Heightened Domestic Violence
During World Sporting Events

Our conscious awareness of what is not working, for the implementation of what does, is growing. But as Angela Marie MacDougall, the Executive Director of Battered Women’s Support Services, says,

“You might think an organization called Battered Women’s Support Services wouldn’t still have to explain why specialization matters. Yet here we are. Nearly 50 years after BWSS was founded, we’re still making that case.”

With statistics and explanations, here is the BWSS Newsletter for July 22nd, 2026, written by Angela, and below that, what Universal Mother Mary explained about balance on Earth in her teaching of the blessing and virtue of hope:

The FIFA World Cup is over, and I am starting to catch my breath.

Like many of you, I spent wonderful time with friends watching remarkable moments on the field, and those aren’t the moments that have stayed with me.

I keep thinking about the women who reached out to BWSS during the tournament.

You see, before the tournament began, we urged the government to include intimate partner violence in public safety planning. We shared international research and proposed a specialized response because we believed more women would need support during the tournament.

The prevailing view was that this probably wouldn’t be necessary.

We didn’t agree, and we prepared anyway.

For 40 days our incredible team stepped right up and mobilized a 24/7 response that included on the street engagement and a public awareness and education campaign.

I have never been prouder of the incredible people who volunteer, work and support BWSS.

Of course the calls came in and women came to us with coercive control, escalating violence, strangulation, death threats and fear for their children, their companion animals and themselves.

Some were trying to decide whether to leave, others had already left and were facing the dangers that often come after separation, like stalking and post separation abuse.

By the end of the tournament, we had responded to 734 requests for specialized support, a 37.2% increase over the same period last year.

Nearly 70% of women required individualized risk assessment for lethality, 94 women disclosed strangulation, and 85 women reported death threats.

Those numbers matter; sure, we can make a compelling graph, but when a woman tells us what is happening in her life, she isn’t only asking for help.

She’s also teaching us something about how intimate partner violence works, where systems fall short and what safety actually requires. If we pay attention, every conversation makes us better at the next one.

That, to me, is one of the responsibilities of specialized intimate partner violence response.

Women don’t need another report, so why did we publish one?

Specialized intimate partner frontline service organizations respond to this violence, and we develop knowledge through practice; every safety plan, every risk assessment and every difficult conversation deepens our understanding of coercive control, strangulation, firearms use, lethality and what effective intervention looks like, and knowledge almost never leaves the frontline.

That’s why we’ve published From Evidence to Implementation, our practice-based framework for specialized intimate partner violence response during the FIFA World Cup 2026.

You might think an organization called Battered Women’s Support Services wouldn’t still have to explain why specialization matters.

Yet here we are.

Nearly 50 years after BWSS was founded, we’re still making that case.

Fortunately, we’re not making it alone.

Women’s Aid organizations across the United Kingdom have demonstrated the value of specialist services for decades, and researchers—including the authors of the Kirby World Cup Research—have reached similar conclusions.

Women have better outcomes when they can access organizations whose expertise is in intimate partner violence.

Intimate partner violence doesn’t just escalate. It is downplayed first.

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As we begin to truly embrace the Divine Qualities, the blessings and virtues of the higher realms, we create a Loving foundational way of being within, and therefore naturally strive for that to become our outer reality on Earth.

Universal Mother Mary had this to say when she taught us the blessing and virtue of hope:

The Divine Feminine, my energy and your energy, and again this is not gender based, is the ability to create and to bring forth, to birth what is truth, what is light, what is meaningful.

Western women have heeded the inspiration for a long time.

Think of, oh it has been about 70 of your years, in the United States where the Suffragists began to claim their right to vote, a very basic thing to say:

“My voice must be heard. My desires and what I wish to create for myself, and for my family must be taken into account.”

Now how was that born?

It was heavily influenced by the work that they were undertaking with emancipation.

And many women realized that it was not only their black brothers and sisters who were enslaved, but them as well, that they did not have the power to invoke the practical changes.

And this has gone in fits and starts, the rise of feminism, again the demand for liberation, for freedom, yes, biological freedom, reproductive freedom.

It is self determination and what I say, and you are seeing this all over your planet, this rise, St. Germaine’s Cry for Freedom, the Arab Spring, but this Cry for Freedom has come most strongly, most clearly and most consistently from the western women.

You will not stand for it and you will not stand for children being shot and families going hungry and inequality because none of these things are of love.

The redefinition of family, of what constitutes family, of expanded family, of reconstructed family, of community and what community is capable of, is coming from the grass roots of women.

Now I do not say this to the exclusion of the male population because at the same time as you are shifting and ascending, the male population is finally embracing their Divine Feminine in the same way that many of the women are saying:

“I will have to embrace my Divine Masculine and move into action in new and different ways.”

So it is reaching the balance and it is the western women saying, particularly to the western men, being in a male dominated society and culture is not acceptable.

“What you have created economically, financially, politically, culturally, is not loving.

“It is not reflective of the Divine Qualities.

“It does not take into account the potential and the sanctity of each life.”