‘It Ends With Us’ Should Have Warned Audience About Abuse Storyline

The new movie It ends with us The film, starring Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni, is billed as a love story in which a young woman finds herself caught up in a romantic relationship with a powerful neurosurgeon. But in reality, in the film, and especially in the book from which it is based, the real story is a powerful depiction of the complexities and heartbreaks of domestic violence.

Author Colleen Hoover’s book and the film show how unaddressed historical trauma breeds more trauma. The challenge when we think about authentic and truthful storytelling about these issues is that it’s not just about these stories, but also about how we prepare people to deal with them and how we care for them afterward.

By glossing over the domestic violence content in the film’s advertising and not providing any content warnings before the film begins, It ends with us ultimately fails to defend the survivors he is supposed to defend.

As the Executive Director of the Network for Victim Recovery of DC (NVRDC), an organization that advocates for those impacted by crime to have meaningful rights and access to support services to mitigate the negative effects of post-victimization trauma, our staff supports survivors of domestic violence every day. What’s important to these survivors is feeling safe and seeing a world where accountability exists and matters. Over 83% of the people we serve are women or identify as women, and an alarming 79% of NVRDC’s cases involve sexual assault and/or intimate partner violence.

Watching the film in a packed theater with a colleague on opening night, our first reaction to the film’s ending was disappointment that resources for survivors weren’t offered right after the end credits rolled. Later, an end-credits message appeared, though it arrived after many people had left: “If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic violence, help is available.” www.nomore.org for further information and assistance. »

We both knew the film must have had an impact on the people in that room since, statistically, more than one in three women (35.6%) and more than one in four men (28.5%) in the United States have experienced physical violence, rape or stalking by an intimate partner in their lifetime, according to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence.

This is not to say that we shouldn’t depict domestic violence in film. We should, but we should warn viewers before the opening credits to ensure that any trauma survivors who want to leave can do so. This is a common practice in television shows and should be adopted for film because when we have survived a traumatic experience like domestic violence and are faced with similar stimuli in the future, we don’t just remember our own experience, we relive it.

In our work in trauma-informed care, we know that the best thing we can do to help people who have been traumatized…