At 10 AM on an otherwise unremarkable Thursday morning, he sent a message informing me he was "ready to talk in a neutral space." To say I was not expecting his message would be an understatement. The last time we had any contact, he was beating me with my own umbrella on Hollywood Boulevard. That was four years ago.

When pressed for an explanation of his unsolicited missive, he replied, "I was under the impression you had something you wanted to say to me. You do seem to have a problem moving on."

Did I have a problem moving on? Four years had passed; in them, I had thrived. I was no longer being emotionally and physically abused by someone I loved. I had redeveloped the capacity for self-respect our relationship had eroded. I was a stronger person, a better person. But, in spite of it all, did the problem remain? Yes, I conceded. It did. It was, it turned out, incredibly difficult to accept and move on from the fact that I had allowed myself, a card-carrying feminist from birth, to become a victim of domestic abuse.

I always hated the word "victim." It implied a level of powerlessness I thought I, a character of the staunchest order, was incapable of possessing. I was always a mouthy broad, fiercely independent and seemingly incapable of suffering fools gladly. I was not your typical victim, if such a thing exists, which is why I kept my abuse a secret for so long.

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Growing up, I viewed domestic violence as something that happened to other women—women with no self-worth, no education, no hope. Women who had never heard of Germaine Greer; women who didn't know "riot grrrl" was spelled with three r's and zero i's. The sort of women I'd watch brokenly and inconsolably sob in Lifetime movies with inane titles and even more inane dialogue, rife with variations of the sentiment, "If I can't have you, no one can."

I was raised in a household where the threat of domestic abuse was ever present, yet never fully manifested. My father seemed content enough by the results he got punching a hole in the wall near my mother's head, avoiding the pesky legal troubles that may have arisen were he to move his fist to the right an extra six inches. My mother's solution to the gaping hole in the drywall was to hang a JCPenney portrait of my sister and I over it. That was how things were. I knew they were not healthy, not "normal." But at least, I told myself, he didn't actually hit her.

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I never pitied or resented my mother, but I did judge her for sticking around. Why put herself through so much undue trauma, feeding the bleeding ego of a man too proud to admit he had an anger management problem, when she could just jump ship? When she eventually left him, I thought, Took you long enough. I told myself I'd never put myself in a situation like hers. For years, I kept that promise—until, of course, I didn't.

My ex was controlling from the get-go. He didn't like a lot of things about me, up to and including the fact that I smoked; I quit in order to prevent the fights we'd have about it. Whenever stress led me to sneak a cigarette, he'd invariably find out, either by smelling my clothes or my breath, and give me no end of hell for my indiscretion.

Everything I did was fodder for an endless argument, for which I would endlessly apologize. I'd brokenly and inconsolably sob while begging for his forgiveness and promising that, whatever it was I did, I would never do it again. After a few days of silent treatment, he'd acquiesce; we would move on as if nothing happened.

Our problems were always my creation, as he steadfastly refused to acknowledge guilt in any situation. I was the person who caused the conflict; I was the one who made him so damn mad. Why couldn't I just stop being a cunt? If I could do that, things would be peachy. I tried my best, but invariably failed.

I had little to no friends and familial ties that could, at best, be described as weak. I had no one to talk to and nothing to say anyhow. I had reached the point where I believed him when he told me I was worthless, awful, ugly. After all, if I weren't, wouldn't I have at least some semblance of a support system? As my only consistent companion, his word became bond.

In the home the two of us shared, the specter of violence was ever present, just as it was in my childhood home. Chairs were thrown and threats were made, but never realized. I thought his threats, like my father's, were impotent—idle words he'd never make good on. Nevertheless, they caused me to harbor resentment, and I, in turn, did some heinous shit of my own. I cheated on him, eventually marrying the guy I cheated on him with out of spite. For this, I sincerely apologized. He never did.

When he finally followed through on his threats, we weren't even dating. I had broken up with my husband, reestablished ties with him, and let him crash at my place upon his move to Los Angeles. I remember the first night it happened; the wild look in his eye as he ripped my clothes and pinned me down. At the time, I was still friendless, lacking anyone to confide in. I had quickly fallen back into old habits, absorbing his word as gospel. Because I cheated on him, he explained, he now had an excuse to beat me. So he did.

While all this was happening, I started doing the impossible—making friends for the first time in my adult life with people I met at stand-up shows. But they, my ex would inform me, were not my friends. The men who said I was funny solely wanted to sleep with me. The women were fair-weather, ignorant, and not to be trusted. Anyone who wasn't him was the enemy.

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I can't pinpoint exactly when or why I decided to stop believing him—it was a combination of factors, including entering into a new relationship with a non-sociopath, making friends, and having a creative outlet people complimented me on. The more folks treated me as a person of worth, the quieter his voice got. Eventually, he was drowned out.

I kept what had happened under wraps for ages, revealing it solely to a handful of close friends. I didn't want people to pity me; I didn't want to be seen as a victim. The more people I told, however, the more support I received—they didn't see me as a victim. They didn't see me as powerless. I was just a person who found herself in a shitty situation she thankfully extricated herself from. It didn't make me any less of a woman, any less of a feminist, to be in that position. I stopped blaming myself. I moved on—to the extent, of course, I could.

Follow Megan Koester on Twitter.

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The New York State Capitol in Albany. Photo via Flickr user Wally Gobetz

Like almost every other year in this twilight of American governance, 2014 has oozed with filth. You had the McDonnells of Virginia, both (former Governor) Bob and his wife, Maureen, sentenced in September to what could be a decade in jail for 11 counts of corruption. Before that was the US Supreme Court decision on McCutcheon v. FEC, which allowed the midterms this year to be filled with more shadow money from shadow individuals than the last presidential election. Oh, and aides to Governor Chris Christie in New Jersey shut down highway lanes to get back at a local rival in an incident Americans now affectionately refer to as Bridgegate.

Shit got so bad, even the Veterans Affairs office in DC—an agency that has the non-partisan goal of helping our former soldiers survive after returning home—was afflicted by some shady behavior.

Even so, Transparency International, a global anti-corruption coalition, rated America 17 out of 175 countries this year, only a shade dirtier than Canada, Australia, and a handful of Scandinavian countries.

Maybe they should have spent more time in New York.

Residents of the Empire State will start 2015 with their governor, Andrew Cuomo, under a cloud of federal investigation. The State Assembly Speaker, Sheldon Silver, is now facing a federal probe of his own, and one of New York's best-known congressmen, Staten Island Representative Michael Grimm, announced late Monday that he would resign after pleading guilty to a felony count of tax evasion. As Dick Dadey, the head of Citizens Union Foundation, a nonprofit good governance group, told me, "This year, you had a record number of state officials that either resigned from office or were indicted because of corruption or corruption-related issues."

It seems like everywhere you look, someone in the elected higher offices of New York has been doing something vile, or at least been accused of it. Here's a breakdown of everything you need to know about what might be the shadiest place in the country.

