changing line between "prude" and "slut," often expected to embody purity and sexuality at once - and then chastised if they lean too far in either direction.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Prudish. Flirty. Whore. Proper. Cheeky. Slut. These are just a few of the words that could be used to describe a woman's sexual behavior based on her appearance alone, and 18-year-old college freshman Rosea Lake chose to display them starkly -- on a young woman's legs in a photo that has since gone viral. (Scroll down to see the image.)

Lake, who studies graphic design and illustration at Capilano University in Vancouver, never thought she'd become an Internet sensation when she posted her "Judgments" photo project to her Tumblr on January 5th. But something about the picture struck a chord with those who saw it, and within 24 hours the image had been re-blogged 100,000 times.

The photo, which the student took as part of an AP high school art class last year, depicts the back of her friend Ali MacKenzie's legs, Lake told The Huffington Post. Horizontal lines are drawn up her leg, reflecting various skirt lengths, and next to each line is a description. Lake labelled the longest skirt length "matronly" and the shortest "whore."

Lake got the idea for the photo from looking at graduated cylinders in her science class, she told The Huffington Post. "[I wanted to] take the idea of impersonal, supposedly objective, measurement of things and put it on something that we do measure, but we don't talk about," she said. "We measure women the same way we measure water in cylinders, but no one says it because it's mean."

Lake also expressed that working on the photo project forced her to reassess her own judgments about other women. "I used to assume that all women who wore Hijabs were being oppressed ... and look down on and judge any woman who didn't express her sexuality in a way that I found appropriate," she wrote on her Tumblr. "I'd like to think I'm more open now."

When asked why she thought the photo resonated so deeply with so many women, Lake chalked its momentum up to timing. "It's a concise, visually-attractive articulation of what a lot of women are thinking lately," she said. "Our society is ready to talk about [slut-shaming]. This just sort of gave it a push."

LOOK: Rosea Lake's "Judgments"

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
LOOK: The Most Powerful Photo We've Seen All Week

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Prudish. Flirty. Whore. Proper. Cheeky. Slut. These are just a few of the words that could be used to describe a woman's sexual behavior based on her appearance alone, and 18-year-old college freshman Rosea Lake chose to display them starkly -- on a young woman's legs in a photo that has since gone viral.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
One epicenter is South Carolina, where all 46 counties have at least one animal shelter-and only 18 have domestic abuse shelters.

Denton Rumsey/Shutterstock

The map is of South Carolina and its counties. " All 46 counties have at least one animal shelter to care for stray dogs," The Charleston Post Courier reports, "but the state has only 18 domestic violence shelters to help women trying to escape abuse." One of the red dots represents a 31-year-old, Amerise Barbre, whose boyfriend strangled her. Each red dot represents a woman killed by a husband or boyfriend. In the eight-year period shown, that sort of murder happened 292 times.

"Most state legislators profess deep concern over domestic violence," the newspaper notes in the introduction to a seven-part feature. "Yet they maintain a legal system in which a man can earn five years in prison for abusing his dog but a maximum of just 30 days in jail for beating his wife or girlfriend on a first offense."

Domestic abuse reportedly occurs there about 36,000 times per year.

The feature posits that public-policy failures largely explain why South Carolina's homicide rate for women is presently the highest in the nation. It urges sweeping reforms.

They are summarized here.

According to the Violence Policy Center's annual report, When Men Murder Women, the following is true of homicides perpetrated by men against women nationwide:

For homicides in which the victim to offender relationship could be identified, 94 percent of female victims (1,509 out of 1,601) were murdered by a male they knew.

Sixteen times as many females were murdered by a male they knew (1,509 victims) than were killed by male strangers (92 victims).

For victims who knew their offenders, 61 percent (926) of female homicide victims were wives or intimate acquaintances of their killers.

There were 264 women shot and killed by either their husband or intimate acquaintance during the course of an argument.

Nationwide, for homicides in which the weapon could be determined (1,551), more female homicides were committed with firearms (51 percent) than with any other weapon. Knives and other cutting instruments accounted for 20 percent of all female murders, bodily force 14 percent, and murder by blunt object seven percent. Of the homicides committed with firearms, 73 percent were committed with handguns.

In 87 percent of all incidents where the circumstances could be determined, homicides were not related to the commission of any other felony, such as rape or robbery.

People laugh when Louis C.K. gets at this reality with his singular brand of dark humor:

But he isn't making anything up. In addition to the newspaper feature discussed above, some illuminating reading on this subject can be found in essays here and here.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
A Deadly Epidemic of Violence Against Women

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
One epicenter is South Carolina, where all 46 counties have at least one animal shelter-and only 18 have domestic abuse shelters. The map is of South Carolina and its counties. " All 46 counties have at least one animal shelter to care for stray dogs," The Charleston Post Courier reports, "but the state has only 18 domestic violence shelters to help women trying to escape abuse."

# data[].attributes.body
Sexism, Domestic Violence, Language Against Women, Stereotypes

# data[].attributes.headline
“Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.”– Yoda

# data[].attributes.subject
“Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.”– Yoda

# data[].attributes.body
Is fear the root of all evil?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself," said Franklin Delano Roosevelt during his First Inaugural Address. I'm sorry Mr. President, but I thoroughly disagree with this statement. Why should we fear fear? Isn't it a natural response to certain situations?

Fear is normal. We all feel it. In fact, it's fear that can actually help us learn to avoid dangerous situations. Fear can protect us. But sometimes, we become afraid of the feelings that fear brings. Sometimes, those very same symptoms that can help to save our lives, make us anxious, make us fearful. A major aspect of anxiety is the tendency to develop a fear of fear. In other words, becoming afraid when having feelings which we attribute to anxiety or fear, no matter what the reason. In this case, not only do we try to avoid the fearful situation that has started these feelings in the first place, but the feeling of fear also becomes something we want to try to avoid. This is really the basis of anxiety and panic attacks - the fear of fear.

What exactly is a panic attack? Clinically speaking, a panic attack is an intense fear that results in a surge of adrenaline in our bodies. Adrenaline is a hormone that is released by the adrenal gland. It is perfectly normal to have this adrenaline surge, perfectly natural, and here's the important point, it is perfectly safe. We may get an adrenaline rush, as it's called, in different situations: when in a fearful situation, when stressed, or when doing something that's physically demanding or exciting.

An adrenaline rush can be beneficial. It actually helps us. In what ways? It allows the airways and blood vessels to dilate which results in more oxygen being sent to the brain, respiratory system and muscles. This helps us feel stronger and more able to function in scary situations. Have you heard about the fight/flight response? In a dangerous situation, the adrenaline surge helps us in determining whether to stay and fight or flee the scene. It also gives us an extra boost so if you stay to fight you may find you have more strength than you think possible. Or if you flee, you may find you can run faster than ever before. Perhaps you've read accounts from people who have been in dangerous situations who have said, "I don't know where the strength came from," or "I don't know how I got myself out of there so fast, but before I knew it, I was far away from the scene."

Let's get back to the notion of fear of fear. Consider the following examples.

A young woman is standing at a curb and steps foot out into the street. All of a sudden a car comes careening past and the driver honks the horn, loudly and continuously. Frightened, she jumps back up on the curb and waits until the danger has passed. Once the adrenaline surge (remember, there will be an adrenaline surge along with the fear) has subsided, she is once again calm, and comfortably steps out into the street and crosses it. The woman does not get frightened about her reaction to the honking because she believes it's normal, natural to have reacted with fear to this situation.

Now, a few days later, this same woman, is sitting in a movie theater when a commercial comes on the screen reminding people to turn off their cell phones, sit quietly and notice where the emergency exits are. While watching the commercial, she wonders to herself to which exit she would run in case of an emergency. That thought caused a slight feeling of butterflies in her stomach. Having this feeling alarmed the woman because she imagined the commercial did not cause anyone else concern and she became concerned the butterflies in her stomach would turn into an anxiety attack. She wondered, "What happens if I start to panic?" which caused her to get a little more anxious. The woman then began to think there must be something wrong with her because she was having these anxious feelings when everyone around her seemed to be feeling fine. This caused a further increase in anxiety. The more the woman became concerned about her feelings of anxiety, the stronger they became. The stronger these feelings became, the more anxious she got. The woman's fear of the fear, caused her to become more and more anxious.

The above represents what I call the "Circle of Fear." We become uncomfortable with our feelings of anxiety and define them as abnormal or unnatural, as feelings others must not be experiencing given the same situation. So, unlike the first example when the woman was crossing the street and felt justified in feeling anxious, in the second scenario she did not feel the situation warranted any anxiety which in turn caused her to become more anxious. And because she didn't feel any of her feelings of anxiety were a normal reaction, this caused her anxious feelings to mount.

It is our interpretation of our anxious feelings that may cause our anxiety to increase. If we think these feelings are justified, we are likely to ignore them and let them fade by themselves. If, however, we do not believe we should be having these feelings, they may grow in intensity and feel as if they are taking over.

Remember, anxiety is a perfectly normal and natural feeling to have. We all get anxious about different things. When we fear those anxious feelings and convince ourselves they are unwarranted, we have a pretty good chance of increasing the very anxiety we're trying to stop.

As a response to Franklin D. Roosevelt who said, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself," no, there is nothing to fear about fear.

In my next article, I will explore what to do and what not to do when having an anxiety or panic attack.

To download a free copy of my booklet "How to Talk so your Spouse will Listen" please go to http://lifewithoutanxiety.com/publications.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
To Fear or Not to Fear, You're in Control

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself," said Franklin Roosevelt. Really? I think not! Fear is normal, fear can be helpful, fear can sometimes actually help save our lives! But what if it takes over? What happens if we feel we can't control it?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
How many times have you heard a child bellow to a parent (in the effort to avoid being punished): " I didn't do it! He [or she] did it!!! "? And to actually engage in this desperate tactic even in situations where their culpability was transparent? If you're like the rest of us, probably more times than you can recall. In fact, as a child, it's altogether possible that-impulsively-you may have done this yourself.

