Marie Osmond Quotes

Children in dysfunctional homes at risk of abuse are kept in danger for too long because politically correct rules mean we won't challenge unfit parents.

Mother beat the hell out of us. She'd have wild outbursts.

It's extraordinary what children put up with. I happened to see two of my uncles put my father up against the wall of my grandmother's house and knock his teeth out, because he'd been unpleasant to my mother. The next day I went upstairs and found my father making a rather half-hearted attempt to gas himself.

When I was a kid, my mother's parenting style teetered between benign neglect and intense bouts of violence.

I punched my mother out once.

I pretended I was living with a television family and there was no yelling at home and no one hit me.

We now recognize that abuse and neglect may be as frequent in nuclear families as love, protection, and commitment are in nonnuclear families.

I was an abused kid.

If you give me any problem in America I can trace it down to domestic violence. It is the cradle of most of the problems, economic, psychological, educational.

A kid in an abusive home has far fewer rights than any POW. There is no Geneva Convention for kids.

I was angry about the fact that my father would beat my mother on a daily basis, that my mother would take it in turn and beat on me. I was an abused child. I was mad about all those things, very bitter and very angry.

I loved my parents... but that can never change the fact that my father's violence ruined my childhood.

My mother would beat me so bad, I wouldn't be able to sit down. And I would never snitch.

I have spent a lot of time listening to people who are serving life sentences and getting to know them and the circumstances of their lives. I have never met anyone serving a long prison sentence who had anything close to what I could call a childhood; instead, the upbringings always - always - involve extreme situations of poverty and abuse.

My dad has spent 20 years of his life working in child protection and writing policy for organisations across Australia in order to recognise and safeguard against abuse.

I came from a dysfunctional family - very dysfunctional. And my father used to find great humor in throwing me down the stairs.

Long before I ever got incarcerated, I should've been able to access services that help me deal with the grief and the loss of my son, that help me deal with the trauma, the abuse that I experienced as a child.

I have a history with domestic violence myself. I have toddlers in my home, and I'm a gun owner. And, as a veteran, I'm a member of a community that has a very high suicide rate. So all of those things have touched my life.

Since I was probably eight years old, just about everyday, all the way until I was 14 or 15 years old, just about everyday my mom and my stepdad would roll around in the living room fighting.

I went through child abuse, and I also went through abuse with dating a couple of boyfriends in high school. I also have gone through a divorce.

No matter how much poverty you grow up with, you shouldn't be subjected to violence and abuse.

Some studies have shown close to 70 percent of men who are in prison have one of two things in common: One, they can't read. And two, they witnessed violence or were victims of violence as a child. You would think that if you had seen your mother get beaten when you were 10 years old, you'd never raise your hand to a woman. Not true. The prospect that you will increases dramatically if you witness violence. So it's so much bigger than just about women. It's about our society. It's about our culture. It's about who the hell we are.

I have a lot of advantages: I'm not addicted to horrifying pills. I also have surrounded myself with far more caring and upright individuals. And I wasn't abused as a child, so I'm doing okay!

Parents are indeed capable of routinely torturing their children without anyone interceding.

You know . . . a lot of kids at school hate their parents. Some of them got hit. And some of them got caught in the middle of wrong lives. Some of them were trophies for their parents to show the neighbors like ribbons or gold stars. And some of them just wanted to drink in peace.