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New York State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver. Photo via Flickr user Azi Paybarah

Let's start with the most recent humiliation: Sheldon Silver, the 70-year-old who has held the office of assembly speaker up in Albany since 1994, is being investigated by the feds. Why? Because he controls an office that has tremendous influence over which laws go through the legislature, many of which pertain to enormous real estate tax credits—and according to the New York Times, US attorney Preet Bharara has discovered that Silver (who also works as a lawyer) has received outside, undocumented payments from a rinky-dink law office in Downtown Manhattan, Goldberg & Iryami, P.C. Of course, it just so happens that Goldberg & Iryami's speciality is tax reductions for commercial and residential real estate, meaning a relationship with Silver would be highly beneficial.

The only two lawyers at the firm have contributed extensively to Silver's campaigns in the past, but the US attorney's office says it has evidence that there was a "substantial" amount given to Silver under the table. In this case, the most telling figure may be the sheer discrepancy on the Speaker's 2013 tax returns: While the salary for the gig is only $121,000, the politician raked in an additional $650,000 that year. When pressed on the matter in early December, Silver refused to disclose where the money came from, aside from being "outside legal work" he's done with his private law firm.

When I reached out to John Kaehny, the head of Reinvent Albany, a transparency and accountability group, he responded over email with the subject line, "call today re: Albany cess pool." On the phone, he told me that the scariest part of the Silver situation is how easy it is to pull off. Because by and large, it's protected by law.

"The real scandal is what's legal: Pay-to-play has become a pastime in Albany, with contributions turning into actions," Keahny said. "In three or four of his speeches over the past two years, US Attorney Preet Bharara has said what's shocking to him is what's legal."

That being said, Keahny commended the probe into Silver, while making the case that outside income streams are a dime a dozen in the State Capitol. Dadey of Citizens Union agreed.

"Our laws are very weak when it comes to ethical oversight and enforcement, and it allows for this abuse to happen," he told me. "As a result, we have to rely on external forces, like the US attorney's office." (It's worth noting that Bharara currently has his hands full with the hellhole that is the Rikers Island prison complex.)

"Whether this Silver investigation amounts to anything," Dadley continued, "it could provide an opportunity to continue to tighten the laws that govern Albany on outside income."

We can credit much of this to the extraordinary concentration of wealth in New York, which in turn stems in large part from the state's position as a financial and cultural heavyweight. In other words, big business—especially in New York City—demands big payouts from local politicians. Keahny referenced the gigantic subsidies that go to the film and television industries as one part of an "opaque" system that has gone off the deep end.

"We don't know who's getting the tax credits. We don't know who made contributions to whom," he told me. "Who picks the winners and why do they win? We just don't know. It reflects a culture in Albany that has not changed, and is still mired in corruption."

It says a lot about this place that one investigation inevitably leads to another. See, Silver's probe would have never happened if Bharara wasn't already looking into the shady dealings of another politician—in this case, New York's commander-in-chief, Governor Andrew Cuomo.

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NY Governor Andrew Cuomo. Photo via Flickr user MTAPhotos

When Cuomo was elected in 2010, he rode a wave of anti-corruption sentiment, telling voters he would clean up Albany. So he convened the Moreland Commission, an anti-corruption panel with subpoena power that he hoped would shine light onto the shadows of New York State politics. Their slogan? "Restoring Public Trust." But then, all of a sudden, Cuomo nixed the commission this summer, saying its mission was accomplished. And one of the main fields of investigation before the commission at the time of its demise: outside income, like Silver's extra cash.

It is the panel's premature death that is at the center of a federal investigation, especially after it was discovered that the Moreland Commission had begun to set its eyes on Cuomo and his own office. Over a three-month span, a New York Times investigation laundry-listed several instances where Cuomo aides pulled the plug on inquiries that came too close to their boss. These included media firms and real estate moguls, some of whom were major donors to Cuomo's re-election campaign and the State Democratic Party, which Cuomo's office controls.

In true Nixonian fashion, Cuomo's office responded to the Times investigation by saying, "A commission appointed by and staffed by the executive cannot investigate the executive. It is a pure conflict of interest and would not pass the laugh test."

That leads us back to the mother of all industries in New York: real estate. Take, for example, Gary Barnett, the CEO of ExTell Development. A few months before a renewal for a tax break known as a 421a was renewed and signed by Cuomo, Barnett, his family, and a few shell companies associated with him donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Governor's campaign and the Democratic Party. Soon enough, his One57 project, a towering 90-story condo in Manhattan, received the tax break, and Barnett saved $35 million.

The Moreland Commission started to look into it, but, of course, the commission was axed before any questions were answered.

It is for this reason, Keahny argued, that New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is still unsure about his very own pied-à-terre proposal, which would tax foreign billionaires, oligarchs, and whoever else owns these exorbitantly expensive properties popping up across the real estate market. Right now, city law allows the rich to live here property-tax-free if they don't stick around for the whole year (that is the definition of pied-à-terre: a home away from home). That would change under de Blasio's plan and, as a result, add millions to the city's coffers.

"The United Nations has said New York and London are at the center of global money laundering—all of that laundering leaks into the local and state political systems," Keahny argued. "De Blasio has said, 'The politics aren't good' for his tax. Well yes, the politics aren't good because real estate controls Albany."

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Rep. Michael Grimm. Photo via Flickr user US Fish and Wildlife Service

Speaking of dodging taxes, that leads us to our final star in New York sleaze for 2014: Congressman Michael Grimm. The Staten Island Republican made headlines a few months back for threatening to throw a local television reporter off "the fucking balcony" and "break you in half... like a boy." (You can watch video here.) It was revealed later that Grimm was under investigation for filing a false tax return that allegedly hid a million dollars he had made from a Manhattan health-food restaurant.

Somehow, Staten Islanders still re-elected this guy in November, but on Monday, he announced his resignation from Congress, just a week after he pleaded guilty to the charges. Grimm faces up to three years in prison. "This decision is made with a heavy heart, as I have enjoyed a very special relationship and closeness with my constituents, whom I care about deeply," he said in a statement. (Oh, and guess who's thinking of replacing him: Staten Island District Attorney Dan Donovan, the prosecutor who oversaw the grand jury that cleared the cop responsible for Eric Garner's chokehold death in July.)

Making things even more flagrant around here was the veto this week of a Port Authority reform bill by both Governor Cuomo and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie (they run the cross-state Port Authority together). This is the body that was wrapped up in the Bridgegate scandal, and both of these men are under investigation by the United States government, one way or another. That apparently gives them license to team up.

"Will any of this change?" Keahny asked, repeating my question to him. "There's no indication at all that it will."

Follow John Surico on Twitter.

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Photo by Scott Olson via Getty

The term "rape culture" is a neat shorthand people use when acknowledging that we, as a society, enable, excuse, and even encourage rape in myriad, overlapping, often immensely complicated ways.

Under the logic of rape culture, an astonishing amount of humans are actively offended at the suggestion that sexual assault happens at an unthinkably high rate. This is in spite of the fact that perpetrators of sexual violence rarely face consequences for their actions, in spite of the fact that their victims are often shamed and treated inhumanely for simply living through sexual violence and daring to speak out about it.