Sadly, such guileless efforts at deceit are sufficiently common in youngsters as to make them seem almost innocent. Still, such an unfortunate tendency is one we may never completely outgrow. And such prevarication is certainly not one of our more endearing traits. It's hardly exemplary behavior to try to escape blame or criticism by (shamelessly) "passing the buck." And projecting our mistakes, or misdeeds, onto others represents a psychological defense that, while it may protect our ego, typically creates far more problems than it solves.

What I'd like to clarify in this post is that a good deal of our anger is motivated by a desire not to experience guilt-and beyond this, the distressing emotions of hurt and fear. It's by now generally agreed upon that anger, as prevalent as it is in our species, is almost never a primary emotion. For underlying it (as fellow blogger Steven Stosny pointed out two decades ago) are such core hurts as feeling disregarded, unimportant, accused, , untrustworthy, devalued, rejected, powerless, and unlovable. And these feelings are capable of engendering considerable emotional pain. It's therefore understandable that so many of us might go to great lengths to find ways of distancing ourselves from them.

In fact, those of us who routinely use anger as a "cover-up" to keep our more vulnerable feelings at bay, generally become so adept at doing so that we have little to no awareness of the dynamic driving our behavior. As I've discussed in earlier posts on the subject, anger is the emotion of invulnerability. Even though the self-empowerment (read, "adrenaline rush") it immediately offers is bogus, it can yet be extremely tempting to get "attached"-or even "addicted"-to it if we frequently experience another as threatening the way we need to see ourselves (e.g., as important, trustworthy, lovable, etc.).

After all, this is how all psychological defenses work. Simply put, they allow us to escape upsetting, shameful, or anxiety-laden feelings we may not have developed the emotional resources-or ego strength-to successfully cope with.

So, for example, say your partner (whether intentionally or not) expresses something that leads you to feel demeaned. Rather than, assertively, sharing your hurt feelings, and risk making yourself more vulnerable to them, you may react instead by finding something to attack them for. It could be as petty as their forgetting to put something away, or not having gotten back to you on scheduling an event, or a past mistake that compromised the family budget-in short, anything! In such instances, what you're basically doing (though it's most likely unconscious) is endeavoring to make them feel demeaned, to hurt their feelings-or rather, hurt them back. It's an undeclared, largely unrecognized, game of tit for tat. And while you're engaged in such retaliatory pursuits, guess what? Presto! You're no longer feeling demeaned-at least not in the moment. . . . Which, sadly, reinforces this essentially childish behavior (as in, " You're the one who's bad!").

And what about the recipient of your fit of temper? Now they bear the burden you've just managed to shake off. Whatever feelings of hurt you were experiencing (and you can choose from the italicized list above) has been passed on-or "transferred"-to them. And their initial reaction may be one not simply of hurt but fear as well. For at the most primitive, instinctual level, by experiencing themselves as the object of your anger, they unconsciously grasp that you harbor the hostile impulse to harm them. So if they step back from you, it's not because they want to provide you with more space to vent your venom. It's that they're feeling an urgent need to distance themselves from it.

In any case, though, their own defensive reaction is likely-in "counter retaliation," as it were-to be one of blaming you right back. Which in turn can escalate the conflict between the two of you with lightening speed. Here it's not a physical "eye for an eye" but a verbal "blow for blow" (!).

Other possible reactions are for the now-distressed recipient of your (vengeful) criticism to archly defend themselves. Or to leave the scene altogether. And, of course, none of these self-protective reactions helps the respondent of your attack understand just what triggered your anger buttons in the first place. Which is another reason that anger-despite its ability to offer immediate emotional release, and relief, from whatever originally provoked it-rarely resolves anything,.

So, to fundamentally change what can be a never-ending vicious cycle, it's crucial to comprehend not only the cause(s) of our anger but also its detrimental effects . Ultimately, feeling hurt-and consequently acting out a compulsion to retaliate in kind-is "kid stuff." In such instances, then, can we learn how to hold onto our most rational adult self and "process"-internally-what's happening inside our head? And to do this before we alleviate our feelings of guilt, hurt, or fear by turning them into anger? Can we begin to break a pattern that may well be hazardous to the relational closeness, harmony, and trust that we-like the rest of humanity-deeply crave?

Now that's a question worth contemplating. . . .

NOTE 1: Inasmuch as it's one of my specialties, I've published a variety of articles on anger in my PT blog. If you're interested in taking a look at other ways I've approached this most toxic of emotions, here are links to some additional posts of mine on the subject: Here are links to other posts I've published in Psychology Today on anger:

"How Is Your Anger Best Seen as Retaliation?"
"Feeling Vulnerable? No Problem-Just Get Angry" "I'm Not Angry-But I Still Think You're Being Unfair"
"Anger: When Adults Act Like Children-and Why"
"The Paradox of Anger: Strength or Weakness?" "Does Your Partner Have Rage Attacks? Here's What to Do" "Angry Tears" "Don't Let Your Anger 'Mature' Into Bitterness" "The Rarely Recognized Upside of Anger" "The Anger Thermostat-What's the "Temperature" of Your Upset?"
"Anger Always Makes Sense,"
"What Does Donald Duck Have to Do with Anger Control?" "A Powerful Two-Step Process to Get Rid of Unwanted Anger," "What Your Anger May Be Hiding,"
Mad =Angry + Crazy + Dumb" (Parts 1 & 2), and
"Afraid to Rage: The Origins of Passive-Aggressive Behavior."
NOTE 2: If you think this post might be useful to others, please consider sharing its link with them.

NOTE 3: If you'd like to check out other posts I've done for Psychology Today, on a broad variety of psychological topics, click here.

© 2013 Leon F. Seltzer, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved.

---To be notified whenever I post something new, I invite readers to join me on Facebook-as well as on Twitter where, additionally, you can follow my frequently unorthodox psychological and philosophical musings.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Anger-How We Transfer Feelings of Guilt, Hurt, and Fear

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
How many times have you heard a child bellow to a parent (in the effort to avoid being punished): " I didn't do it! He [or she] did it!!! "? And to actually engage in this desperate tactic even in situations where their culpability was transparent?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Amanda is a dark-haired stunner with a zesty disposition, and Elliott took a fast liking to her. Within days of their meeting, bouquets began arriving at the office for her. As if it were the NASDAQ index of her appeal flashed across Times Square, Amanda relished the surprise deliveries-and the admiring notice of officemates.

Elliott himself made less of an impression; he was ordinary looking and wiry, with a slight nervous edge. But his retro style of dressing did stand out: Plaid jackets and saddle shoes made him look as if he were always sneaking a quick break from a low-budget comedy act.

Over weeks and then months, Elliott showed up regularly to take Amanda to dinner or out with friends. He called frequently, too-to make sure she got the flowers, to find out who ogled them, or just to hear her voice. If Amanda wasn't at her desk, the calls often bounced to her increasingly annoyed colleagues.

"Elliott had a goofy side that appealed to me, and at first, I thought he was just kind of love-struck. I was charmed and amused," Amanda recalls. But, she realized gradually, the flowers were a kind of camouflage. "He needed to know where I was every minute, and if he didn't hear what he liked, his voice would crack with rage. That really creeped me out. I woke up one day and thought: Why does this romance feel like it's becoming a prison? In that instant, I knew I had to get out."

The flowers notwithstanding, Elliott exhibited many of the classic signs of jealousy- fear of losing his lover, lack of trust, anger at real or imagined attention to others, the need to control a loved one. Even the flowers were a time-honored mate-retention strategy of the kind kicked off by jealousy, although we're more inclined to associate jealousy with negative tactics, from vigilance to violence.

More often than not, feelings of jealousy flare with such intensity that they burn a hole in the brain, obliterating rational thought and setting off behaviors that create a self-fulfilling prophecy by pushing away the very person one desires, or needs, the most. Think of astronaut-in-training Lisa Nowak, who in 2007, at the age of 44, drove a thousand miles nonstop from Houston, Texas, to Orlando, Florida, with a diaper on, the quicker to kidnap the new girlfriend of a fellow astronaut with whom she had had an affair. Ironic that an impulse that arises from love can so easily destroy it.

Yet jealousy, experts agree, is a survival mechanism, although what is most at stake is a matter of debate. The most destructive of passions-it is a leading cause of homicide-and the least studied, it is, like all emotions, born of necessity, with roots deep in our evolutionary past. Its purpose: to help maintain intimate relationships.

Jealousy is not envy, although the words are often used interchangeably. "Jealousy arises when a relationship is infringed on by a rival who threatens to take away something that is in a sense rightfully yours," explains Richard Smith, professor of psychology at the University of Kentucky. The rival may or may not have features that also incite envy. "But to feel jealous you need not have any sense of what that third party is like," notes Smith. Envy, on the other hand, derives from the basic fact that so much of the spoils of life come from how we compare to others. It arises when another person possesses some trait or object that you want, and includes a mix of discontent, a sense of inferiority, and a frustration that may be tinged with resentment.

Here's the shocker: Jealousy may be losing its utility in contemporary life, more useful to our ancestors than to us, given our penchant for changing partners. As our high divorce rate attests, sometimes, we're just not all that interested in saving our closest relationships. It may also be that jealousy is on a shifting course in our emotional repertoire, moving from coercive social emotion, a socially sanctioned response to infidelity, to sign of personal pathology.

