Stories
Stories
The Real Meaning of Love
Katie Hood (MBA 2001) is CEO of the One Love Foundation , which is dedicated to bringing an end to relationship violence by educating, empowering, and activating campus communities. In this interview, Hood describes why the organization was formed and how its volunteers are working to raise young people’s awareness of the warning signs of abusive and controlling relationships.
“The One Love Foundation in Honor of Yeardley Love was started in 2010 after Yeardley, who was a University of Virginia fourth year, was beaten to death by her ex-boyfriend, another University of Virginia student. I got involved because Yeardley’s cousin is my best friend.
“Fifty million women in this country right now will be in an abusive relationship in their lifetime, and yet you never hear about it, you never talk about it, and all of a sudden it had just happened to my best friend’s family. Yeardley died, and her death was avoidable. If she and her friends and her family had had any information about the warning signs of an abusive relationship and what the earliest phases look like, steps could have been taken to save her life.
“One Love is focused on educating young people about emotional abuse, and our real goal is to create stigma around emotional abuse. Now when we do this, we don’t talk about abuse and we don’t talk about violence, we talk about healthy and unhealthy behaviors. Overall, we try to educate about the difference between love and control.
“We also want to educate everyone about how this is so nuanced in different ways in all of our lives, whether we’re like the big scary bully in the corner or whether it’s just the patterns we use to interact with each other to resolve conflict, et cetera. How can you have a healthy relationship with your friends? How can you have a healthy relationship with your loved one?
“And we’re trying to position this not as a women’s issue or domestic violence issue alone—it’s really a public health issue. It’s really a community health issue, and that’s the way we should think about it.”
(Published September 2016)
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