This year, under the logic of rape culture, an enthusiastic hoard of anti-feminist commentators and deniers populating the bristling underbelly of the Internet continued to insist that rape culture is a "myth." This year, conservatives argued, straight-faced, that asking for consent before engaging in sexual intercourse will ruin sex for everyone. This year, while all of this indignant pontificating went on, millions of men and women were raped, sexually harassed, stalked, threatened and subjected to other forms of sexual violence.

For something that is constantly and passionately called into question, the prevalence of rape in our society is an easily demonstrable fact. According to a Center for Disease Control study conducted in 2011 but just published in September, an estimated 19.3% of women and 1.7% of men in the United States have been raped during their lifetimes, and an estimated 43.9% of women and 23.4% of men in the United States have experienced other forms of sexual violence. Nearly one in five American women are raped in their lifetime, and yet victims who come forward are still subjected to callous scrutiny and picked apart by a public that would rather call them liars or sluts than admit that sexual assault happens, and it happens a whole fucking lot.

This year, at least 21 women came forward and accused the beloved comedian Bill Cosby of sexual misconduct over the course of his illustrious career. For decades, Cosby's alleged victims were either forced, goaded, or scared into silence.

Now that people are finally paying attention, many of Cosby's past enablers have shared regretful accounts of their complicity in creating and enforcing his alleged victims' silence. That complicity isn't limited to his circle of insiders. Yeah, Cosby had a "fixer" who helped pay off eight different women. He also had a PR team who convinced media outlets to kill critical stories. But the most powerful tool at his disposal was the public who were not just willing but actively eager to ignore the women he allegedly drugged and abused.

The Cosby allegations are not new, though one might think so from the recent media frenzy. The original lawsuit, in which 13 women were set to testify that he'd sexually assaulted them, occurred in 2004. Three of his alleged victims spoke to the press at that time, but most journalists chose not to cover their accusations (several, including Cosby's biographer, have now apologized for failing to do so). And so everyone forgot about the claims, in part because they wanted to forget.

Rape culture is self-sustaining in this way. Even when Cosby couldn't pay or intimidate his alleged victims out of coming forward, the public rendered the very act of coming forward irrelevant.

The overwhelming collective apathy that originally surrounded the Cosby story is not a unique occurrence. We should not be calling the Cosby allegations "shocking," because they've been circulating for a decade. Nor should we be surprised that the assaults were covered up so successfully for so long: that exact thing happens all the time, in all sorts of institutions, through the blithe indifference of thousands who should be raging about unpunished crimes. Unfortunately, far too many people still have the luxury of thinking of sexual assault as outrageous or unbelievable.

This year, 88 colleges came under federal investigation for mishandling rape on campus. The biggest story on the subject—the Rolling Stone article centered around an alleged gang rape at a UVA fraternity—was not fact-checked rigorously enough, and several of the details surrounding the victim's alleged assault came under question. In response, the magazine issued a partial retraction in which they blamed the victim for the publication's own failure to perform due diligence.

"[W]e have come to the conclusion that our trust in her was misplaced," said the original statement, since amended. Anti-feminist critics gleefully celebrated the factual discrepancies in the piece as evidence of a "false accusation crisis," as definitive proof that the campus rape phenomenon is overblown and exaggerated. At the same time, sexual assault advocates rushed to point out that many survivors never come forward because of our collective incredulity and that false accusations are incredibly rare.

Yes, the alleged UVA victim's story was factually compromised (even though both her roommate and the friends she told about the assault have confirmed that she "clearly... experienced a horrific trauma"). But what does that change about campus rape in general? What of all the other alleged gang rapes that have occurred at colleges around the country? And what of the statistic that one in four female college students are sexually assaulted at school? How does one botched story blot out—or even partially obscure—the grim reality of sexual assault on college campuses?

This is how: As a society, we will desperately seize onto any opportunity to ignore the ubiquity of sexual violence. We try to find ways to discredit the victim—"Were you drunk?" "What were you wearing?" " Why didn't you bite his penis?"—and then wonder loudly why victims are so reluctant to come forward.

As long as our culture enables and excuses sexual assault, it does not matter how many women say, "Yes, rape happens; it happened to me." If people don't want to believe that rape occurs, they'll find a way not to. It does not matter how much data there is showing the alarming frequency of sexual violence. It does not matter how many rape stories we hear. As we've learned far too many times, it does not even matter if the assault is videotaped or photographed, if the victim is crying or unconscious or obviously intoxicated to the point of incapacitation. People will find a way to insist that she's lying, that she's delusional or that she was asking for it anyway.

By pretending rape doesn't exist as long as we look the other way, we all perpetuate the conditions in which sexual violence proliferates.

This year, Canadian radio host Jian Ghomeshi was arrested after allegedly sexually harassing and violently assaulting eight women. The allegations were not surprising to his peers. As a stream of remorseful writers noted after the fact, a lot of people knew the stories about Jian. And no one did anything. Because it was easier, and it felt nicer, to feign ignorance and to cling to the delusion that doing nothing doesn't enable an alleged serial abuser's attacks on women.

Rapists directly benefit from the callous skepticism of the masses. By refusing to hear or believe survivors, we effectively permit rapists to act with impunity. By pretending rape doesn't exist as long as we look the other way, we all perpetuate the conditions in which sexual violence proliferates.

This year, a 22-year-old man named Elliot Rodger went on a shooting spree in Isla Vista, killing six people before committing suicide. In the weeks leading up to the crime, he posted a series of YouTube videos and penned a 141-page manifesto outlining his hatred of all women, whom he said deserved to die for not wanting to fuck him. "I don't know why you girls aren't attracted to me," he proclaimed in one video post. "But I will punish you all for it."

Arguably the most unsettling part of Elliot Rodger's blatant, vitriolic misogyny was how completely non-shocking the sentiments behind it were. There are entire forums and websites and online communities filled with men who share his beliefs, who afterward applauded him as a hero and a visionary. In one forum, anonymous users praised him and spoke about "going Elliot" themselves.

"Guys, I bet you this will happen more times in 2014," wrote one excitedly. "Others will do it. Promise."

A milder, more insidious version of the deranged philosophy Rodger spewed in his manifesto—i.e., "women owe me sex; if I treat a woman with kindness or even just humanity and she doesn't reward me with intercourse, then she's a horrible bitch who deserves nothing but scorn"—is depressingly common in pop culture. That's where we get the idea of the "friend zone." That's why some men respond with blind rage when women don't reply to them on OkCupid and Tinder. That's why women often feel it necessary to invent a boyfriend when rebuffing a stranger's advances—because being totally uninterested in a dude is an affront, whereas being already-claimed is unfortunate, if understandable.

On Twitter, in response to Elliot Rodger's hideous invective, women all too familiar with his line of thinking started sharing their own stories using the hashtag #YesAllWomen.