A Signal to Look Within

Jealousy is an extremely painful emotion; social exclusion, whether real or imagined, always hurts. It throws the mind into turmoil and is difficult to dislodge. Those in its grip typically blame the discomfort on a partner for bestowing attention on others. But there are huge individual differences in the propensity for jealousy, and there is emerging evidence that elements of personality influence some of them. Those who are most insecure, in fact, may be most unrealistic in perceiving threats and making accusations. But this same view of jealousy also suggests that the emotion need not be unleashed on a destructive path; it can instead serve a highly constructive purpose-as a valuable signal to look within and repair one's own sense of self. That, in turn, can only improve relationships. Jealousy, it seems, says more about the bearer than about the deeds or misdeeds of a mate.

No one can say for sure what jealousy is; attempts to define it are elusive for a reason. As a complex emotion it involves, at a minimum, such distressing feelings as fear, abandonment, loss, sorrow, anger, betrayal, envy, and humiliation. And it recruits a host of cognitive processes gone awry, from doubt to preoccupation with a partner's faithlessness. It may take much of its primal force from activating the attachment system of the brain, a genetically ingrained circuit that is the foundation of our social bonds and that prompts widespread distress when they are threatened.

According to University of Texas psychologist David Buss, jealousy is a necessary emotion, a potential deterrent to infidelity that arises in both men and women when a threat materializes to intimate relationships. Boyfriend talks to beautiful woman at party and smiles admiringly at her; to girlfriend, a rival is born, a flesh-and-blood warning that what she thought was hers might now be endangered. Or wife suddenly embarks on series of brief out-of-town trips with co-head of her team. What is at stake is survival of our most valued relationships and thus the future of our children-which is to say, the species.

The "crystalline logic" of evolutionary psychology, argues Buss in The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy Is as Necessary as Love and Sex, holds that men and women experience jealousy differently, and that it's the threat of sexual infidelity that most stirs jealousy in men. The burden of manhood is uncertainty of paternity; jealousy serves to keep a mate from straying, upping a man's confidence that he is the genetic father of his partner's children. Jealousy arose to keep him from the reproductive dead-end of investing his finite resources in raising some other man's children. Women respond most to the possible loss of love to a rival female, a way of protecting a partner's needed commitment to home and kids. And perhaps in the small bands in which humans lived for most of evolutionary history, jealousy was effective in keeping a mate from straying.

Yes, says Buss, jealousy can cause men, especially, to "explode violently," although that's just a way "to reduce the odds that their partners will stray." Jealousy is not just the main motivation for spouse battering. Sexual jealousy is the leading cause of spousal murder worldwide. Even then, it's not really jealousy that's to blame, contends Buss. "It is the delusion that a loved one has committed an infidelity when none has occurred." But "this double-edged defense mechanism" wouldn't exist if long-term love hadn't emerged among primates. Jealousy is love's necessary protector-even if, given the cognitive biases built into the brain, it errs on the side of seeing betrayal where it does not exist. Delusion is jealousy's yes-man.

Not Inevitable

However much Buss sees jealousy as a necessary evil, his newest work suggests that it isn't quite as inevitable as it's been made to appear. In a not-yet-published study of nearly 1,000 people in various stages of commitment-married, engaged, dating, or single-he and a colleague in Spain find that the individual inclination to jealousy is strongly influenced by two of the so-called big five personality factors. It is positively associated with neuroticism, or emotional instability, the liability to such unpleasant emotions as anger, anxiety, and depression. The higher the level of instability, the more one is prone to jealousy.

And it is negatively related to agreeableness; the tendency to be cooperative and compassionate rather than suspicious and antagonistic. Like all the major personality factors, neuroticism and agreeableness are both influenced by heredity and environment, including early experience, in roughly equal proportions.

"What we find," says Buss, "is that neuroticism is positively correlated with a whole slew of mate-retention tactics"- defense maneuvers, like increased vigilance, intended to guard a partner from straying. "Agreeableness is negatively correlated, and low-agreeable people tend to use cost-inflicting mate-retention tactics," like yelling at a partner for talking to someone else, cutting a partner off from friends and family, derogating the partner, undermining a mate's self-esteem, or threatening violence against a partner or perceived rivals. "We view these as abhorrent," says Buss, "but sometimes they work to keep a mate in a relationship."

As Exhibit A in the neuroticism category, Buss cites his own experience long ago with a former partner. "She thought that every female graduate student was coming on to me, and after I had a meeting with a student, she would tear into my office and interrogate me. Who knows; maybe her neuroticism or hyper-jealousy in fact deterred other women."

Not all jealousy is activated by immediate threats of sexual infidelity or loss of a partner to a rival-so-called mate poaching. It also responds, says Buss, to such factors as subtle indicators of discrepancy between the "mate value" of two partners-one partner is more attractive than the other.

Or, by sheer genetic chance, one partner (think: John Edwards) stays far more youthful-looking than the other. But it works in both directions. "Some men luck into a woman who is higher in mate value than they are," reports Buss. "And on some level such a man has some realization that he is not going to be able to replace her with someone of equivalent value. So he is on jealousy hyperalert."

The thing is, neuroticism itself is not a very appealing attribute in a mate; on its own it lowers an individual's mate value. But, as with Elliott and Buss' former partner, it's not a trait that's necessarily on full display when one enters into a relationship; it tends to reveal itself only over time. The more emotionally stable you are, says Buss, the higher your mate value.

"The formula for jealousy," says psychologist Steven Stosny, "is an insecure person times an insecure relationship." But it's insecure people who tend to destabilize relationships and make them insecure. And a person who is very insecure is not just sexually jealous but jealous of any kind of friendship or even of a child-"anything that takes attention off them," he adds.

Because jealousy is accompanied by a sense of inadequacy, it is hard to bear, says Stosny, and most people convert the discomfort into anger, which they regulate by trying to control a partner-distrusting them, going through their belongings and cell phone call logs, making accusations, behaviors more likely to drive a partner away. "The trick is you have to control jealousy within yourself. You have to do something that will make you feel more lovable, because basically you feel unlovable when you're jealous."

That, observes French psychiatrist Marcianne Blevis, is the heart of jealousy. For Blevis, who has spent years in the trenches with patients, jealousy is not the guardian of love but more typically its destroyer. It arises in relationships whenever we feel "erased" by a partner's lack of attention. She insists it is a signal-not to blame the partner for attention to someone else, which is what we usually do, but to look inside oneself. There, she contends, we will find the source of insecurity that instantly makes the rival seem so superior to us. What's at stake in jealousy, she argues, is nothing less than survival of the sense of self.

Just What Are We Doubting?

"We assume that jealousy is a necessary evil, the collateral damage of love," says Blevis, author of Jealousy: True Stories of Love's Favorite Decoy. "'Jealousy lives upon doubts,' said the 18th century moralist Francois de la Rochefoucauld. But what exactly are we doubting? All human emotions exist to help us figure out who we are in the world, and jealousy is no exception. It is a resource we call on when we feel at risk, when our sense of self is put in jeopardy. When we are jealous, we are in fact in the grip of an identity crisis."

Invariably, however, we misdirect our attention. Blevis explains: The target of jealousy, the one who has provoked our jealousy, shatters our self-regard. From the rival emanates an aura of magical attributes that he or she possesses and we don't. Yet we are the ones who assign those attributes to the rival; what they really represent is something unrealized in ourselves. "It signals our wish to be better than ourselves, to reconfigure who we are." Blevis cites the case of a patient who had not dared to pursue the career of her dreams -becoming a doctor. But her boyfriend left her for a woman more accomplished than she. "She came to realize that her jealousy of her rival masked her craving for the part of herself she had ignored. She lost the boyfriend, but she went back to school."

It's a mistake to assume that jealousy always involves love, argues Aaron Ben-Ze'ev, a philosopher who heads Israel's University of Haifa. "A man who despises his wife may nevertheless become jealous when someone else looks covetously at her. Here the central feature is losing to a rival." In this case, he insists, jealousy is more germane to the personal characteristic of selfishness than to love.

People indeed use jealousy as a signal-to try to control their partner. But that only makes the relationship worse. "They substitute power for value," says Stosny. "They feel a loss of personal value and rather than do something that will make them feel more valuable, they do something that will make them feel more powerful." But the more that people try to soothe their own emotions by controlling a partner, the more powerless they are destined to feel-because, observes Stosny, "you're dependent on your partner's whims to feel OK." And that's a setup for anger.

Our brains don't titrate jealousy, releasing just enough to penetrate our self-awareness. Jealousy lands with brutal force, lending itself far too readily to obsession and delusion. "It makes you think the same thing over and over," says Stosny, "and the more you do that, the less reality-testing you do. Emotions all have an illusion of certainty, and jealousy makes you certain of your perception of the world." Buss contends that the tendency to deception that is a hallmark of jealousy is built into the brain. "We have evolved cognitive biases designed to overestimate the likelihood of costly things happening. So we make all kinds of errors in judgment-erroneous inferences, erroneous suspicions. But our brains are designed that way to avoid the more costly error of being exposed to a mate poacher."

A Measure of Commitment

However much jealousy encourages an outsize response, a little bit is good for relationships, especially in the early stages, before trust has a chance to develop. "The paradox of jealousy is that we all want some of it," says Stosny. It's a measure of commitment. "In small doses it's an expression of caring. Jealousy is like a way of testing whether it's safe to invest more emotion. It's safe when a person cares enough to be uncomfortable. Jealousy is a fear of losing something you perceive you have-the affection, the fidelity of another person. The threat of losing it is a test of how much you value it."

Although the perceptions that accompany jealousy may be distorted, the pain it gives rise to is real. The neural circuitry that underlies our psychological response to such complex social events as being accepted or rejected is the same circuitry that underlies the simplest physical pains and pleasures. Experiencing envy, which is a first cousin to jealousy and similarly gives rise to feelings of inferiority and resentment, activates pain-related neural circuits in the brain, neuroimaging studies show.

