Silence is why the numbers are rising

Out of respect for Angie's family, I do not discuss her surviving relatives, and I ask that interviews and coverage do the same. Angie's story is the one I am here to tell.

Across the country, intimate partner homicides of women rose 22 percent between 2014 and 2023, a trend driven by firearms, which accounted for a 36 percent increase over the same period.

Summit County, Ohio, where Angie lived, shows what that looks like in one place. Two people were killed in domestic violence deaths there in 2024. In 2025 the figure rose to at least eight. Angie was one of them.

Sources: Everytown for Gun Safety analysis of FBI Supplemental Homicide Report data, 2014–2023. Summit County figures from Hope & Healing Survivor Resource Center.

The picture is wrong

Television taught the country what a domestic violence victim looks like: poor, uneducated, from a broken home in a rough part of town. Millions of people compare their own life to that picture, find no resemblance, and conclude the subject has nothing to do with them.

The word victim finishes the job. Someone twenty-five years into a marriage does not recognize herself in it. She remembers the good years, and she still sees a good man having a hard time. What she believes she has is a difficult marriage, not a crime.

People across every income, education level, race and gender are living with abuse and would never use that word for it.

They also do not know what is available to them. When they picture a domestic violence organization, they picture an emergency shelter, and since they do not need a bed, they assume there is nothing there. They never learn about the safety planning, the counseling, the advocate who goes to court, or the help with children and pets that these organizations provide every day, without requiring a crisis and without charge.

That is the gap. Not a shortage of services, but a picture so narrow that the people inside it are the only ones who know the services exist.

The room she will not enter

Here is the part that gets missed. A person living with abuse will not attend an event about domestic violence. Walking into that room is a confession, in front of colleagues, neighbors and friends, and the shame alone will keep her home.

She will, however, attend a women's health conference, a wellness session at work, or a women's ministry event at her church, for reasons nobody will question.

That is where this information has to be waiting for her. Alongside the mammogram reminder and the menopause panel, delivered to a room she had every ordinary reason to be in, so that she can take what she needs and tell no one why she needed it.

The same is true for men, and more so. More than one in six men in the United States have experienced physical violence, sexual violence or stalking by an intimate partner, and by broader measures the figure approaches one in four. Almost nothing is built to reach them, and the shame runs deeper, because our picture of abuse rarely places a man in that role. He will not attend a session on domestic violence either. He may well be sitting in a leadership training, a men's group or an employee wellness session, and that is where the information has to find him.

Menopause, fibroids, GLP-1s, breast and ovarian cancer all moved from whispered to ordinary because people refused to keep them private, and women are healthier for it. Emotional abuse and domestic violence have not made that move, and the numbers say they should have long ago.

Lifetime prevalence of intimate partner violence, National Coalition Against Domestic Violence and CDC National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, compared with lifetime breast cancer risk, American Cancer Society, Cancer Facts & Figures 2026.

Mable Ivory speaks at the events where women's health, wellness, professional development and faith are already on the program, and adds the subject that keeps getting left off. Not as a session people must choose, which selects them out. As part of the conversation they already came to hear.

What the talk is for

The purpose is not to frighten a room. It is to give people permission.

Most outreach on this subject is built for emergencies, so anyone who does not feel in danger, and anyone who does not need a bed, concludes that none of it applies to them. They stay quiet, often for years, believing that misery alone does not qualify them for help.

You should not have to be in danger to deserve support. If your relationship hurts, that is reason enough.

Shame keeps the rest of them quiet. Many will never call a hotline, and many will never say a word out loud. They will, however, read a website late at night, or watch something on their phone that finally describes their life. That is who this work is built to reach, and speaking is how the message travels.

About Mable Ivory

Mable Ivory founded Recognize to Rise in 2026, after losing her best friend of nearly forty years to domestic violence.

This is not only a clinical problem. It is a communications problem, and it has been treated as everything except that.

The services exist. The expertise exists. The funding, imperfect as it is, exists. What has failed is the message: who it pictures, where it appears, and how much shame it asks a person to accept before they are allowed to use any of it. That is a failure of reach and framing, and it can be fixed.

Mable spent her career on precisely this kind of problem. She studied marketing at the NYU Stern School of Business and spent a decade in marketing and communications at Time Inc. and ESSENCE, where she served as Director of Community Development and Partnerships, building programs that connected a national audience of Black women to information and resources, and overseeing a $500,000 Hurricane Katrina relief fund. Reaching people who are not already looking for you is the work she knows.

She has also watched this work from the inside of a health movement. Mable lost her mother to breast cancer at twenty and found support through SHARE, Self-Help for Women with Breast and Ovarian Cancer, a New York City nonprofit. At twenty-two she joined SHARE's board of directors. She saw what sustained awareness can accomplish for a disease that was once discussed in whispers, and she has seen what its absence costs.

She is not a clinician and does not present herself as one. Where a subject calls for clinical, legal or advocacy expertise, she coordinates with organizations equipped to provide it. What she brings is a media and communications career, and the perspective of the friend who did not see it in time. She watched someone she loved live with abuse for years without recognizing what she was seeing, because Angie was too frightened to say anything, and because nothing about the way we discuss domestic violence resembled Angie's life.

Recognize to Rise is what Mable wishes had existed then. Somewhere to go when you are not ready to tell anyone, when you need information rather than intervention, and when nothing about the usual picture of abuse looks like you.

Topics

For employers

The business case is not thin. Intimate partner violence costs an estimated 8 million days of paid work each year, the equivalent of more than 32,000 full-time jobs. In one survey, 21 percent of full-time employed adults identified themselves as victims, and 74 percent of that group reported being harassed at work. Roughly two thirds of companies have no policy on any of it, and about one in five offers training.

Recognize to Rise works with employers who want to change that, and brings in the advocacy organizations equipped to advise on policy, training and safety planning.

Sources: American Psychological Association; Society for Human Resource Management.

For press

Available for interviews on emotional abuse, coercive control, the distance between recognizing abuse and finding support, why shame keeps people away from hotlines, and why this subject remains outside the mainstream health conversation.