"Because every single woman I know has a story about a man feeling entitled to access to her body. Every. Single. One," wrote one.

"In college, we'd regularly find girls who had been roofie'd and left passed out in the parking lot next to our dorm. REGULARLY," said another.

"I shouldn't have to hold my car keys in hand like a weapon & check over my shoulder every few seconds when I walk at night," said a third. The hashtag trended for an entire weekend and prompted more than a million tweets in all.

So much of rape culture depends on the simultaneous ubiquity and invisibility of sexual assault. As thousands of women pointed out via #YesAllWomen, we are expected to live in constant fear of rape, to be careful how much we drink and what we wear and how we travel at night—but we're also told that we're being hysterical or whiny when we talk about how exhausting, how limiting, how completely and utterly frustrating it is to constantly deal with the systemic sexism and sexual violence endemic to our culture.

I interviewed Barbara Bowman, one of Cosby's alleged victims, earlier this year. We speculated about the reason her story has finally received sustained media attention after ten years. I asked her whether she thought the rise of social media had anything to do with it, and she told me that it wasn't social media alone: "If we had had social media back then, I don't know that this [story] would have been what it is. Because people weren't talking then. It was a different era," she said.

Women finally have a platform to make their voices heard, and people are finally starting to believe victims. It is becoming increasingly difficult for the powerful and the complacent to sustain a culture of silence.

Of course, we still have a long way to go. Speaking out about sexism and sexual assault still invites loudly-expressed doubt and irritation—if not outright fury and explicit threats—from those invested in maintaining the status quo. But, as the complex mechanisms of power typically used to suppress victims begin to become conspicuous and fall apart, that will start to change. I hope.

We didn't learn any new lessons in 2014, not really. We re-learned that allegations against the rich and powerful aren't treated with the scrutiny they deserve, and that we the public are partly responsible for that. We re-learned that colleges will turn a blind eye to sexual assault and the sexist on-campus institutions that facilitate it (and we immediately and enthusiastically attempted to un-learn that as soon as Rolling Stone threw the alleged UVA victim under the bus). We re-learned that internalized misogyny is not harmless and that it affects all women in various ways, both obvious and tacit.

We need to stop re-learning and start remembering; we need to keep directly addressing sexual assault and sexism, and we need to keep listening to and believing survivors. Silence is the same thing as complicity—it's how we manage to keep forgetting.

Follow Callie Beusman on Twitter.

Some guy calling himself "Dollar BIllions" made a video this week called "How to Get a Crackhead off Your Motherfuckin' Front Porch." In it, an apparently hallucinating woman who wants to buy drugs, gets sprayed with a garden hose on a 57 degree Christmas Eve morning. LOL. 3,585 internet points!

He says in the video, "This is the kinda shit you gotta deal with in a trap, know what I'm sayin'?" I do know what he's saying. If you run a trap house, you're profiting from the hopelessly addicted. And when they won't leave because they have nothing to quiet their agony, that must be pretty goddamn annoying.

"Step one," he says, is "You're gonna have to light a blunt, because everybody knows it's too damn early for this shit." Step two is acted out, not spoken: He sprays the woman on his porch with a hose.

Upon being sprayed, the woman in the video shrieks and runs maybe 20 feet, while Dollar Billions says, "This strategy is also effective against punk rock hoes that will not get off yo dick. Have a nice day. Share and go viral." The tactic must be more effective on hoes, actually, because the woman can still be heard ranting and raving in the background, having not—despite his efforts—actually left.

That's probably because withdrawals are more uncomfortable than being sprayed with a hose on a chilly morning.

When there's a psychiatric emergency happening on their property, crack dealers might think their resources are limited to hoses and cops—and they're obviously not about to call the cops. In most urban communities, however, the police won't do much unless the homeless person is in the middle of committing a crime.

It's better to call your local homeless outreach hotline. These organizations are particularly active during the winter, and what they're out there to prevent, essentially, is people being sprayed with hoses by internet douchebags.

If you have a substance abuse problem, find a treatment center through the Department of Health and Human Services. To find ways to get involved in combating the homelessness problem, visit the National Coalition for the Homeless website.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter

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Photo by Flickr user Peter Thoeny

Growing up, we had a family tradition of putting the Times Square ball-dropping ceremonies on our living room TV so we could count down the minutes until the new year. This was kind of contrived, since we lived in California and by the time the ball dropped, it was only 9 PM. Still, the time difference gave me three hours to carefully strategize exactly how to make the next year the best year of my life.

I've always loved New Year's. I love making resolutions that I know won't last, clinking glasses with cheap knockoff champagne inside, and wearing those chintzy plastic sunglasses with numbers of the year shaped into the eye holes. There's no other holiday with less pretense than this one. And yet New Year's has got a bad rap. I brought it up to a friend recently, who said, "Ugh, I hate New Year's," before rattling off a list of legitimate reasons it's the worst invented holiday of all time: It's expensive, it's glittery, there's an incessant need to do something cool for the sake of appearances, and Uber surge-pricing will leave you broke for the rest of the year. "God, isn't it the worst?"

No, it's not. New Year's might be flawed, but it's still my favorite holiday. Here's why.

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Photo by Flickr user Victor Casale

New Year's Resolutions

I make resolutions every year, and they're usually pretty lofty. I'll learn a new language! I'll go gluten free! I'll start running every morning! I'll start volunteering at an animal shelter! Saying these things out loud—better yet, saying these things to the drunk person next to me at the bar—makes me feel infinitely better about myself. I don't think I've ever stuck to a resolution for more than a few months, let alone remembered it by the end of the year. (The sole exception is this past year, when I resolved to stop being such a bitch to my boyfriend. We moved in together in June, so that resolution was either a spectacular success or a real failure, depending on your perspective.) But it doesn't matter that these resolutions unravel so quickly. All that matters is that on New Year's Eve, and if only for a few days after, I feel like a new person.

New Year's resolutions give me the same kind of joy as sitting in Barnes and Noble's self-help section and fantasizing about future-me. It's a short-lived feeling, but for this one night of the year, my self-esteem has never been higher.

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Photo by Flickr user acearchie

Binge-Drinking

The festivities that go along with New Year's are like a foil to my resolutions: I'll decide that I'm going on a diet in the new year, and then I'll swallow six jello shots. There's a sense of urgency in indulging in my vices, since I've solemnly resolved not to do these things again for the next 365 days. (Not that those resolutions last, but you know, it's the thought that counts.) The evening of New Year's is the closest thing to returning to college, when getting blotto drunk is totally kosher. Plus, since everyone has New Year's Day off from work, it won't matter what your hangover is like tomorrow.

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Photo by Flickr user Allan Chatto

The Anatomy of a New Year's Party

Unlike most nationally-celebrated holidays, there is no predetermined structure for a New Year's party. As long as you're up and at 'em when the clock strikes twelve, you've pretty much done your job in fulfilling tradition. Some of my favorite New Year's were the ones right before I turned 21—when I was old enough to drink but not old enough to do it legally—when someone would invite a few people over to their house and we'd all sip Andre out of plastic cups and play Cards Against Humanity. Those kinds of New Year's weren't altogether much different from what my friends and I would normally do together, except for the addition of party-poppers hanging out of our mouths and plastic hats on our heads. But it was more fun, somehow, because it was New Year's.