According to Japanese neuroscientist Hidehiko Takahashi, envy activates the anterior cingulate cortex, the site where cognitive conflicts of social pain are processed, and the stronger the emotion, the greater the activation. "We usually have a positive self-concept, and we experience discomfort when we perform in a way that violates this self-concept," Takahashi reports in Science. "The anterior cingulate cortex is activated when this positive self-concept conflicts with external information."

Neuroimaging is only at the earliest stages of investigation of jealousy. In a 2006 study, reported in NeuroImage, Takahashi found some significant sex differences in the neural response to statements depicting sexual and emotional infidelity. In men, jealousy activates the amygdala and hypothalamus, regions rich in testosterone receptors and involved in sexual and aggressive behavior. In women, by contrast, especially in response to thoughts of emotional infidelity, activation was greater in the posterior superior temporal sulcus, a region implicated in detection of intention, deception, and trustworthiness as well as violation of social norms. The greater activation elicited by emotional infidelity in females, Takahashi reported, suggests that they are particularly sensitive to changes of a partner's mind.

The emotional sensitivity of women may explain why their jealousy is not limited to romantic relationships. Women experience the upsetting emotion in female friendships as well, feeling anger, loss, and betrayal when a friend defects or pays more attention to a female interloper. "They're in competition for alliances with each other a lot more than males are," says Stosny.

Relationships end. Divorce is a reality. And situations that give rise to mate poaching are not going away anytime soon. Over 50 percent of males and females report having tried to steal a friend's partner. "You can't eliminate loss," says Stosny. But secure people can handle disappointment without feeling like a total loser. The only way to eliminate the pain of loss is to eliminate value, and you can't do that because then life would not be worth living." -Hara Estroff Marano

Jealousy as a Test of Affection
A little pang can go a long way.
Once jealousy took up residence in the repertoire of human emotions, who was to say it couldn't be used strategically? In fact, reports University of Texas psychologist David Buss, 40 percent of women deliberately provoke a bit of jealousy in a partner to get a reading on the strength of the bond. (Men do it too, but not nearly as often as women.) It can also up one's desirability in a mate's eyes.

Because jealousy, especially in the early stages of a relationship, correlates with caring, deliberately provoking it can be a way of testing whether it's safe to invest more emotion. "If your partner doesn't respond," says Steven Stosny, "then it's not safe."

Common tactics include talking about an ex or another guy in the presence of a partner, talking to another man at a party or actually even dating another guy, and talking about attractions to other men. There are sins of commission: Women are not above dressing highly provocatively when going out with friends or lying about being attracted to another man. And there are sins of omission: deliberately failing to answer a phone call from a boyfriend to make him think she's out with someone else.

The surprise is how easy it is to trip the male jealousy switch. "A lot of times men aren't even aware of the emotional manipulation," says Buss.

And nothing is more effective than flirting with another man, as simple as flashing a smile, a signal men invariably read as sexual while women do not. There's very little risk. It's hard to blame a woman for "just being polite" or "friendly."

Women are also likely to provoke a little jealousy when they perceive a partner is less committed to the relationship than they are. The aim is to alter their partners' perception of how desirable they are.

"No one wants to be with someone whom no one else wants," says Buss. "If no one else wants them, people start taking each other for granted."

What to Say When Suspicion Strikes
There are steps either partner can take to contain jealousy and keep it from wrecking a relationship. Marriage and family therapist Lori Gordon offers several suggestions.

As a general insurance against jealousy, nurture your relationship. Take time to be together, and spend time talking even when apart. It's important to share your inner worlds with each other.

Make a decision whether you want to confront your suspicions or not.

If you feel suspicious, worried, possessive, threatened, or unsure regarding your partner-or, alternatively, you feel crowded, controlled, restricted, or blamed by your partner about friendships or activities-don't let your assumptions run away with themselves. Check them out with your partner. But first, reflect on how to put your thoughts into words.

The goal is to start a conversation non-belligerently, to be constructive and non-blaming. To avoid setting off defensiveness in a partner, use statements that begin with "I," not "you."

Identify a specific behavior of your partner's that is upsetting to you ("when you let that guy pour you a drink") and explain how it makes you feel.

Knowing how to give voice to things that disturb you is crucial. A good structure to follow has three parts:
"I notice..." (you seemed quiet last night, or you were unusually friendly with that woman at the party).
"I assume that it means..." (you were upset about something, or you were just being friendly).
"I wonder..." (what it is and if you would tell me, or whether there is more to it).

Pause to be sure your partner is listening and to give your partner time to respond.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Amanda is a dark-haired stunner with a zesty disposition, and Elliott took a fast liking to her. Within days of their meeting, bouquets began arriving at the office for her. As if it were the NASDAQ index of her appeal flashed across Times Square, Amanda relished the surprise deliveries-and the admiring notice of officemates.

# data[].attributes.headline
4] The Emotional Response/Drive: Jealousy, Anger, and Fear

# data[].attributes.subject
4] The Emotional Response/Drive: Jealousy, Anger, and Fear

# data[].attributes.body
5 to choose from

# data[].attributes.body
Notice the Years these words first started to make their appearance/attribution to the definition we use now

# data[].attributes.body
Use the Form below as you read through/watch your chosen secondary source. Turn the form in as well as a paragraph (8-10 sentences) answering the discussion question in connection with Othello.

# data[].attributes.headline
Prezi: Attitudes Towards Moors in Elizabethan England

# data[].attributes.subject
Prezi: Attitudes Towards Moors in Elizabethan England

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Elizabethan England
This is a period in England's history that is considered to be it's golden age.
This golden age led to an influx of writers, philosphers and playwrights of one which is Shakespeare.
There were people of different races, including Moors in England at the time but they weren't treated in the way they were in pre civil war America.
Race and Culture
Race wasn't a specific identification for a person until the beginning of the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade. How people identified each other in Elizabethan England was by religion and culture. Religious tension between Catholics and Protestants in 16th century England was very big and divided many people. When foreigners including Moors came to make a life for themselves in England they were forced to assimilate into English culture. Many of the English were fearful and hated foreigners.

Shakespeare and the Moors
Race and Culture cont.
For a while historians had a hard time proving that Africans lived in England at the time. This is because a division of races and race itself wasn't necesarily a concept that was important to the English at the time. Historians were able to prove that they were there by reading through peoples diaries and noticing when they referenced black people. However the division of culture lead to a huge mistrust of people of different races from foreign lands.
Thank you!
Background
At the time of Shakespeare slavery was not based on race. It was based on whether or not a country had conquered your own and made you a slave.
That being said, how were North Africans (Moors) treated in Elizabethan England?
And how did this perception of moors influence Shakespeare's writing?
Works Cited
Camp, Noelle. "LITR 4332 American Minority Literature UHCL 2004 Sample Student Research Project." LITR 4332 American Minority Literature UHCL 2004 Sample Student Research Project. University of Houston, 2004. Web. 11 Mar. 2016.

Schultz, James. "Shakespeare's Colors: Race And Culture In Elizabethan England." Shakespeare's Colors: Race And Culture In Elizabethan England. Old Dominion University, n.d. Web. 11 Mar. 2016.

Neshati, Kristen Johnsen. "A Cultural Context For Othello." Shakespeare Theatre Company at the Harman Center of the Arts. Shakespeare Theatre Company, 19 Aug 2005. Web. 11 Mar. 2016.

Whitson, Barbara. "Love's Labour's Lost - Cultural/Historical Influences - Cedar Crest College." Love's Labour's Lost - Cultural/Historical Influences - Cedar Crest College. Cedar Crest College, 1999. Web. 14 Mar. 2016.

Elizabethan attiudes towards Moors
A prezi by: Matthew Jodoin
Shakespeare and Moors cont.
This "signals the entrance not of actual Africans, but of English minstrels in blackface. There is a wealth of evidence about how early modern performers achieved racial impersonation by means of theatrical integument (make-up) and although English monarchs employed black musicians-there is no record of black performers being borrowed from royal or aristocratic households to play roles on stage." (Barroll 21)
-
Shakespeare's Attitude Toward Race
Barbara Whitson
Shakespeare seems to take the concept of race and turn it on its head. He takes a Moor (Othello) and presents him as the protagonist in his play. This is something no one in England had done before.
Shakespeare and Moors
Despite trying to portray a Moor as a hero it is not recorded anywhere that an African played one on the stage. However he did portray other Moors in the play as stereotypes of what the English believed they were. (loud and obnoxious.)
Conclusion
To summarize, Moors were treated with fear and mistrust by the English during this period due to a lack of knowledge, cultural and religious tensions. Shakespeare made a point to challenge this view of foreigners and Moors in particular by making the hero of Othello a respected military hero of African descent. At the time this wasn't very effective as Africans didn't act in England at the time.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Elizabethan EnglandThis is a period in England's history that is considered to be it's golden age.This golden age led to an influx of writers, philosphers and playwrights of one which is Shakespeare.

# data[].attributes.body
Elizabethan England

Read through the Prezi below before choosing 1 of the articles (Colors or Britain's first black community)

# data[].attributes.body
Race/Shakespeare

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The reign of Elizabeth I saw the beginning of Britain's first black community. It's a fascinating story for modern Britons, writes historian Michael Wood.

Walk out of Aldgate Tube and stroll around Whitechapel Road in east London today, and you'll experience the heady sights, smells and sounds of the temples, mosques and curry houses of Brick Lane - so typical of modern multicultural Britain.

Most of us tend to think that black people came to Britain after the war - Caribbeans on the Empire Windrush in 1948, Bangladeshis after the 1971 war and Ugandan Asians after Idi Amin's expulsion in 1972.

