I wish I had more time to devote to this post, but we’re in a 24-hour news cycle, and the Cleveland kidnapping story will soon vanish from our short-term memory.  For those of us who’ve lived through and narrowly escaped domestic violence, this incident is (yet again) a long-term memory reminder.

“So, you know, I figured it was a domestic-violence dispute.”  What Charles Ramsey did – and I hope to God he is immortalized for it – is called “Bystander Intervention.”  As Amy Davidson writes in the New Yorker, “For Berry and the others to be rescued, in other words, two things had to happen: she had to never forget who she was, and that who she was mattered; and Ramsey needed to not care who she might be at all—to think that all that mattered was that a woman was trapped behind a door that wouldn’t open, and to walk onto the porch.”

Please take the 20 minutes to watch this TED video of Jackson Katz who asks a very simple question, “Why is violence against women a women’s issue?”

Update: So, of course we now find out Ramsey has a domestic violence background of his own.

Related articles

• Charles Ramsey Demonstrates Bystander Intervention
• Charles Ramsey’s Bystander Intervention in what he thought was Domestic Violence
• Why ending domestic violence is our business
• Gender Violence is a Man’s Issue