To say that you "hate New Year's parties" is like saying that you hate watching movies—it doesn't make sense, because New Year's parties come in all variations. They can be whatever you want them to be, whether it's getting bottle service at a trendy club or staying home with a group of friends (or, fine, staying in bed). It's also the only time of the year when you can really dress however you want—in head-to-toe sparkles, in a spandex jumpsuit, even in your birthday suit—and no one really cares.

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Photo by Flickr user gingerbeardman

Being Nicer Than Normal

Sort of like my short-lived New Year's resolutions, I have a penchant for making plans with people that I have no intention to follow through on. Normally, I take great pains to avoid acquaintances at parties, because I hate making small talk and "catching up" and making plans to hang out. But on New Year's, nothing delights me more.

I'm also generally adverse to chatting up strangers, unless I'm trying to get free drinks at a bar, but on New Year's, it always feels like the right thing to do. I've heard of lots of people doing this for the sake of scoring a New Year's kiss, but for me, it always happens long before that. Maybe it's because I'm often very drunk, or maybe it's because everyone else is drunk, but I get really friendly on New Year's. I've met some weird people in New Year's past, and I always come home with a bunch of unrecognizable names and numbers stored in my phone. One year, when I spent the holiday in New York City, I shared a cab going uptown with a perfect stranger at 3 AM—not something I would've done any other day of the year. There's nothing like overpriced transportation to bring people together.

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Photo by Gideon Tsang

It Feels Like the End of the World

New Year's has that YOLO quality to it—it's now or never, bitches!—which only made sense on New Year's Eve 1999, when people were legitimately concerned that the world would end with the turn of the millennium. But the sense that you're invincible on New Year's, for better or for worse, makes the whole night magical.

And you know what? Even if the magic only lasts for one day, when I'm buzzed off cheap champagne and high on ambition, it might be the best I feel all year.

Arielle Pardes will be ringing in the new year wearing a skirt set printed in Emojis and resolving to go gluten-free. Follow her on Twitter.

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Photos by Andrew Perry

This piece first appeared on VICE UK

Scotland's first same-sex marriage ceremonies took place seconds after midnight on December 31, 2014. The weddings—one of two men and one of two women—marked the culmination of a long and hard-fought campaign by LGBT rights activists for marriage equality.

Or, depending on your views, they signified the end of traditional definitions of marriage, a threat to the sanctity of family life and the beginning of a slippery slope towards marriage being meaningless. That's the opinion of Scotland for Marriage, a campaign ran by an alliance of Christian organizations. They used the catchy slogan, "Supporting the current definition of marriage, which has served Scotland well for centuries." I guess they were using "Scotland" as an abbreviation for "straight people in Scotland."

Scottish ministers had intended to recognize same-sex marriage at the same time as their English counterparts, but Westminster managed to enact its legislation first, leaving Scottish couples looking on enviously as same-sex couples south of the border got hitched from March 2014. But with its own law now in place, Scotland has joined the growing list of countries which recognize marriage between people of the same gender.

I went along to one of the weddings to find out whether two people publicly declaring their love for one another really could lead to the breakdown of Scottish society.

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Joe (left) and Malx (right)

Grooms Joe Schofield and Malcolm "Malx" Brown certainly didn't seem the type of folks to destroy civilization as we know it. Friendly and excited, they met me at their wedding venue—the lavish Trades Hall in Glasgow's famously LGBT-friendly Merchant City district—where they told me they hadn't intended their marriage to become one of biggest news stories of the year.

"Honestly, if it had been up to us then we'd have gone to the local registry office in our normal clothes with a couple of pals and done it quietly" said Joe, a 42-year-old healthcare worker, originally from Manchester.

"But when the opportunity came up to be one of the first couples to marry, we jumped at it. It wasn't that we thought we were special, it was that we wanted to share our wedding with all of the activists, the politicians and the community members who've been fighting for this."

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The couple met online through last.fm. Both fans of punk and alternative music, they bonded over their shared love of the Fall and Dropkick Murphys. Online chats led to phone calls and eventually to Joe loading his possessions into a van and coming to live with Malx north of the border.

Ten years later, with Scotland's same-sex marriage law coming into force, the two decided to tie the knot.

But while their wedding marks a high point for Scotland's LGBT community, the road to equality hasn't always been smooth. The nation didn't officially legalise same-sex sexual activity until 1981, 14 years later than England.

And in 2000, campaigners bankrolled by the Stagecoach transport tycoon Brian Souter fought against the repeal of laws which prohibited the "promotion" of homosexuality as a "pretended family relationship" in schools. The Keep the Clause group ran a nationwide billboard campaign warning of the horrors awaiting Scottish schoolchildren if teachers were allowed to suggest that gay, lesbian and bisexual people weren't somehow fundamentally flawed.

Nowadays, though, public opinion seems to be squarely on the side of LGBT rights. In 2002, 40 percent of Scots polled approved of same-sex marriage. By 2014 that proportion had jumped to 68 percent. Scotland for Marriage started a petition against marriage equality and they only managed to attract 54,000 signatures. The legislation sailed through the Scottish parliament with a massive majority.

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Marco Biagi MSP, pictured left, as the couple cut into a big wedding cake with two groom figures and a map of Scotland on it

Marco Biagi, the Scottish government minister who introduced the new same-sex marriage law, reckons the shift in public attitudes was largely down to more and more people being open about their sexuality. "I think it's visibility that does it," he said. "If you've got a friend who is openly gay then it demystifies the whole thing. If it's a brother, sister, niece, nephew, grandchild, then even more so."

He added that he'd been surprised by the willingness of many in the "anti" camp to listen to opposing views. "There will always be die-hard opponents, with any kind of social change that will happen," he said. "But I found that during the campaign the great majority of people I spoke to weren't die-hards. They were genuinely concerned about religions being forced to change their practices and other unintended consequences.

"A lot of those people respond to the argument that groups like the Quakers and Unitarian Church want to offer same-sex marriage in accordance with their religious beliefs. The proscription on same-sex marriage was unfair to them; it's an issue of religious freedom."

Biagi served as one of the witnesses for Joe and Malx's ceremony, which, for such a momentous turning point in Scottish history, actually turned out to be a pretty straightforward affair.

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Ross Wright, center, as the couple read their vows

The grooms entered together, led by a piper playing Scotland the Brave. Celebrant Ross Wright from the Humanist Society of Scotland—himself a prominent LGBT rights activist—introduced the couple and shared some stories from their relationship. The time Malx was almost arrested because he looked similar to a wanted credit card forger. The time the couple went on holiday to Ukraine and hiked around the site of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. That kind of thing.

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The grooms read vows they'd written themselves. They exchanged rings. On the stroke of midnight they kissed and were declared lawfully married husbands.

