Volunteering at a Women's Crisis Hotline: What I've Learned

I  have been volunteering at a hotline for women in crisis since the beginning of the year. I donate money to various charities every year but I thought I would offer a few hours of my time each week to this. They asked for a 6-month commitment which is almost over at the end of this month. So I've pretty much decided not to re-up my volunteership because this shit is depressing AF.  Most of the women calling in are distressed over their partners.

I wanted to share some of the most common traits of the NVMs that are causing women to have nervous breakdowns or want to unalive themselves. Nothing too surprising here but I'll list them out anyway. NOTE: The rest of my post will be as general/vague as possible to protect the anonymity of the people who call in.

 Non-committal: Most of these women are living with these men but the vast majority have no ring on their finger, and they've popped out at least one of his kids.

S*xual coercion: These men will coerce their partners into sending noods, opening up an OF account to help pay the bills, and pressure them to do positions they've seen in p*rn.

Drinking: So many women have said their partner comes home, drinks until bedtime, stays up while they go to bed, then after she's asleep his ass starts looking at p*rn or starts xesting female coworkers or old girlfriends.

Drugs: Mostly weed or MDMA but a few meth and heroin users. They get high and then do what I listed above under "drinking."

Video games: They are almost always video game addicts. They also look at p*rn through their game consoles.

Choking: If their partner has put hands on them, choking is the most common thing they mention.

Financial status: Most of these women are experiencing some form of financial abuse from their partner. Some of them have never been to college and have no marketable skills- these aren't older women, these are women under 30.

Long Bathroom Breaks: I was amazed to hear how many women tell me they found out that their partner is pretending to use the bathroom but actually are watching p*rn and getting off. In the middle of the day. While the kids are screaming and sometimes banging on the bathroom door to potty. I'm convinced if your man is regularly in the bathroom for more than 15 minutes, he's a LVM.

There you have it. The reason this crap is depressing is two-fold. One is yes, it's depressing AF to hear these same stories over and over but the more depressing part is when the caller doesn't want my resources, they just want me to tell them that everything will be okay or that it will get better. Sometimes they get angry at me when I ask them if they would like me to provide a list of DV shelters or any sort of resource related to sexual assault beause they don't consider choking domestic violence or they don't consider their partner forcing them to have intercourse as s*xual assault.