Life After Abuse Pod

Sheila Weir is a life coach who has a special passion for helping victims of abuse. She practices Core Energy coaching, which is focused on helping her clients create and maintain the energy that they need to live a life filled with abundance and purpose. In this episode Ms. Weir discusses her practice, what she sees as the challenges that abused women face and how she works with them to take back their power. Ms. Weir is the founder of The Elephant Mofit. You can expl...

Victims of sexual abuse are unfortunately getting younger, as are their perpetrators. Despite the depiction of adolescents as “young adults” in our media, we must remember that they are not. They are children. A 17-year-old assault victim is a child who has been assaulted. The distinction between adults and children is critical. We must remember that the human brain is not fully developed until the early 20s. Although we often use the rhetoric that children are “resilient”, this is not ...

It takes a village to protect victims of abuse and assault. That village by necessity requires the strong support of men who care deeply about the lives of women. These are men who recognize that they were born of women, that women are the glue that keeps families together and are often the strength of communities. They know that without strong and healthy women and girls, we imperil our future.I had the privilege to interview one such man who has been working hard for over a deca...

An extraordinary woman can do extraordinary things out of horrific circumstances. Hellen Tanyinga is such a woman. In 2009, Ms. Tanyinga started the Rape Hurts Foundation (RHF), an NGO in Uganda to help girls and women who have suffered abuse in its many forms and to stop human trafficking. She understood the impact of rape. She was raped as a child while getting water for her family. As she told me “I named the foundation ‘Rape Hurts’ because rape hurts.” The Rape Hurt...

The road to bringing perpetrators to justice can go through the criminal and/or civil justice system(s). Considering the relatively small percentage of assault cases that are brought forward by district attorneys, especially in the case of intimate partner abuse, the civil legal system is an avenue to punish perpetrators. The impact on the victim of assault and abuse are high. There is a substantial physical, emotional and economic cost to untreated trauma. The victim m...

"New parents with college students believe that there is this safe order around all the colleges [and] that everything is going to be fine because the college is a safe environment. Well I would tell you that there is no place that is a hundred percent safe.” In my interview with Michael Bicking, find out what you should do if you are a victim of a sexual assault on a campus. Mr. Bicking also discusses the obligations that colleges have under title IX and VAWA to both prevent assault and supp...

I’m going to focus on findings from a Columbia University/Barnard cohort (group of students) that was surveyed in 2016 as part of the SHIFT or Sexual Health Initiative to Foster Transformation (SHIFT) study. The study is very well conducted and the analysis is solid.

In 2017 my life changed forever after my oldest daughter was raped on a college campus. Just when I thought that this was the worst blow I would ever suffer as a parent, my younger daughter was also raped while attending a boarding high school the following year.I believe that the time has finally come to burn down all of the horrible, old-fashioned ideas that are keeping women at risk for violence induced trauma. For more information go to: lifeafterabusepod.com