But, back in Shakespeare's day, you could have met people from west Africa and even Bengal in the same London streets.

Of course, there were fewer, and they drew antipathy as well as fascination from the Tudor inhabitants, who had never seen black people before. But we know they lived, worked and intermarried, so it is fair to say that Britain's first black community starts here.

There had been black people in Britain in Roman times, and they are found as musicians in the early Tudor period in England and Scotland.

But the real change came in Elizabeth I's reign, when, through the records, we can pick up ordinary, working, black people, especially in London.

Shakespeare himself, a man fascinated by "the other", wrote several black parts - indeed, two of his greatest characters are black - and the fact that he put them into mainstream entertainment reflects the fact that they were a significant element in the population of London.

Find out more

Watch Michael Wood's The Great British Story: A People's History on Friday 20 July on BBC Two at 21:00 BST

Read Michael Wood's blog

Discover your place in history through Great British Story activities

Or catch up later via iPlayer The Great British Story: A People's History
Employed especially as domestic servants, but also as musicians, dancers and entertainers, their numbers ran to many hundreds, maybe even more.

And let's be clear - they were not slaves. In English law, it was not possible to be a slave in England (although that principle had to be re-stated in slave trade court cases in the late 18th Century, like the "Somersett" case of 1772).

In Elizabeth's reign, the black people of London were mostly free. Some indeed, both men and women, married native English people.

In 1599, for example, in St Olave Hart Street, John Cathman married Constantia "a black woman and servant". A bit later, James Curres, "a moore Christian", married Margaret Person, a maid.

The parish records of this time from "St Botolph's outside Aldgate", are especially revealing. Here, among French and Dutch immigrants, are a Persian, several Indians and one "East Indian" (from today's Bengal).

In this single small parish, we find 25 black people in the later 16th Century. They are mainly servants, but not all - one man lodging at the White Bell, next to the Bell Foundry off Whitechapel road, probably worked at the foundry.

Some were given costly, high status, Christian funerals, with bearers and fine black cloth, a mark of the esteem in which they were held by employers, neighbours and fellow workers.

Among the names are these:

Christopher Cappervert [ie from Cape Verde] - "a blacke moore"

Domingo - "a black neigro servaunt unto Sir William Winter"

Suzanna Peavis - "a blackamore servant to John Deppinois"

Symon Valencia - "a black moore servaunt to Stephen Drifyeld a nedellmaker"

Cassango - "a blackmoore servaunt to Mr Thomas Barber a marchaunt"

Isabell Peeters - "a Black-more lodgeing in Blew Anchor Alley"

"A negar whose name was suposed to be Frauncis. He was servant to be [sic] Peter Miller a beare brewer dwelling at the signe of the hartes horne in the libertie of EastSmithfield. Yeares xxvi [26]. He had the best cloth [and] iiii [4] bearers"

Among later names, we find:

Anne Vause - "a Black-more wife to Anthonie Vause, Trompetter"

John Comequicke - "a Black-Moore so named, servant to Thomas Love a Captaine"

And, the saddest in this list:

Marie - "a Blackamoor woman that die in the street"

Sometimes the detail in the Botolph's register is absolutely fascinating.

In 1597, for example, Mary Fillis, a black woman of 20 years, had, for a long while, been the servant of Widow Barker in Mark Lane. She had been in England 13 or 14 years, and was the daughter of a Moorish shovel maker and basket maker. Never christened, she became the servant of Millicent Porter, a seamstress living in East Smithfield, and now "taking some howld of faith in Jesus Chryst, was desyrous to becom a Christian, Wherefore shee made sute by hir said mistres to have some conference with the Curat".

Examined in her faith by the vicar of St Botolph's, and "answering him verie Christian lyke", she did her catechisms, said the Lord's Prayer, and was baptised on Friday 3 June 1597 in front of the congregation. Among her witnesses were a group of five women, mostly wives of leading parishioners. Now a "lyvely member" of the church in Aldgate, there is no question from this description that Mary belonged to a community with friends and supporters.

Despite the story of Fillis, the lives of others were far from sweetness and light, of course. The lives of some black people were as free as anywhere in the white European world, but, for many, things were circumscribed and very hard.

Some black women worked alongside their white counterparts as prostitutes, especially in Southwark, and in the brothel area of Turnmill Street in Clerkenwell. Here the famous Lucy Negro, a former dancer in the Queen's service, ran an establishment patronised by noblemen and lawyers. Lucy was famous enough to be paid mock homage in the Inns of Court revels at Gray's Inn.

Britain's black community

First recorded in theTudor period

John Blanke was a black trumpeter during the time ofKing Henry VII andHenry VIII

In June 1948, Empire Windrush arrived at Tilbury Docks carrying 492 workers from the Caribbean

Her area of London was notorious. "Pray enquire after and secure my negress: she is certainly at The Swan, a Dane's beershop in Turnmil Street," wrote one Denis Edwards in 1602. Shakespeare's acquaintance, the poet John Weaver, also sang the praises of a woman whose face was "pure black as Ebonie, jet blacke".

In around 1600, the presence of black people had become an issue for the English government. Their numbers recently increased by many slaves freed from captured Spanish ships, the presence of black people suddenly came to be seen as a nuisance. In 1601, among the Cecil papers still held at Hatfield House, we hear this:

"The queen is discontented at the great numbers of 'negars and blackamoores' which are crept into the realm since the troubles between her Highness and the King of Spain, and are fostered here to the annoyance of her own people."

The "great numbers" were mainly galley slaves and servants from captured Spanish vessels, and a plan was mooted to transport them out of the country. Was this the first example of government repatriation? In July 1602, Cecil was putting pressure on the merchants, one of whom wrote:

"I have persuaded the merchants trading to Barbary, not without some difficulty, to yield to [ie pay for] the charges of the Moors lately redeemed out of servitude by her Majesty's ships, so far as it may concern their lodging and victuals, till some shipping may be ready to carry them into Barbary..."

Whether this actually happened is unclear. No more then than now, should we take a government's pronouncements on such matters at face value?

But it is at least worth noting that the authorities felt duty-bound to look after food and lodging while the freed slaves were in London. But it cannot be, as is sometimes claimed today, that this edict applied to the many black people who, like Mary Fillis, were living as citizens in London, as they were in Bristol.

Brief as they are, such hints suggest a surprisingly rich hidden narrative for black people in Elizabethan England.

From Lucy Negro to Mary Fillis, their numbers grew in the 17th Century as they were joined by large numbers of people from India and, in particular, Bengal.

Sadly, their own story, in their own words, is lacking, but by the time we reach the 18th Century, we have the remarkable works of prose, poetry and music written by black Britons, among whom the likes of Olaudah Equiano, Ottobah Cugoano and Ignatius Sancho deserve their place in any list of Great Britons.

By the 18th Century, it is thought as many as 20,000 black servants lived in London. They even had their own taverns where they greeted defeat of the "Somersett case" and the victories of the abolitionists with raucous good humour.

Their numbers were still small compared with the population as a whole, but they already had a role in our national story. What would Mary Fillis make of things today I wonder? And what would we give for her story?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The reign of Elizabeth I saw the beginning of Britain's first black community. It's a fascinating story for modern Britons, writes historian Michael Wood. Walk out of Aldgate Tube and stroll around Whitechapel Road in east London today, and you'll experience the heady sights, smells and sounds of the temples, mosques and curry houses of Brick Lane - so typical of modern multicultural Britain.

# data[].attributes.body
Race/Shakespeare

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Shakespeare's Colors: Race And Culture In Elizabethan England

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Shakespeare's Colors: Race And Culture In Elizabethan England

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
1 Way To Look At Racial Profiling :: Disturbing Video

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Lawrence Otis Graham believes teaching his two boys to act and dress a certain way will protect them from being "profiled" by police. Family... are there any amongst you that think this is the answer to the racial profiling and dehumanizing issues, puppets and puppetmasters that plague Black people?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
As a startup, it can sometimes be hard to navigate the shifting sands of race, gender, and power. But some mistakes are easy to avoid.

Eric Thayer / Reuters

This week, for instance, it debuted a filter that covered over a user's eyes and forehead with closed-eye slants while enlarging their teeth and reddening their cheeks. The company called the feature "anime-inspired."

Twitter / @tequilafunrise

But as highlighted by Katie Zhu, a product manager at Medium, that set of visual clues has few roots in anime. "Anime characters are known for their angled faces, spiky and colorful hair, large eyes, and vivid facial expressions," she wrote. Instead, the filter adopts wholesale a different visual language of representing East Asians: yellowface. Indeed, two hallmarks of yellowface are squinted eyes and buckteeth.

In a statement to press, Snapchat could not quite bring itself to a mea culpa.

"This anime-inspired lens has already expired and won't be put back into circulation," it said. "Lenses are meant to be playful and never to offend."

Earlier this year, on April 20, Snapchat released a "Bob Marley" filter. The digital mask edited a knit cap and dreadlocks on users, while also darkening their skin. That this was a kind of digital blackface-another taboo racist caricature with a long history in the United States-was evidently lost to Snapchat, an American company.

The company withdrew the filter and said it launched the software in partnership with the Bob Marley Estate.

Yellowface and blackface are not shrouded and arcane aspects of the American racial experience, marginalia known only to historians and theorists. Unlike AirBNB's struggles with discrimination, for instance, they are neither disaggregated across users nor difficult to untangle from America's structural racial inequality. Blackface and yellowface-especially in the simplistic form perpetrated by Snapchat-are plain and easy taboos, and for good reason. Even if Snapchat's main audience are college kids, there are articles every October aimed at college kidsdocumenting the perils of blackface and yellowface.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
As a startup, it can sometimes be hard to navigate the shifting sands of race, gender, and power. But some mistakes are easy to avoid. This week, for instance, it debuted a filter that covered over a user's eyes and forehead with closed-eye slants while enlarging their teeth and reddening their cheeks.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How the Stress of Racism Affects Learning

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A new study shows that the pressures associated with discrimination contribute to the achievement gap.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Saturday evening, I got a call that no parent wants to get. It was my son calling from college - he's a third-year student at Yale. He had been accosted by a campus police officer, at gunpoint!

