Ten years ago, a mother from Maryland didn’t know much about relationship abuse. Then her daughter died.
Sharon Love “didn’t know relationship abuse could be so insidious, difficult to recognize or that it could happen” to her daughter, Yeardley Love, according to the Baltimore Sun. She has learned, however, that after abuse and death, love can grow.
That love has come in the form of OneLove Foundation, founded by Ms. Love and her daughter Lexie Hodges after Yeardley’s murder by her ex-boyfriend, and “named for her lacrosse jersey number, which was 1,” the Sun reported.
According to the Baltimore Sun’s article, the foundation “uses a network of staff and volunteers across the country to educate students as early as middle school to recognize the signs of relationship violence and abuse.” Statistics show, the article noted, that “roughly one in three women – and one in four men, and one in two transgender and nonbinary partners – will be in an abusive relationship at some point in their lives.”
Yeardley Love was a 22-year-old lacrosse player at the University of Virginia when her ex-boyfriend killed her 10 years ago, the newspaper said. Her death “brought national attention to the Loves and the University of Virginia,” which was where she was murdered.
Her ex-boyfriend, George Wesley Huguely V, who was also a Virginia lacrosse player and a Bethesda, Maryland, native, was sentenced in 2012 to 23 years in prison for second-degree murder, the Sun said.
finding a way to healthy relationships
Love told the Baltimore Sun that when her daughter was killed, “it was so surreal that anything like that could’ve happened, to Yeardley especially.”
She “wanted to make other parents aware that this is real and it’s out there.” And, she told the Sun, she wanted to “change the statistics.”
Ojeda Hall, director of the regional division of OneLove, told the newspaper that in 2019, OneLove “visited more than 77,500 students in 400 middle schools, high school and secondary education institutions in the Maryland, D.C. and Virginia region alone.”
The foundation’s goal is to “equip students with the language to identify the signs of healthy and unhealthy relationships,” the article said.
Katie Hood, executive director of the OneLove Foundation and a family friend of the Loves, told the newspaper that the foundation’s strategy is “based on prevention” of abusive relationships.
She said that when you choose a strategy of prevention “you quickly learn you have to get the knowledge, skills and mindsets out to your community at younger and younger ages.” the article noted.
According to the Sun, OneLove Foundation holds workshops that are “administered by local, trained volunteers at schools and other community organizations.” These workshops, the newspaper reported, “feature several short films tailored to different age groups, teach viewers the difference between healthy and unhealthy displays of love, and home in on those signs in other videos.”
The workshops, the article said, “equip viewers with the knowledge to go out and educate their peers, directly or indirectly, outside a school setting.”
peers can help to end abuse so that love can grow
Because of the “magnitude” of abuse, Hood said, “if we rely on experts to teach us about this issue, there are never going to be enough experts.”
“And that’s important because peers are the first ones who can intervene when they notice signs of abuse in their circles,” the article said.
Hood told the Sun about the importance of love. “Love is learned,” she said. “It’s not just a feeling and emotion, it’s a skill you can build and bring intention to it. We can all love better.”
Because after abuse and death, love can grow, something OneLove Foundation works every day to prove.
Read more about OneLove Foundation and the work they do to help people have healthy relationships. And discover how “love is learned” at their foundation website.
#thatsnotlove
