All those years, I noticed the little stories tucked away on newspaper back pages, given a paragraph or two, mentioned in passing on broadcasts, about dismembered sex workers and murdered children and tortured young women and long-term captives, about wives and children slain by husbands and fathers, and the rest, each one treated as an isolated incident or at least something that was not part of any pattern worth naming. I connected the dots, saw an epidemic, talked and wrote about the patterns I saw, waited three decades for it to become a public conversation.
