While compiling this issue, we put out a call to readers asking for stories of their first encounters with violence. A number of responses are shared throughout the issue, snapshots of memories of the moments when the world shifted in our minds.

Rainey Webb | Arlington, TX, US

My first recollection of violence came when I was nine years old. Our neighbours had a son a year above me in school, and our families were always close due to our proximity in age. His parents were typical white, suburban, middle-class people. The husband, however, wasn’t able to control his drinking, and the more intoxicated he got, the more violent he became. One late night we heard a loud banging on our back door. We all rushed to see the wife and the son standing in their pajamas desperate for safety. The wife’s eye was swollen up like an egg and was already starting to turn purple. My father had us all get into his car, and we drove to my grandparents’ house. They lived close, but the woman’s husband did not know exactly where. It would be a safe refuge for the night. As we were driving, the man responsible for the injury pulled up behind our car. He was far enough away that he couldn’t discern it was us. Thinking quickly, my father pulled into another driveway, turned off the lights, and told everyone to duck. As soon as the assailant’s car drove by, we took an alternate route to my grandparents’ house. I’ll never forget my friend, barely ten years old, so frightened I could feel his body trembling next to mine. I also remember not being able to comprehend how he could be so afraid of his own father, the man who was supposed to be his protector.

Emily Eber | Memphis, TN, US

I moved to Memphis in the summer of 2022 and quickly faced the unprejudiced reality of violence. In early September, days apart, a woman was kidnapped and killed while on a run and a man went on a shooting rampage, both within walking distance of my new home.

I vividly remember getting the shelter-in-place order as the shooter terrorized Memphis. I locked my doors, set the alarm, turned off the lights. Never has the veil of security I shroud myself in felt more sheer. The man on a killing spree had last been seen down the street from my house, and I was home alone with my nine-month-old. I sat in silence, watching the baby monitor as my son slept. Were we safe?

It was not as though violence was foreign to me—I work for a non-profit that helps men and women shut down nearby drug houses, and I had heard their stories of drug sales, drive-by shootings, and feeling unsafe. I understood that feeling safe in your home, your neighbourhood, was important. I knew these things, but I had not experienced them this closely.

For months, I found myself looking over my shoulder, checking locks, creating exit plans, and wondering if it was really a good idea to go for a walk. As a new mom, the juxtaposition of my son’s soft snores and the deafening roar of my fear was paralyzing.

How do we exist amid violence and not let it control us?

Julia Prins-Vanderveen | Vancouver, BC, CA

In my memory, it is almost Christmas in 1990, and we are bumping our way through poorly lit streets in an unfamiliar city. My three brothers and I are crammed uncomfortably into the back of an old Nissan, trying not to distract our parents. Stiff axles groan underneath us while my dad weaves around cavernous potholes in the dirt road. Then under the moonlight, we see the slick sheen of a man’s back, stretched and still. He is facedown in the watery gutter, alone and abandoned. We should help him, I insist. But after a short silence comes the halting, heavy response: We can’t. He’s already dead, my dad explains, and if we stop, we could be accused of having committed the crime ourselves.

The earthy, oppressive air of the West African coast and the agony of denying someone’s death heaves a sombre reality over us. How can I describe it? Death is as appalling as a man half exposed in the mud. My mom is absorbed in thought, and my dad is stolid, but the shadow of a tremor in his voice tells me that passing a dead man shatters something in him too. I turn to look out the back window and can’t keep my eyes off the man’s body—watching him as long as I can to see if he might move. When he doesn’t, I begin to feel a suffocating, gasping pressure. Did he drown? Did he die some other way and collapse there? Was he dropped by some calloused hand?

Since then, I have seen many bodies, sometimes shortly after death, though none that have been literally left for dead. But it was the beginning of knowing that such things happen.

Rajan Matthews | New York, NY, US

When I was doing my MDiv at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, I decided to do a guided theology course on the topic of violence. The first challenge was the proper definition of violence. I was challenged to see that Mahatma Gandhi’s “nonviolent” movement opposing British policies on textiles in India created significant hardships on women and children and resulted in the reported deaths of many in Manchester, England. The question that arose was whether this nonviolence in India was violence to children and women in Manchester. This conundrum helped me deal with my first experience of racism in the US—its historical context, its deep interdependence across all sections of society and belief, and its often masquerading poise as benign paternalism. It was interesting to see how racism morphed when dealing with minority immigrants that could often be seen as an alternate to dealing with affirmative action in businesses and other institutions. I often had to face the issue of being “very good” at my job but not “good enough” for the promotion or the title or the compensation, which went without question to the majority white person. The real antidote was what Joseph said to his brothers: “You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good” (Genesis 50:20).