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Malx cried. It was all very sweet.

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There was a slight snag when it came to signing the marriage schedule. The paperwork provided had spaces for signatures for a bride and groom, but a quick handwritten alteration by the registrar soon put things to rights.

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Cake was cut. Then the newlyweds stood in front of a battery of flashing cameras while confetti cannons showered them from a balcony overhead.

On the whole it was touching and incredibly civilized. The couple hadn't even arranged a boozy reception —with Hogmonay celebrations (the Scottish new year) looming they wanted to save their strength—so no one even got hammered.

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If, as its opponents suggest, same-sex marriage is going to damage the fabric of Scottish society, then it's difficult to look at Joe and Malx and see how. It seems pretty clear that Scotland is strengthened by equality.

"I think Scotland is evolving, it's changing, it's moving on," said Malx. "During the independence referendum campaign we had a lot of talk about fairness and equality in Scotland, I think this is an example of that attitude. There's still more to do in terms of equality, but I'm really proud to be a Scot because of this."

As I left I couldn't disagree. I felt I lived in a better country today than the one I lived in yesterday.

Follow Owen Duffy on Twitter.

Last night New York City's Times Square did its usual New Year's Even thing. An estimated million people assembled in the freezing cold to wear pink hats and watch that famed glittering testicle descend at the stroke of midnight while surrounded by NYPD cops and bomb-sniffing dogs. Photographer Patrice Helmar was there to document the scene, and he came back with these shots of people making out, celebrating, and strutting through the cold.

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Check out Alex Schubert's Instagram.

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Photos courtesy of the author

It's the end of 1970 and a girl I know, Nancy, has invited me to a New Year's Eve party at her place. I figure I'll bring my friend and housemate Aldo along. If I get bored, I can always depend on Aldo for mayhem—he carries it everywhere he goes.

Nancy has a nice little two-room on the third floor of an old frat house and she's the only one there. It occurs to me there never was a party; Nancy wants to fuck and I've been too much of an idiot to notice. We smoke a joint and she has a little jar of Nembutals and we all take two. Nancy and I leave Aldo with the Nembutals, a 35-mm film can of pot, and a jug of wine, and we go to the bedroom. She has the Woodstock album on the stereo and for the rest of my life I'll connect Nancy with "I'm Going Home" by Ten Years After.

Five years later, I'm at a barn dance, though it's really a hanger-sized Quonset. I photograph a girl who looks like she's going to punch me, then I photograph a couple of girls laughing and having a good time. Everyone is young and drunk and next year will probably be worse than the one they are all kissing goodbye. I flirt with all the girls and no one objects. The boys are all shit-kickers, howling like a pack of dogs. I see a girl across the way and she's cute like a farmer's daughter and she's crying. I make my way to her but when I get there she's gone and I don't see her again.

Five years earlier, Nancy has fallen asleep from drink and drugs, but I'm still amped up and Aldo is pacing the living room telling me let's go do something stupid before we get sober. We take two more Nembutals each and I suggest we go burn down a barn. Aldo has a better idea: He knows of a farm close by with a super-sized Confederate flag on the back wall of the barn. Let's get his .38 Colt and my 12-gauge Browning and go murder the flag. Five minutes later we're in my 1963 Plymouth Valiant cruising Interstate 70 headed for the farmlands.

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Aldo directs me to a dirt road through the woods, and we're sliding around the curves and kicking up dust. Aldo's got his gun aimed out the window and he says "bang bang bang." The barn sits at the top of the next long hill. There are darkened houses at the bottom on both sides. I park us in tire tracks on the grass. We walk through the weeds, and barking dogs are about. The barn is gray and old. Aldo has a flashlight, and we go inside, and there it is in all its dumb glory—the Confederate flag.

The South is not going to rise again and I'm no fan of Dixie, but if it was an American flag up on the wall, I would do the same thing. My shotgun is an automatic with four shells, and in quick succession they go boom boom boom boom! Aldo's .38 goes bam bam bam bam bam bam! We're laughing like hyenas.

At the barn party five years later, a drunk in the bathroom is peeing in the sink. I take a step back and he tells me his girlfriend is seven weeks knocked up and they are getting married next week. He says he loves her enough that he would have married her anyway but he still kind of wishes she'd get an abortion. He tells me Happy New Year and I tell him I hope it all works out.

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Everything goes quiet once the gunshots have faded. The dogs stop barking, the cicadas and crickets have nothing more to say. Aldo and I are panting from exertion. I get spooked by the sudden stillness and for no reason I say, "Fuck, shit. Let's get out of here, run!" Aldo's more paranoid than I and now he's spooked as well. His hair stands on end and he takes off running. I'm right behind Aldo when he steps in a hole and goes down. "Shit fuck, man," I tell him. "Get up, let's get out of here?"

Aldo is cursing and moaning and at times laughing. "It's broken. My fucking leg is broken." He still has the flashlight in his hand, and he puts the beam on his ankle. "No shit," I tell him. "Your ankle is broken. Fuck, shit, I'm gonna have to leave you here. I'll see you later, man." I'm joking but Aldo doesn't find it all that funny. I try dragging him to the car, but he's too heavy and screams when I grab his good leg and pull. Lights come on in a farmhouse. We finally get Aldo up on one foot and draped over me, and we get him in the car and we take off with the tires spinning, and when we make it to the interstate I roll down my window and howl like an ambulance.

Scot's first book, Lowlife, was released in 2011, and his memoir, Curb Service, is out now. You can find more information on his website.

Even though we've been hearing electronic music for well over 50 years, songs made with machines still fill my mind with visions of a dystopian future where we're slaves to androids. Sometimes I listen to Aphex Twin and imagine 2001: A Space Odyssey's Dave gleefully smashing Hal 3000 with a sledge hammer. "Out of the Silent Planet," by electronic producer Jordan Jolly, elicits similar kinds of fucked-up sci-fi daydreams. The glitchy chillwave track would serve as the perfect score to a human uprising against the technocratic overlords of our post-apocalyptic future.

Listen to more Jordan Jolly on SoundCloud.

Welcome to a new year! It's time to stop worrying about all the terrible things that happened globally and locally in 2014, and focus on speculating about the terrible things that will probably happen in 2015, and look ahead at the especially awful shit that's coming up on the calendar. So away we go:

January 1: Russia's Economic Problems Will Spread to Its Neighbors

New Year's Day is the first day of existence for something called the Eurasian Economic Union, which is a European-Union-style economic bloc made up of Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan; Armenia and Kyrgyzstan are slated to join this year. This all might have seemed like a good idea to the member countries, most of whom signed up back in May, but now the whole thing "looks like a disaster," according toBusiness Insider's Mike Bird.

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From Google. Retrieved December 31, 2014

Russia's economy is showing no signs of emerging from the drain it seems to be circling, and while it's fun to imagine Putin freaking out about his currency turning into toilet paper, there are now going to be consequences for other countries. For instance, Kazakhstan, which was showing signs of economic improvement, is now going to be irreversibly bogged down by a bunch of partnership agreements that no longer benefit its people. "The EEA says it's open to new members," writes Bird, "but it doesn't look like there's going to be a rush of countries trying to sign up."