This is how my son remembers it:

He left for the library around 5:45 p.m. to check the status of a book he had requested. The book hadn't arrived yet, but since he was there he put in a request for some multimedia equipment for a project he was working on.

Then he left to walk back to his dorm room. He says he saw an officer "jogging" toward the entrance of another building across the grounds from the building he'd just left.

Then this:

"I did not pay him any mind, and continued to walk back towards my room. I looked behind me, and noticed that the police officer was following me. He spoke into his shoulder-mounted radio and said, 'I got him.'

"I faced forward again, presuming that the officer was not talking to me. I then heard him say, 'Hey, turn around!' - which I did.

"The officer raised his gun at me, and told me to get on the ground.

"At this point, I stopped looking directly at the officer, and looked down towards the pavement. I dropped to my knees first, with my hands raised, then laid down on my stomach.

"The officer asked me what my name was. I gave him my name.

"The officer asked me what school I went to. I told him Yale University.

"At this point, the officer told me to get up."

The officer gave his name, then asked my son to "give him a call the next day."

My son continued:

"I got up slowly, and continued to walk back to my room. I was scared. My legs were shaking slightly. After a few more paces, the officer said, 'Hey, my man. Can you step off to the side?' I did."

The officer asked him to turn around so he could see the back of his jacket. He asked his name again, then, finally, asked to see my son's ID. My son produced his school ID from his wallet.

The officer asked more questions, and my son answered. All the while the officer was relaying this information to someone over his radio.

My son heard someone on the radio say back to the officer "something to the effect of: 'Keep him there until we get this sorted out.' " The officer told my son that an incident report would be filed, and then he walked away.

A female officer approached. My son recalled, "I told her that an officer had just stopped me and pointed his gun at me, and that I wanted to know what this was all about." She explained students had called about a burglary suspect who fit my son's description.

That suspect was apparently later arrested in the area.

When I spoke to my son, he was shaken up. I, however, was fuming.

Now, don't get me wrong: If indeed my son matched the description of a suspect, I would have had no problem with him being questioned appropriately. School is his community, his home away from home, and he would have appreciated reasonable efforts to keep it safe. The stop is not the problem; the method of the stop is the problem.

Why was a gun drawn first? Why was he not immediately told why he was being detained? Why not ask for ID first?

What if my son had panicked under the stress, having never had a gun pointed at him before, and made what the officer considered a "suspicious" movement? Had I come close to losing him? Triggers cannot be unpulled. Bullets cannot be called back.

My son was unarmed, possessed no plunder, obeyed all instructions, answered all questions, did not attempt to flee or resist in any way.

This is the scenario I have always dreaded: my son at the wrong end of a gun barrel, face down on the concrete. I had always dreaded the moment that we would share stories about encounters with the police in which our lives hung in the balance, intergenerational stories of joining the inglorious "club."

When that moment came, I was exceedingly happy I had talked to him about how to conduct himself if a situation like this ever occurred. Yet I was brewing with sadness and anger that he had to use that advice.

I am reminded of what I have always known, but what some would choose to deny: that there is no way to work your way out - earn your way out - of this sort of crisis. In these moments, what you've done matters less than how you look.

There is no amount of respectability that can bend a gun's barrel. All of our boys are bound together.

The dean of Yale College and the campus police chief have apologized and promised an internal investigation, and I appreciate that. But the scars cannot be unmade. My son will always carry the memory of the day he left his college library and an officer trained a gun on him.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A21 of the New York edition with the headline: Library Visit, Then Held at Gunpoint. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Opinion | Library Visit, Then Held at Gunpoint

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Saturday evening, I got a call that no parent wants to get. It was my son calling from college - he's a third-year student at Yale. He had been accosted by a campus police officer, at gunpoint! This is how my son remembers it: He left for the library around 5:45 p.m.

# data[].attributes.body
4 to Choose From

# data[].attributes.body
The couple who fought against the ban on interracial marriage/miscegenation ("mixed" blood)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
What You Didn't Know About Loving v. Virginia

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The landmark civil rights Supreme Court case-which made it illegal to ban interracial marriage-was about more than black and white

# data[].attributes.body
Act by Act

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
"Othello" by William Shakespeare, Act I - Vocabulary List : Vocabulary.com

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Answer a few questions on each word on this list. Get one wrong? We'll ask some follow-up questions. Use it to prep for your next quiz!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
I guess we should begin by thanking the television show Modern Family. The show's creators put the new "modern family" on the map by blowing away all the old stereotypes of what a family should look like. Upon its debut and in all the years since, it's been both a reflection of our culture and an inspiration to it.

Finally, the advertisers have caught on as well. We've seen a trend toward depicting modern family life in marketing, including television advertising, online video and all the social media activity that amplifies it. The brands are doing a much better job, IMHO, of reflecting our collective culture as it relates to family life.

Cheerios may have set this marketing trend with its first commercial featuring "Gracie" and her parents. While the brand got considerable flack for showcasing a mixed-race family, it carried on and released a sequel that debuted in this year's Super Bowl. The plot twist featured another baby on the way along with a negotiation for a new puppy as a result.

Honey Maid amped up its game by featuring real families of every size, shape and flavor, declaring them all to be wholesome, including single and same-sex parents among its buffet of families. Like Cheerios, the brand responded with more videos when it faced a social media backlash.

Swiffer joined in the game too, with real families discussing how they handle their domestic duties. The segment with the physically-challenged Dad broke even more boundaries.

In the end, backlash or not, these brands are demonstrating that they "get it," with the hope that if consumers see themselves in the brand, then they are more likely to participate.

As a result, we are seeing a new reality painted across what it's like to be a parent in this age of diversity. We are not the parents of yester year anymore; the stereotypes are a minority now.

It's actually kind of fun to see modern day portrayals of parenting, because the style is so vastly different than in generations past. We relate to our children differently than many of our parents related to us, and our interactions are very different as a result. It's not that we are peers by any means, but our relationships are more multi-dimensional.

Take a look at "First Moon Party" from HelloFlo, where this Mom tackles childhood drama in such a different manner, highlighting how her relationship with her daughter helps them tackle life's obstacles. This is not how June Cleaver would have handled her daughter's first period, that's for sure.

I'm inspired to see how Dad is being portrayed in marketing now as well. Hopefully, gone is the stereotype of the bumbly, fumbly Dad who is either completely uninvolved or who can't seem to get his act together to save his life.

Enter the new campaign from Cheerios called #HowToDad. Sure, they are launching a new item with peanut butter, but they are also declaring war on the notion that Dad can't run a household. This man is large and in charge, navigating the house and the entire family, including his wife.

My favorite line that I really resonate with as a Dad: "When a rule is broken we are the enforcement, when a heart is broken we are the reinforcement." Bravo!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GYxH2-WeZY
It's been said that it takes three things to make a "trend," so clearly the modern family is trending. Let's hope it becomes more of a paradigm shift, with permanence.

As a single Dad myself, newly-minted to the empty nest, I know that I could have used the emotional and cultural support when I was going through those child-rearing years. In many ways I was alone in my parenting, so I am personally thrilled to see brands better reflect and inspire today's parents... of any flavor.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
I guess we should begin by thanking the television show Modern Family. The show's creators put the new "modern family" on the map by blowing away all the old stereotypes of what a family should look like. Upon its debut and in all the years since, it's been both a reflection of our culture and an inspiration to it.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In North Carolina, the mixed-race population doubled. In Georgia, it expanded by more than 80 percent, and by nearly as much in Kentucky and Tennessee. In Indiana, Iowa and South Dakota, the multiracial population increased by about 70 percent.

"Anything over 50 percent is impressive," said William H. Frey, a sociologist and demographer at the Brookings Institution. "The fact that even states like Mississippi were able to see a large explosion of residents identifying as both black and white tells us something that people would not have predicted 10 or 20 years ago."

Census officials were expecting a national multiracial growth rate of about 35 percent since 2000, when seven million people - 2.4 percent of the population - chose more than one race. Officials have not yet announced a national growth rate, but it seems sure to be closer to 50 percent.

The contour and the shade of the change are not uniform. In states like California, Hawaii and Oklahoma, where people of mixed race already made up a significant percentage of the total, the increases were smaller than in places like Mississippi, where there were far fewer mixed-race people to start with. In Hawaii, for instance - where the multiracial group accounts for 23 percent of the population, highest of any state - the growth since 2000 was 23.6 percent.

Also, in Hawaii, the predominant mix is Asian and white and native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, while in Oklahoma, it is American Indian and white. In Mississippi, the most common mix is black and white - historically and today the two groups least likely to intermarry, sociologists say, because of the enduring social and economic distance between them. (It was also against the law until 1967.)

Mississippi led the nation in the growth of mixed marriages for most of the last decade, according to Mr. Frey's analysis of the American Community Survey. Still, multiracial people are a tiny percentage of the state's population: 34,000, about 1.1 percent. And many here complain of enduring racial inequities.

There was an uproar last year over comments by Gov. Haley Barbour suggesting that the civil rights era in Mississippi, with its sometimes fatal strife, was not that bad. And some are rankled that the state flag still contains a miniature version of the Confederate battle standard.

Nonetheless, many here also see progress, something akin to "a door opening," in the words of one resident.

