PROTECT YOURSELF:

• From emotional and physical abuse in your own relationships.
• With a personal support network; friends, neighbors, minister/priest, family, co-workers, and domestic abuse advocates.

BREAK THE SILENCE:

• Demand accountability from the system and from the individual perpetrators.
• Listen to and believe women and children.
• Look for warning signs that a woman or child is in trouble.
• Support battered women's advocacy programs and/or shelters, sexual assault crisis centers, and other grass roots organizations fighting violence.

HONOR AND RESPECT SURVIVORS OF ABUSE:

• Honor individual women and children in every step of their struggle to escape abuse.
• Respect each survivor's timing and process in the journey of healing.

TAKE A STAND AGAINST EVENTS AND MATERIALS THAT:

• Minimize battering (such as jokes about "keeping her in line").
• Confuse sex and violence.
• Demean women and children, and, in doing so, diminish men.

SUPPORT EDUCATIONAL PROGRAMS THAT:

• Teach non-violent ways to resolve conflict.
• Distinguish between sex and violence.
• Recognize the connections between violence against women and the sympathetic oppressions of racism, sexism, ageism, able-bodyism, anti-Semitism, militarism, and homophobia.

SUPPORT WITH YOUR DONATIONS OF TIME AND MONEY:

• A local battered women's program, The Minnesota Coalition for Battered Women, the Sexual Assault Coalition, BIHA (Black, Hispanic, Asian Women in Action), The National Coalition Against Domestic Violence.

ORGANIZE COMMUNITY ACTION:

• Plan a fund-raiser for a battered women's advocacy program to raise needed funds and educate the community about available services.
• Hold a candlelight vigil or ceremony to remember the victims of domestic abuse, to honor the survivors, and to celebrate those working to end violence against women and children.
• Promote religious services that speak out against the use of violence in the home.
• Present a school/college/university program that focuses on prevention curriculum and teach peace.
• Ask librarians and bookstores to set up displays of literature about domestic violence.
• Keep issues before the public. Write letters to newspapers; perhaps editorials or comments to print media as well as TV and radio.
• Organize inter-agency activities with police departments, PTA's, community colleges/universities, women's clubs, girl and boy scouts, other social and civic groups or human service agencies.
• Have a speaker, or facilitate discussion, at a Brown bag lunch.

DEMAND LEGISLATIVE ACTION THAT WILL:

• Increase funds for existing programs to continue or expand their services.
• Designate funds for new services or special projects.
• Support legislation that enforces existing statutes to protect battered women and their children.
• Create services that are linguistically and culturally appropriate.