Beca Bruder | Ancaster, ON, CA

I grew up in an area where kidnapping was common. A form called express kidnapping was rampant in my city for a few years: Two or three armed men would get into a victim’s car, take their belongings, and drive to an ATM where the victim was forced to withdraw money. And if they weren’t compliant, the assailants were ready to use their firearms. We all had to be extra careful, especially women driving alone at night. Strange men would get with you as you entered your vehicle, or motorcyclists would stop next to your car and break into your vehicle when you were waiting on a red light. It became such a regular occurrence that the city government changed the transit laws, allowing drivers to run red lights after 7:00 p.m. to avoid exposing themselves to danger. I vividly remember learning about my friend’s mom, Monica, being abducted. This was a family that was close to mine, and we had been to their house many times for our prayer group. This time, there was a large group of us praying, except Monica. She called her husband, afflicted, with the ransom request, and the two kidnappers took her to an ATM for the cash. They drove her around and finally let her go on the side of the road, joking that they didn’t want to leave her alone at night, it was dangerous. We stayed at their house with her family praying for hours for her safety until she returned in the middle of the night.

Sally Steenland | Washington, DC, US

I was sitting in high school French class when my history teacher knocked on the door and whispered something to my French teacher. We watched her go to the board, pick up a piece of chalk, and write, “Le President est mort.” It was Friday, November 22, 1963, and President Kennedy had been assassinated. At that moment, the whole world shook.

We were sent to chapel to pray for the country. No one cried. My Christian school and community of Dutch-immigrant Calvinists were staunch Republicans who believed that Kennedy, a Roman Catholic, wanted to destroy America so the pope could rule the world. My parents were Democrats, and we loved President Kennedy.

School let out early. I got off the bus at my stop, but the houses and sidewalks in my neighbourhood looked menacing and strange. In my mind I saw a globe smashed to pieces. I walked in the door to a crying mother, joined her in front of the TV, and sobbed. I threw up again and again.

On Sunday, we stayed home from church and watched Jack Ruby get shot on live TV. I stayed home from school the next week, filled with sick fury at my fellow students and the new chasm between us.

Before November 22, 1963, I believed adults could keep me safe. I believed the world was an ordered place. I did not know how death could crush me.

Irena Dragaš Jansen | Arlington, VA, US

July 13. My birthday. The bullets could be heard and seen ricocheting off our brick house. We put mattresses on the floor of the living room and slept there, away from the low windows of our bedrooms. It was a birthday slumber party I never wished for or thought I would have—my family huddled together, hiding from gunfire. The turbulent rumbles of war that we had been hearing in the distance had come and knocked on our door.

Yugoslavia was falling apart. Croatia had declared its independence. The tension between ethnic Croats and ethnic Serbs living in Croatia was high. It was charged by collective memories of centuries-long animosity between the two groups. But, for a long time, we had been living together, peacefully. For me that meant my whole life. Our family, our neighbourhood, our church, our town, our whole country—the ethnic lines were blurred, the lives had become intertwined.

The Yugoslav National Army, the army in which my father and brother had served, turned against us. The attack on our hometown soon followed. Fighter planes. Tanks. Armed soldiers. Explosions. Fire. Violence. Death. Some of our neighbours and friends from church had known the attack was coming. They fled ahead of time. They did not warn us. We were of the wrong ethnicity. The other. Is this what betrayal feels like? Is this how a war starts? Is fear fuelling this horrid violence? These questions were my birthday present. I was seventeen.

Kendra Hamilton | Clinton, SC, US

I was seventeen; it was 1975. I was a black kid driving back from Pizza Hut with a white friend down a dark road in Goose Creek, South Carolina. We encountered a roadblock that turned out to be a Klan rally—white-robed dudes waving a line of cars into an open field where presumably a cross was to be burned. My friend kept driving. I hid in the floorboards. Later she found a Klan medallion at a flea market and gave it to me as a memento. When I showed it to my uncle with a flippant comment, I got a blistering lecture about the Phoenix Massacre, an election riot in 1898 that his father and uncle—my grandfather and great-uncle—barely survived. So at age seventeen, I learned there were men who wanted me dead for no reason at all and that this threat of violence was generational, continuing, and might break out at any time. A chilling reminder came in 2015, when it was revealed that Dylann Roof had a list of churches he had considered attacking. My church was on the list, but it had been rejected because it was too small to make an impact. Our current politics offer no assurance that this threat will ever be lifted. Every time I enter Walmart in my rural South Carolina county, I’m aware that any one of the grim-faced white men I encounter may be the next to snap and end me.

Ashley Reiter | Langley, BC, CA

I was six when my uncle’s canoe capsized, donating our picnic to the Kettle River. My cousin bent over, cackling at his soggy family. He probably sassed his mom too. They had a very combative relationship. I remember him laughing—and then I remember her hitting him as she wept, screaming, one hand gripping his arm, the other slapping his face, his ears, him cussing and trying to hit her back, my uncle white-faced and looking away, my parents shushing my sister and me as we cried too. “Stop it, Dad”, I begged him. “Quiet now,” he said brusquely. “It’s none of your business.” He thought it was none of his either. Who was he to criticize his brother’s wife? We had arrived at the river in my uncle’s van. My aunt came from a childhood of violence, and though she wanted to do better, I saw more of it as I grew up. I remember my cousin’s defiant, tear-streaked grin as he showed me his newly chipped front tooth, muttering curses toward his mother’s back. Years later, when I brought up the memory, my father was uncomfortable, hasty to change the subject. He would rather not remember. Whether he is ashamed or not of his inaction, I don’t know. Would I have done differently? We are taught to avert our eyes at another’s embarrassment, to give privacy to an excess of emotions. How, then, can we train ourselves to intervene when emotions become violent?