Every October is both Domestic Violence Awareness Month and Breast Cancer Awareness Month. The simultaneous events mean that domestic violence (DV) victims' advocates spend the month trying to compete with the "Go Pink" commercialization of breast cancer activism. The charts below, show that DV advocates aren't imagining the significant hurdle they must climb to reach public consciousness. According to Google Trends, the number of searches on breast cancer far surpasses google searches for domestic violence (see graph below).
Yet, to put the challenge of generating DV awareness in greater context, interest in Chris Brown is much greater than either women's health issue (as measured by google searches- see graph). Domestic violence barely even registers and breast cancer only seems to get a bump in attention during October. It's really not surprising that DV activists latched on to Chris Brown perpetrating domestic violence as an attempt to create some awareness.
Follow #DVAM on Twitter this month for more information about DV and how you can do your part to raise awareness.
2 Comments
Sara Martinez
10/2/2013 04:45:01 am
I am so disappointed your graph line for Breast Cancer Awareness wasn’t Pink. LOL. I was satisfied reading your blog as just yesterday I sat in anguish as the people I love on Good Morning America kicked off BC Awareness month with a bang. I felt bad cause I was so jealous of the media attention BC gets and my mind reeling with the fact that DV harms more women than lung cancer, diabetes and stroke. This is my third year as an activist for DV and I expect I will be turning Purple all month trying to get people to pay attention to DV awareness.
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Joanna
10/2/2013 07:09:32 am
Cool! Glad it was helpful. If I knew how to alter the colors using Google Graphs, pink totally should have been the color! I agree it's hard to feel united around women's health when it feels like a zero sum game.
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