“Her daughter wouldn’t tell her anything over the phone. It wasn’t until L.Y. Marlow drove from Maryland to her daughter’s Philadelphia apartment and saw the bruises on the young woman’s neck that she learned the full truth.

Her daughter had become just like her. And her mother. And her grandmother.Three generations of women in the family had been physically battered and almost killed by the men they loved, and now here was Marlow’s daughter, the fourth generation, describing how her boyfriend had tried to strangle her. How she began to black out when she heard her 6-month-old daughter on the bed next to her screaming. How that sound made her fight back.
Marlow listened that day in 2007, cried and decided then she needed to do something – if not to save her daughter, then to save that baby on the bed, a girl whose name spoke to what she would come to symbolize: Promise.

The nonprofit organization Marlow started days later has grown alongside the long-legged girl it was named after. And this year, as both the organization and Promise turn 10, Marlow has new allies in the long, formidable fight that her group and many others have waged against domestic violence. Saving Promise is bringing together executives from major companies, academics from Harvard and others – all united by an ambitious goal. They don’t want to just help women get out of abusive relationships. They want to prevent that abuse from occurring in the first place.

“I feel Promise was born for a purpose,” said Marlow, who’s 50 and lives in Bethesda, Maryland. “I want her to know what it means and feels like to not have to endure what four generations of mothers endured before her. She could really be the first in our family not to be abused.”

http://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/ct-grandmother-harvard-save-girls-from-domestic-violence-20170314-story.html

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