Silence is our curse

As my disgust grows with the media coverage of the Steubenville rapes and what I'm sure is likely to be a scandal is about to rock the world of some people I know that aren't nearly as drama-free as they like to pretend they are, I've been doing a lot of thinking about the women who keep their silence and wondering if my own hasn't hurt more people in the long run than it ever helped. A lot of people in my family won't want to hear the things I have to say because we've ignored them for so long. A lot of people I care about could have been saved a lot of pain if I had not kept my silence and slipped off into a new life. But I am so very tired of always keeping my peace to maintain someone else's "good name". 
In my family, men can do no wrong. I have watched again and again as my cousins and uncles and grandfather are idolized and the women they have destroyed over the years are treated as second class citizens. Last year, when my grandfather fell and hit his head and everyone thought that this was finally the end, one of my cousins posted from the hospital that it was tough to see a great man struck down like that. Maybe some of the younger ones are too young to remember, maybe there parents have spent their entire lives denying what their childhood was like, but my grandfather has never been what you would call a great man. My grandfather was smart, on occasion funny, a great dancer, but the dark side that my mother and her siblings lived with every day and, to a lesser extent, my cousins and I grew up with was an evil force to be reckoned with. My grandfather was (before a stroke melted his brain into goo) an alcoholic. He abused his children in horrifying ways that most people wouldn't believe if you told them and, when we were kids, he would squeeze our hands as hard as he could just to make us cry and would go off on drunken rants and disgusting jokes that children should never have to listen to. 
When my uncle's wife finally had enough and walked out on their marriage, people said it was such a shame to see such a great couple split after so many years together. My uncle is also an abusive alcoholic, he is a mean-spirited bigot, and no one ever knew about all of the times he cheated on her and made her feel worthless and locked her in the closet so she couldn't leave the house. 
But my family stands up for them and is blind to their faults and considers them to be "great men" who "love their families". Any time a woman leaves her husband, though, my family finds some way of putting the blame on her.
Even when my father was on drugs and stopped paying my sister's child support and stole $1000 out of my checking account, my family stood up for him (let me point out that this is my mother's biological family). After spending years trying to help him get clean and manage his finances and even letting him live in my home and providing him with things he needed to be able to live on the road for his job and even driving through some of the worst neighborhoods trying to find him and bring him home, I had had enough. I kicked him out and told him that I couldn't be in his life while he was destroying it. My family would call me from the homeless shelters they found him at and make me feel guilty for not taking care of him, they would scold me for not respecting him as much as I should because he was my father and he "loved me". 
It doesn't seem to matter in this world how much harm men have caused, women are supposed to take it and bare their pain silently.
A long time ago, a friend kissed me and told me how very much he wanted to be with me but could not leave his wife. I was in an incredibly low point in my life and was very lost and because he was someone I thought was my very best friend and I trusted him, I let things get farther than I could live with. Having had the "other woman" break up my own marriage, I never wanted to be that person. I could no longer live in the same city as my shame and I took the first job offer I could and moved away that fall. In the years since then, I have watched him befriend and groom many other women to be his unsuspecting play things. I have no idea how many of them have fallen victim to his charm and been shamed into silence because the scandal would be too much to live with. I wonder how many people's lives have been thrown into upset because I chose to keep my silence and not warn them all about who and what he was. 
But I am tired of being silent. And I am tired of watching other women being shamed into silence. Please, my dearest friends, stand up and tell your stories. Support the strong, beautiful women around you when they break their silence. And stop accepting a society that requires us to be ashamed of the things that were done to us by others.