"Racial attitudes are changing," said Marvin King, a professor of political science at the University of Mississippi who is black, married to a white woman, and the father of a 2-year-old biracial daughter. "Day in, day out, there is certainly not the hostility there was years ago, and I think you see that in that there are more interracial relationships, and people don't fear those relationships. They don't have to hide those relationships anymore."

Mr. Norwood and his wife, Patty Norwood, agreed. "It's been really smooth here," said Mr. Norwood, 48, a Hattiesburg resident for 11 years and a men's basketball coach at William Carey University. He had been most recently coaching at a college in the culturally diverse area of Cajun Louisiana. "I think some people who may not have been comfortable with this in the past have no choice now. I mean, people always told me, the farther south you go, the more racism you'll feel. But that has not been true."

Mrs. Norwood, 39, a photographer who is Thai and Chinese on her mother's side and white on her father's, added: "I think if people see that you are genuine and in love, and that you are comfortable with yourselves, they are put at ease."

And unlike in many states, Mississippi's population has not grown much over the last decade, suggesting to researchers that any change in culture is happening not primarily as a result of newcomers. (Mississippi's population grew by 3.8 percent since 2000. In contrast, North Carolina's grew 18.46 percent.)

"North Carolina grew rapidly with Hispanics and blacks and people coming in from out of state and changing things," Mr. Frey said. "In Mississippi, I think it's changed from within."
Changing Identities
The share of the multiracial population under the age of 18 in Mississippi is higher than its share of youth in the general population, suggesting that much of the growth in the mixed-race group can be explained by recent births. But in Mississippi and in other states, some growth may also be a result of older Americans who once identified themselves as black or some other single race expanding the way they think about their identity.

"The reality is that there has been a long history of black and white relationships - they just weren't public," said Prof. Matthew Snipp, a demographer in the sociology department at Stanford University. Speaking about the mixed-race offspring of some of those relationships, he added: "People have had an entire decade to think about this since it was first a choice in 2000. Some of these figures are not so much changes as corrections. In a sense, they're rendering a more accurate portrait of their racial heritage that in the past would have been suppressed."

Experts say there are some elements, like military service or time spent on a college campus, that lay the groundwork for interracial relationships. With the Camp Shelby military base on its southern side and the University of Southern Mississippi as an anchor, perhaps it is not a surprise that Hattiesburg, a city of about 50,000 residents, and its surrounding counties would show rapid mixed-race growth.

They are also part of Mississippi's coastal culture, which has historically been more liberal and outward looking - given the port towns - than the rest of the state. (Harrison County, south of Hattiesburg and home to the Gulf Coast cities of Gulfport and Biloxi, has the highest share of mixed-race residents in the state, according to the 2010 census.)

Sonia Cherail Peeples, who is black, met her husband, Michael Peeples, who is white, in the science building at the University of Southern Mississippi in 2003, when they were both students. Friendship ensued, then a crush. "I never dated a black girl before," Mr. Peeples confided. His family was "old Mississippi," living mostly around Jackson. At one time, they ran a luggage company.

Sonia Peeples's ancestors were longtime Mississippians, too, but they were sharecropping cotton.

The differences in the past did not matter in the present, they both agreed.

"I really never thought twice about it," Mrs. Peeples, 29, said of dating Michael, 30. "Everyone was open to it and I thought: 'He has potential. I could marry this guy!' "

And she did. Now they have two boys: Riley, 3, and Gannon, 5, who Mrs. Peeples likes to say are "black, white and just right!"

"It's a generational thing," Mr. Peeples added, noting that his mother has been hot and cold about the relationship over the years, accepting his new family, then sometimes pulling away for a while, only to return, drawn by her grandsons. "I think many older people are set in their ways, but 40 years old or younger, you'll never get the sense that something's wrong," he said.

After college, the couple moved to Denver, but eventually decided to return to Hattiesburg, where Mr. Peeples works at a local dairy.

"I told the Realtor, 'Don't put us in a predominantly white or black neighborhood,' " Mrs. Peeples recalled. "And sure enough, we have a biracial kid next door."

According to the census, multiracial people are more likely to live in neighborhoods that have a broad mix of races with a higher share of whites than those who identify as black alone. This suggests they enjoy higher socioeconomic status, Mr. Frey, the demographer, said.
Lingering Tensions
Still, for the Peeples family, there have been some testy moments. There was the time when another parent at Gannon's school asked if his terrible allergies had something to do with "race mixing." And there was the hospital worker who treated Mrs. Peeples as though she was trying to snatch a white baby when she took Riley, who had blond curls, out of his crib in the nursery. "This is my baby! He just looks like his dad," Mrs. Peeples, who has deep brown skin, remembered scolding the woman.

But both Sonia and Michael Peeples are mindful that those few incidents are insignificant in comparison to what previous generations endured.

"I would not have wanted to live in my parents' or grandparents' time," said Mrs. Peeples, a full-time homemaker. "We're teaching our kids all of it, all their history. My 5-year-old asks, 'People who looked like you, why did they treat them so bad?' It's hard to explain to a biracial child in 2011. In a perfect world, race wouldn't matter, but that day's a while off."

The Norwoods have also experienced minor tensions. A waitress at a restaurant might abruptly decide that she cannot serve their table. Even when they are locked arm in arm, someone might ask incredulously, "Are you together?" Clerks at the supermarket want to ring up their groceries separately.

But there is one place where they know that old thinking patterns are being challenged: at their church.

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called Sunday morning church service the most segregated hour in America, but one would not know that at Grace Temple Ministries, the neighborhood church where the Norwoods worship and socialize with other mixed-race families. The pastor is white and the assistant pastor is black, and the creative arts pastor is Latino. During a recent sermon, the congregation's guiding ethos on social issues was clear: "Let us not be guilty of thinking as the culture and society decides," said the pastor, Dwayne Higgason.

Unlike the Peepleses, Jeffrey and Patty Norwood did not seek a diverse neighborhood, but found themselves in one anyway. In 2001, they bought the first home built on a developing street before any neighbors had even purchased lots. As houses sprang up, their neighbors turned out to be black families, white families and mixes of the two.

"Between our church and the neighborhood, this is the most diverse place I've been," said Mr. Norwood, a native of Tupelo, Miss. "I've never experienced anything quite like this."

Growing up in Victoria, Tex., Mrs. Norwood said she was never quite sure what race to mark on forms, and she hardly ever saw people like herself

"I usually went with Asian because I could only check one box," Mrs. Norwood said. "Our daughter's life will not be like that. She knows what she is and she's exposed to a little bit of everything. The times have certainly changed."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Mixed-Race Growth in Mississippi Signals a Shift in Attitudes

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In North Carolina, the mixed-race population doubled. In Georgia, it expanded by more than 80 percent, and by nearly as much in Kentucky and Tennessee. In Indiana, Iowa and South Dakota, the multiracial population increased by about 70 percent. "Anything over 50 percent is impressive," said William H.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
I told my wife to "leave me alone" after I read " Library Visit, Then Held at Gunpoint" by NY Times Op-Ed Reporter Charles Blow. His son, a student at Yale, had a gun pulled on him by a police officer was told to get on the ground and that he fit the description.

I am an Ivy League educated black male and know what it's like to put on a hoody and be rendered invisible to my white and Asian classmates. I also know what it's like to think that an elite education, the right clothes, and good English will somehow lighten the burden of blackness and lift the implicit bias and alleviate the fear of black men perpetuated by television, media, music, and kitchen table conversations between parents and children for generations.

As I read the piece, the helpful and hurtful comments, and who of my friends chose to share this article, I began to feel small, powerless and hopelessly outnumbered as it seems I'll never be able to cry loud enough or long enough for white people, immigrants, and some other black Americans to think my sadness is their problem. Small, because black men like me are only 6 percent of the U.S. population but 40 percent of all homicides. Selah. Powerless because the average net worth of Congressional members is $1,066,500 and the average net worth of black Americans is $4,900. And hopelessly outnumbered because more people are willing to allow harsh sentences to be passed down for black males when their white counterparts go free and the Voting Rights Act is systematically rolled back than those willing to march, petition or vote for fairness.

These and more thoughts were coursing through my brain when my wife wrapped her arms around me and leaned in for a kiss; and I told her to "leave me alone". My beautiful, empathetic, caring wife who wants to affirm my worth and identity, longs to see the image of God affirmed in everyone and works tirelessly for justice and opportunity in black, brown and immigrant communities -- I pushed her away.

Deeply hurt, she went to bed and I got my wish. I was alone. Score another victory for racism.

Defeated, I plopped down at our dinner table and asked God, "Why did I say that?"

As I sat in silence, I realized no one wants to be racist because it attacks the very humanity of another person and labels him or her as "less than", "unworthy", and deserving of violence, hatred and abuse. It is about exerting power over a person or group of people to the point that they internalize that unworthiness and even enable their subjugation to continue. Racism is not just about someone crossing the street because they see you coming; it's about black Americans believing that non-blacks are justified in doing so and that at dinner tables around the country parents are telling their children to do just that.

As Van Jones said at the SOCAP Conference in 2013, MLK transformed being racist in the United States into a bad thing. He moved it from our unconscious mind to conscious mind. But still, our implicit biases fueled by burdensome cultural and family "rules" and toxic media are at odds with the words that come out of our mouths. We say we want one thing to one person and say and/or do another if certain other people are around.

A father or mother is fine with "whoever their daughter brings home" until the man that walks through the door has skin that is dark like mine. Then the attacks begin, whether subtle or explicit. Let us be clear that threats of parents disowning their children and community exclusion are not fantasy but painfully true.

Now, some may argue that any cross-cultural relationship is difficult and you're absolutely right. But when your race has been subjugated by dominant culture to the point where every ethnic minority group including your own accepts the prevailing narrative of criminal, hyper-sexual, unfaithful, dishonest, and subhuman, then this is not the same.

