Picture a sere summer night in Phoenix, Arizona, circa 1982.¹

I lay on a crinkly table in a cluttered ER, joking with the doc, bribing him with a promise of homemade shortbread if he could fix my face without leaving scars, looking anywhere but in his eyes, and I noticed a police officer nearby.

When I was all stitched and tidied up, I went to the cop and heard a quavering voice tell him that I wanted to press charges against my husband for assault.

October is National Anti-Bullying Awareness Month. With one incident of bullying every seven minutes, sadly, bullying is the most frequent form of violence children encounter.

In the 2011 documentary "Bully," director Lee Hirsch, also the victim of bullying, gives us a window into the lives of five children — from across ethnic, cultural and geographic boundaries — who confront bullying on a daily basis. Their stories are unimaginably painful.

Their stories are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. The statistics on bullying is staggering.

California Gov. Jerry Brown on Saturday, Sept. 29, 2012 signed Senate Bill 1172 to ban “reparative therapy” for minors.

With this historic legislation, California becomes the first state to ban licensed mental health professionals from practicing psychological therapy aimed at turning gay and lesbian youth straight – a controversial practice also known as “ex-gay” therapy, conversion therapy and sexual reorientation.

To put it in plain terms – these quack therapists and their supporters want the homosexual to become the heterosexual.

“The ugly truth is that this goes on right here," he said. "It's the migrant worker unable to pay off the debt to his trafficker. ... The teenage girl — beaten, forced to walk the streets. This should not be happening in America."

These were words spoken in a speech by President Barack Obama at the Clinton Global Initiative’s annual meeting on Tuesday, Sept. 25. He was speaking about human trafficking, which he also said should be called by its real name: “modern slavery.”