The legal system is designed to protect men from the superior power of the state but not to protect women or children from the superior power of men.…

- Judith Lewis Herman

After a traumatic experience, the human system of self-preservation seems to go onto permanent alert, as if the danger might return at any moment.

- Judith Lewis Herman

In order to escape accountability for his crimes, the perpetrator does everything in his power to promote forgetting. If secrecy fails, the perpetrat…

- Judith Lewis Herman

Over time as most people fail the survivor's exacting test of trustworthiness, she tends to withdraw from relationships. The isolation of the survivo…

- Judith Lewis Herman

The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: t…

- Judith Lewis Herman

The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma.

- Judith Lewis Herman

Many abused children cling to the hope that growing up will bring escape and freedom. But the personality formed in an environment of coercive contro…

- Judith Lewis Herman

It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desir…

- Judith Lewis Herman

The guarantee of safety in a battering relationship can never be based upon a promise from the perpetrator, no matter how heartfelt. Rather, it must …

- Judith Lewis Herman