When my wife says she loves me, my mind flashes back to conversations about "the list". This list was the list that black men were never on. Elders passing onto their children the list of who is acceptable for marriage. Asian white, black, Latino, immigrant -- all of them told me about the list and I laughed it off but damn did it hurt.

The continuing narrative of my innate inadequacy was not just an american idea but a global perspective and that cross crushed something in me that God and my wife are still putting back together.

I told Priscilla to leave me alone because I was told men like me are not worthy of love and that something is wrong with the women who do. They are less-than by association.

I am afraid for my marriage because music and movies tells me if my dad was unfaithful, I will be too.

I am afraid to have children because I'm told by culture men like me don't stay and if we do, we're not the best fathers.

I push Priscilla away because I was conditioned to think in the margins alone was where I belonged.

And I'm afraid of the police, rich people, immigrants, other black men, black women, white Americans and teenagers with baggy pants because they might believe what I've been taught too. Taught to believe that black people are inherently to be feared and the good ones are exceptions to the rule.

Yes, I see myself as "an exception" to the post-slavery, post-Jim Crow, present oppressive rule. I struggle to see myself as valid, equal and accepted and am consistently given evidence to the contrary by strangers, family and friends. Lord have mercy.

A high school classmate once told me, "You're not like those other n***ers, Walton. You're different."

Pardon me but my response was, "What the f--- does that mean?" Sadly, I knew what it meant. His father was an alcoholic, physically abusive and when he found out his son was dating a black american girl in our school, his scarring was not just emotional.

To be "black" did not mean intelligent, well-spoken and educated. It did not mean access to resources or enjoying classical of country music. It did not and does not mean success in business, science or academia. It meant violence, misogyny, no impulse control and the ability to intimidate. Carter G. Woodson said :

If you can control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his action. When you determine what a man shall think you do not have to concern yourself about what he will do. If you make a man feel that he is inferior, you do not have to compel him to accept an inferior status, for he will seek it himself. If you make a man think that he is justly an outcast, you do not have to order him to the back door. He will go without being told; and if there is no back door, his very nature will demand one.

And I wish he wasn't right.

I fall firmly into that mold necessitating my own isolation when the family of God certainly speaks the truth that I am worthy of love and community.

Racism wants to destroy me and my marriage because the oppressive system that subjugated and segregated Black Americans and other non-whites in this country is alive and well in the DNA of the United States. And unless there is an active joint rebellion by my wife and I against it, our marriage and relationship will end in silence coded as irreconcilable differences in the divorce papers.

I don't know how you feel reading this but I felt weary after writing it. Galatians 6:9 says, "Do not grow weary in well doing for in due time you'll reap a harvest if you don't give up." So I went to bed and gathered up my wife in my arms and went to sleep.

Each morning we wake up, we pray and put on the armor of God on one another. The belt of truth, the breastplate of righteousness, feet fitted with the Gospel of Peace and the readiness to preach it. That along with the shield of faith, helmet of salvation and sword of the spirit are what we ask for daily. It is true that this battle is not against flesh and blood but powers and principalities and spiritual wickedness in high places. There is no armor on our backs so we promise to guard one another. We accept one another out of the love and acceptance that God through Christ has for us and ask God to bring our hearts in line with what we know to be true in our minds.

The oppressive, corrosive, divisive system of racism and prejudice is as high, long, wide, and deep as anything that I have ever known save for the love of Christ; for the breadth, depth, width and height of the love of God is powerfully boundless and overcomes all hatred and casts out all fear. Yes, racism is destroying me and my marriage but by God's grace we are pressed down but not crushed, persecuted but not abandoned, struck down but not destroyed. Yes, outwardly we are wasting away, but God is renewing us inwardly every day. It is not the cobbled together philosophy of feminism, tolerance or gender and racial equity that holds Priscilla and I together. Absolutely not! It is the Great Reconciler, Jesus who has brought all creation nigh unto Himself and for those who call Him Lord, He has prepared a place where every tribe, tongue and nation worship and are celebrated. He has given Priscilla, me and all of God's people the ministry of reconciliation and our union pursues that reality moment by messy moment. We are saved by grace, justified by living faith and commissioned to be ambassadors of a different kingdom -- a Christ-centered way of life in Jackson Heights and beyond.

In Him, a black male from Brodnax, Virginia can give love to and receive love from a Chinese and Korean female from Jamaica, Queens and that can be celebrated as a reflection of His Great Family and not as something unnatural, shameful and dishonorable to our families and ourselves in this world. Racism wants to destroy me and my marriage but praise God that what He has brought together, no man can separate and neither height nor depth, nor angels or demons, no power present, past or future nor anything else in all of creation can separate me and my brothers and sisters color from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus Our Lord.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
I told my wife to "leave me alone" after I read " Library Visit, Then Held at Gunpoint" by NY Times Op-Ed Reporter Charles Blow. His son, a student at Yale, had a gun pulled on him by a police officer was told to get on the ground and that he fit the description.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Love may be blind, but many Americans aren't blind to who's in love - which can be a problem for interracial couples.

Recently, The Daily Beast reported how "Django Unchained" actress Daniele Watts, an African-American, and her celebrity chef boyfriend, Brian Lucas, who is white, experienced the ongoing social stigmas associated with being an interracial couple.

The article quoted Lucas' account when police approached them and asked how he knew her and what their relationship was. "They were questions that quite frankly made me feel like that they were questioning me being like the client of a prostitute," Lucas said.

The Daily Beast writer, Keli Goff, continued, "Mixed-race families are the fastest-growing demographic in America, there is not a single interracial couple I know who has been together for an extended period of time who has not experienced some awkwardness or indignity that same-race couples do not."

How the couple was treated created a flurry of outrage online. On Monday, HuffPost Live provided some perspective on how bias against interracial couples has persisted for decades. Musician John Mellencamp recounted to the online news publication how his 1980s hit "Jack & Diane" was actually a song intended to describe interracial sweethearts:

The song says Jack is a football star, but Mellencamp said the original lyrics described Jack as African-American.

"In 1982, when I turned the song in to the record company, they went, 'Whoa, can't you make him something other than that?' I said, 'Well, I don't really want to (change it.) I mean, that's the whole point. This is really a song about race relationships and a white girl being with a black guy, and that's what the song's about."

Despite the stigmas interracial couples must face, they make up a large percentage of America's married population. "Interracial marriages in the U.S. have climbed to 4.8 million - a record 1 in 12 - as a steady flow of new Asian and Hispanic immigrants expands the pool of prospective spouses," the Associated Press reported in 2012, citing a Pew Research Center study.

The Pew Research Center also found attitudes toward interracial marriages differ by generation. "Fully 50 percent of Millennials say the trend toward more people of different races marrying each other is good for society. By comparison, 38 percent of Gen Xers, 33 percent of Boomers and only 19 percent of Silents say the same," Pew reported.

But Pew also found non-whites (40 percent) were more likely than whites (29 percent) to view the rise in interracial marriages as a good thing for society.

The generational differences were illustrated by the experience of Hai Nguyen, a Vietnamese woman, who married a Vietnamese man because of their common traits, cultures and their families knew each other. But after their marriage ended in divorce, she remarried a man who is white.

"My parents have prejudices, but they've accepted it," Nguyen told NBC News, describing occasionally feeling different with her parents and other single-race couples. "They know it's inevitable. My native tongue will eventually fade, and history will take its course."

As more interracial couples marry and have children, the stigmas associated with such relationships will gradually fade away, predicted Daniel Lichter, a sociology professor at Cornell University.

"Mixed-race children have blurred America's color line. They often interact with others on either side of the racial divide and frequently serve as brokers between friends and family members of different racial backgrounds," said Lichter, as quoted by the AP. "But America still has a long way to go."

Email: kclark@deseretnews.com

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Interracial marriages on the rise, but social stigmas persist

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Love may be blind, but many Americans aren't blind to who's in love - which can be a problem for interracial couples. Recently, The Daily Beast reported how "Django Unchained" actress Daniele Watts, an African-American, and her celebrity chef boyfriend, Brian Lucas, who is white, experienced the ongoing social stigmas associated with being an interracial couple.

# data[].attributes.body
7 to choose from (you pick 1)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Here's The Truth About Interracial Dating... Mostly

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Interracial dating "can be a little tricky," comedian Phoebe ...

# data[].attributes.body
Same one on Google Classroom

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Iago crudely informs Brabantio, Desdemona's father, that Othello and Desdemona have eloped. Before the Venetian Senate, Brabantio accuses Othello of bewitching Desdemona. The Senators wish to send Othello to Cyprus, which is under threat from Turkey. They bring Desdemona before them. She tells of her love for Othello, and the marriage stands.

# data[].attributes.headline
Walking through the Articles/Videos — Complete the Form as well as the Discussion Question Accompanied with the Topic. 

# data[].attributes.subject
Walking through the Articles/Videos — Complete the Form as well as the Discussion Question Accompanied with the Topic. 

# data[].attributes.body
The Original Doc Analysis

# data[].attributes.body
The Rhetorical Triangle — Analyze Othello's Argument(s) and Iago's Persuasion

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Copy of Understanding the Cultural Context of Othello

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Understanding the Cultural Context of Othello How were the Moors & Venetians regarded in Shakespeare's Day? In Shakespeare's day, anyone with dark colored skin was considered savage and without manners. Military According to the Venetian law, the army general of the Venetian Republic was required to be a foreigner.

# data[].attributes.body
Spoilers

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
William Shakespeare Plays. View all Shakespearean workbooks at the IQ Matrix Store: store.iqmatrix.com/product-category/shakespearean-workbooks