Starting Friday: A Huge Crop of Bad Movies

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Every January, Hollywood—just having glutted itself on holiday season box office receipts, takes what's known in the industry as a " dump." Some movies that are meant to be box office bonanzas always get delayed when the studios realize how awful they are, and the traditional month for releasing all this detritus is the month when people are too snowed-in and depressed to go to the movies anyway.

Debuting Friday is The Woman in Black 2. This Daniel Redcliffe–less sequel to a Daniel Radcliffe horror movie "quickly devolves into predictable shock tactics, drippy wartime romance and scenes in which the characters leaf tremulously through Victorian photo albums and spout exposition," according to Time Out.

Other exciting debuts include a comedy called Mortdecai, in which Johnny Depp and Gwyneth Paltrow do fake British accents, and Veronika Decides to Die, a Sarah Michelle Gellar movie that was completed in 2009 and has finally clawed its way to a release despite no apparent interest from audiences anywhere.

January 3: The New GOP-Dominated Congress Starts Doing Stuff

There's nothing to look forward to as the 114th Congress gets started, no matter where you stand politically. It's going to be a nasty fight, with the newly empowered Republicans feeling butthurt about Obama's executive actions. They appear likely to attack on Obamacare, immigration reform, and the Keystone XL Pipeline with the most gusto, and Obama is poised to fight back with vetoes. Get ready for more gridlock, in other words.

Soon: A Shitty Report Card from the UN

In the year 2000, the United Nations created a program called the Millennium Development Goals, which were meant to be achieved by 2015. It was an ambitious plan born out of extreme, millennial optimism, and if you like humans, reading the list now will make you cry.

Did we "eradicate extreme poverty and hunger?" No. Seventeen percent of people in the developing world live on $1.25 a day or less. Did we "achieve universal primary education?" No. UNICEF's most recent numbers placed us nowhere near that goal.

A lot of strides were made in many of the more vaguely defined areas on the list like, "promoting gender equality and empowering women," "reducing child mortality," and "improving maternal health." But reading a goal like "combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases" when is Ebola expected to kill thousands more in 2015, is pretty depressing.

All Year: Election-Related News Is Coming

In the United States, the never-ending election cycle means we're always hearing about the next horse race, even if almost half of us won't actually vote. There's a two-year lull after a presidential election, but now that's officially over, and we can be expected to hear the dreaded word "Iowa" a lot when we turn on the news. There's no real Republican frontrunner, meaning lots of wild speculation will dominate the coming months. On the Democratic front, there are going to be a lot of attempts to to "destroy" Hillary Clinton.

For a little perspective, the UK is having a general election in 2015; so is Canada, our largest trading partner (Conservative Stephen Harper is expected to win again). Argentina will be electing new leadership during a horrible debt crisis, and Myanmar is meant to be having its first democratic election in decades, though it's not looking like the results are going to be very democratic at all thanks to the military's outsized role in politics there.

But cheer up—2016 is right around the corner.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter

In Back to the Future 2, time traveler Marty McFly finds himself in the year 2015 watching a little girl speed past him. He shouts, "Hey, hey! Stop! Little girl, stop! Look, I need to borrow your... Hoverboard." With those iconic lines, the world got its first glimpse of the levitating plank that has captured our imagination ever since. From then on, we've been writing about hoverboards, dreaming about hoverboards, and trying to make hoverboards a reality. Now that we've finally reached the year 2015, the dream of a floating personal transportation device is within our grasp. Hendo Hoverboards, a company run by Jill and Greg Henderson, are using magnetics, energy, and Kickstarter to bring hoverboards out of futuristic movies and into the real world.

The road to the hoverboard has, so far, been fraught with instability and failed first tries. When inventor Dean Kamen first announced he was working on a self-stabilizing, eco-friendly mode of transportation a lot of people thought he was developing a hoverboard. Hopes were dashed in 2001 when it turned out his project was actually the Segway.

Several inventors and tinkerers, including the almighty Mythbusters (in an episode from 2004), have "successfully" created hoverboards out of leaf blowers. But these hoverboards were only hoverboards in the sense that they A. hovered and B. were boards. However, they were unstable, couldn't reliably support much mass, and were impossible to steer and ride.

Then the internet's heart collectively broke in March 2014 when a hoverboard hoax video circulated. A company named HUVr released the four and a half minute clip starring various celebrities (Moby, Terrell Owens, Bethany Cosentino, Schoolboy Q, and Tony Hawk) riding around on a "hoverboard" in a parking lot. The video went viral, but keen-eyed viewers picked out incomplete special effects. The clip has been attributed to Funny or Die, and looking at the video now, of course it's a fake. But seeing it the first day it posted, even I allowed myself to be fooled.

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_{Back to the Future 2 Still}

Since the release of Back to the Future 2, the idea of the hoverboard has wormed its way into popular culture. From Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles video games to shitty made-for-TV kids' movies starring Tim Curry, it has become eponymous with our vision of a promising future.

But now, thanks to the Hendersons, hoverboards are actually happening. It seemed impossible, but one-time hoverboard-faker Tony Hawk rode a hoverboard for real, and I spoke to him about the experience.

"It feels... I guess it feels it feels like a skimboard that never slows down." The skating legend explained, "Once you step on it, the direction that it spins, that's the direction that you're going eternally, unless you put your hand down or stop it some other way." Control mechanisms are currently in development which, as described by the Hendo Hoverboards people to Tony, "sounds like something more akin to an invisible fin like a surfboard would have."

These developments are all thanks to Hendo's core technology called Magnetic Field Architecture. The basic idea behind the science is essentially: yes, you can create a hovering effect when two magnets are placed with the same poles facing, but the static space between them is, basically, garbage. But if eddy currents are moved on a conductive material, they also create an opposing (but much more stable) magnetic field. The Magnetic Field Architecture makes that field even more efficient.

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The Kickstarter for the Hendo Hoverboard ended on December 15, 2014. They raised over 200 percent of what they were asking for, bringing in $510,000. They're using the money for bigger and better implementation of the technology. "He's an architect by trade," said Tony, "so he was thinking more about building stability during earthquakes."

So is the board just a novelty? Is the board just a spinning, unstable death machine (as it seems to be in some of the video of Tony riding it)? "Just based on what I saw and how much they accomplished in a short time [...] I think that it may be a novelty," Tony reflects, "but I think they're learning as they go, they're working really hard, and they're really committed to make something that is fun and not scary."

And Tony has some words for those detractors, too: "From what I can tell about the comments that people are making about it, they're missing the bigger picture. They see this and they think that's it, that's the end of it. The complaints are, You can't control it. It only works on certain surfaces.But they had to start somewhere. And from what they told me, they're developing a spray they can put on other surfaces to make almost any terrain suitable."

