About the Book
A galvanizing call to end family-based anti-female violence, shaming, and shunning--stories and practices for healing from Family Mobbing.
A galvanizing call to end family-based anti-female violence, shaming, and shunning--stories and practices for healing from Family Mobbing.
"Family Mobbing" is a strategic process of power and control. When daughters are mobbed, they're not just shunned, attacked, or slandered- they're also subjugated by a system of family rules that reinforces patriarchal oppression. What makes mobbing so insidious--and so under-reported--is that here, family itself is the site of violence, trauma, and shame.
Family violence against girls and women is still legal--even in America, and even now. Across cultures, girls and women may be shunned or shamed, emotionally mistreated, or physically attacked by their families to maintain status, social conventions, and the family's own standing within their community. Family Mobbing tactics can include slander, gossip, rejection, beatings, anti-Queer violence, and even honor killings, child marriages, and forced abortion.
Author Stephanie Sellers--herself a survivor--explores the global phenomenon of Family Mobbing, revealing the secrets and patterns that play out behind closed doors and remain unseen, unacknowledged, and unaddressed. She discusses-
Why families and communities alienate members of their groups
Why women, girls, and LGBTQIA2S+ people are at higher risk of mobbing
The ramifications of raising daughters to be submissive
How (and why) mothers and grandmothers perpetuate cycles of Family Mobbing against their daughters
How to move on after being mobbed, shunned, or shamed
Firsthand accounts from people all over the world who were mobbed by their families
How different religious worldviews inform the practice and perpetuation of Family Mobbing
Sellers offers stories, definitions, and solutions to help women, girls, and people of all genders who have been mobbed by their families. She remembers and honors vast, ancient traditions that recognize female sanctity and personhood as paths forward to healing, with a focus on the practices and worldviews of Mother-first cultures that can illuminate the path toward honoring, valuing, and respecting daughters.
About the Author :
STEPHANIE A. SELLERS holds a Ph.D. in Native American Studies with a research focus on women's issues. She's a committed volunteer victim's advocate and professor at Gettysburg College. She's authored two books, Native American Autobiography Redefined- A Handbook and Native American Women's Studies Primer and is a founding member of a collegiate women's leadership committee for the American Association of University Women.
Review :
"Dr. Sellers brilliantly demonstrates the common source of forced child marriages, female infanticide, genital mutilation, breast ironing, bride burning, honor crimes, widow rejection, and LGBTQIA2S+ scapegoating abandonment—and names it 'Family Mobbing.' Daughters Healing from Family Mobbing offers strategies and resources for healing from family tyranny. Opening a new, badly needed conversation, this book promises to become a feminist classic."
—Sally Roesch Wagner, PhD, founder of The Matilda Joslyn Gage Foundation and author of We Want Equal Rights
"Daughters Healing from Family Mobbing offers wisdom and truth to all who are determined to stop repeating the past and allowing abuse to consume humans by destroying families. This book gives men and women alike acceptance into a family that understands and helps to mend broken souls. I applaud Dr. Sellers’s accomplishment of a monumental and much-needed, timely text."
—MariJo Moore, poet, anthologist, medium, and author of Power of the Storm
“Sellers alerts us to the cruelty of Family Mobbing and, importantly, tells us how
survivors can heal. An essential read for veteran therapists as well as those in training.”
—PAULINE BOSS, professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota and author of The Myth of Closure
"La lectura de Daughters Healing from Family Mobbing es una experiencia profunda y conmovedora. Y es una experiencia grupal porque Stephanie Sellers siembra su libro de voces de muchos y muchas. Porque lo que cuentan esas voces revela la realidad oculta del acoso intrafamiliar y muestra los caminos posibles hacia la curación. [. . .] Desde mi propia experiencia en la secundaria, cuando la palabra “bullying” no existía, entiendo en el cuerpo lo que hace el libro. Sellers y las otras voces nombran el problema, lo describen cuidadosamente. Después, lo enfrentan. [. . .] Gracias, Stephanie, por esta escritura coral, por este mapa del infierno y del camino hacia el alivio, hacia la vida."
—Márgara Averbach, Doctora en Letras, Universidad de Buenos Aires
[Translation]: "Reading Daughters Healing from Family Mobbing is a profound and moving experience, and it is a group experience because Stephanie Sellers sows her book with the voices of many, because these voices proclaim the unseen reality of family mobbing and point to the possibilities that exist for healing. . . . I appreciate to my core what this book is doing because of my own experience in secondary school, when the word “bullying” did not yet exist. Sellers and the other voices name the problem and painstakingly describe it. Then, they confront it. . . . Thank you, Stephanie, for this choral writing, for this roadmap of hell and the path to relief and new life."
—Márgara Averbach, PhD, retired professor, University of Buenos Aires