If the Hendo can come up with things like that spray to help make their hoverboards more practical, our 2015 could start to look a lot like the one depicted in Back to the Future 2.

Follow Giaco on Twitter.

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Check out Leslie's blog here.

VICE Greece discovered a beauty pageant focused on celebrating the identity of African women living in Athens. We linked up to talk to them about what its like to deal with racism in modern Greece.

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Photo via Flickr user West Midlands Police

As they often do, local media outlets in several states warned of a spike in domestic violence this holiday season. The phenomenon is not confined to the United States. Last January, for instance, London's Metropolitan Police commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe told the Daily Mail that an increase in domestic violence injuries in the last quarter of 2013 "could be linked to Christmas," elaborating, "You can imagine that when people are at home more there is more opportunity for domestic situations."

Yet despite many-a-tale about the dark side of the celebratory season marking the end of each year, interviews with advocates focused on reducing domestic violence suggest the idea that people are more likely to abuse their loved ones during the holidays is a myth.

Actually, the opposite may be true.

According to Norma Mazzei, Operations Director at the National Domestic Violence Hotline (NDVH), "We have data that supports the opposite. We do not have an increase in calls during holidays—in fact, sometimes it's a little bit decreased."

Mazzei and others close to the issue share a general consensus that domestic violence does not increase nationally over the holidays, even if it might in a handful of places at specific times.

For instance, a 2005 study on domestic violence reported to police in Idaho found 2.7 times more reported incidents of domestic violence on New Year's Eve and New Year's Day than the normal daily average, though rises in the summer were also reported. And a 2010 study analyzing calls to law enforcement "in a large US city" found an increase in domestic violence calls on some holidays, most notably on New Year's Day, but also on Memorial Day, Independence Day, and Labor Day.

"It's kind of all over the place," Kim Pentico of the National Network to End Domestic Violence told me. "It sort of depends on who you ask, and when."

Pentico and Mazzei agree that spikes in some localities are likely due to a host of variables and are an exception rather than a rule.

"Although there continues to be a common perception that domestic violence increases during the holidays, available research on such a link is still limited and inconclusive," a 2014 report from the National Resource Center on Domestic Violence reads. "Information on the number of calls received by the National Domestic Violence Hotline (NDVH) for the past ten years indicates that the number of calls drops dramatically during the holidays, including on New Year's Eve and New Year's Day."

Pentico said a rise in domestic violence often actually occurs after the holidays, "when everything's settled down a bit."

Despite the data, because holiday traditions involve familial gatherings, financial stress, and alcohol consumption, the idea that domestic violence spikes under these conditions has a tempting logic to it.

Michelle Kaminsky, chief of the Domestic Violence Bureau under Brooklyn District Attorney Ken Thompson, said that her district did not see a rise in domestic violence over the holidays from 2011-2013, and offered one possible factor—"What the holidays are supposed to be about: family, togetherness, happiness"—to help explain why spikes do not occur, and violence may even go down.

Kaminsky said the assumed festive nature of the holidays could play a role in either discouraging reporting of violent incidents, or encouraging good behavior in abusive relationships. "I don't know what the numbers mean. It could be that people aren't reporting, and in fact violence is going on," Kaminsky said, adding the caveat, "It could be that people are on their best behavior during the holidays. It's really hard to say."

Pentico said that reported spikes in domestic violence in some localities may be linked more to spontaneous acts of familial violence than what she called an "advocate's definition of intimate partner violence."

Say, for example, two sisters had been drinking and got into fight, prompting law enforcement to arrive at their home. "It's considered domestic because [they] are family," said Pentico, "but not what an advocate would define as domestic violence within an intimate partner relationship because it is not a pattern of coercive behavior used to intimidate and threaten another person."

"An advocate's definition of domestic violence is one person's intimidation and threats over another to gain and maintain power and control," she added. A "domestic" tag on a police report for a violent crime implies a relationship, but not a pattern.

So while discordant definitions of domestic violence could help make sense of reported upticks in some areas, the conflation of risk factors—like alcohol, financial hard-times, and proximity to potential abusers—with root causes of domestic violence helps drive the presumption that domestic violence must go up over the holidays.

"We want to be careful about leading people down a path that stress or an increase in drinking causes domestic violence," said Pentico, "Certainly, we know that stress and alcohol and poverty increase risks [of domestic violence], but they are not causes."

Pentico added that the end of an abusive relationship is the most dangerous, because when a victim plans to leave, "That power has been threatened." There is nothing inherent to the holidays that jeopardizes an abuser's grip on the victim. On the contrary, the nature of the season may actually make victims less likely to leave or challenge their abusers.

"A lot of times we hear anecdotally from survivors that they're doing everything they can to keep the peace [over the holidays]—not to imply they control the violence by any means," Pentico said. "They're ingratiating as much as possible, and then once the holidays are over, it all kind of breaks down, and the violence will erupt again, or at least the fear. Sometimes they'll stay through the holidays just to give their kids a holiday home."

During the holidays, when the NDVH reports a drop in calls, Mazzei said it is "common for people to reach out to us for support to feel like they can make it through the holiday season without having to return to an abusive relationship."

A more common experience of a domestic violence survivor over the holidays is not an increase in abuse but the challenges in leaving, which persist year-long.

"Love for someone, even if a person has been abusive to you, does not disappear overnight," said Mazzei, who adds that the not-necessarily-contradictory feelings of love and pain are there throughout the year, but may intensify during holidays. "Now you have children asking for their father or mother, even if s/he was an abusive partner," she said. Mazzei emphasized that children's desire to be with their parents is one reason victims consider staying in or returning to an abusive relationship.

"Anyone who's left an abusive relationship is struggling to figure out if they made right decision, especially if they have children, or don't have employment or [other financial] resources," she said. These are "things that any victim on any day is going through," but Mazzei notes that the holidays might heighten the stress "because it is a time when you're focusing on family traditions" and leaving an abuser might mean the breaking-up of a once "traditional," or nuclear, family.

Likewise, "[Access to] financial resources is a problem that intensifies during holidays, when you want to buy gifts for your children," said Mazzei, adding that, like most obstacles to ending an abusive relationship, this challenge persists "throughout the year," including, for example, in September, "when you want to buy your children school clothes."

Rather than espouse misguided concern that domestic violence may increase over the holidays, it's better to consider how to support victims during a trying time of the year.

Pentico notes that because one in four women experience intimate partner violence in their lifetime, it is important to "be careful what you say" around the holidays, when relatives may be victims silently struggling with pain and tough decisions. "As women, we say, 'If a man ever hits me, I'm out of here' as a statement of power. But what it tells women who have been hurt is, I'm better than you... something is flawed with you. "

"I think people always say 'Why does she stay?' And we're not asking 'Why does he hit her? If he dislikes her so much, why doesn't he leave?'"

The answer, Pentico said, is "[Abuse is] effective... He's gaining something by staying."

"The big picture is, you know, patriarchy," said Pentico. Not the holidays.

Follow Kristen Gwynne on Twitter.