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“We are working diligently to secure the most favorable outcome possible,” Wolfe said.

In Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, the character Sofia, after being abused by her husband, says, “All my life I had to fight ... I had to fight my daddy; I had to fight my uncles; I had to fight my brothers ... a girl child ain’t safe in a family of men.”

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Sometimes, though, it just takes one man—one man to violate and terrorize his home.

“Like Bresha, an estimated 15.5 million children in the U.S. are exposed to domestic violence each year. Girls and women incarcerated for actions taken in self-defense are disproportionately black. Eighty-four percent of girls incarcerated in the U.S. experience family-based violence prior to being criminalized. Three women are killed per day in the U.S. by a current or former partner, and 75 percent of these women are killed within hours, days or weeks after attempting to escape the abuse. Bresha’s father was also five times more likely to kill his victims because he owned a gun. Criminalizing Bresha in this context sends a harmful message to survivors and their children—that even in the most desperate of situations, they will be punished instead of helped.” —Free Bresha Meadows Campaign

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Jonathan Meadows is dead. He does not need our protection; nor is he worthy of any perverted justice. Death is but a moment, but the lifetime of pain that he caused his wife, his daughter and all those who love them lives on.

Today a black girl sits in a cage, designated a criminal, deemed violent, unworthy of freedom and love and empathy, all because of a system that intentionally denies black girls their humanity—and a father who stripped her of the same.

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Bresha Meadows is our daughter; she is our sister; she is us. She is every girl who has listened through thin walls as a man abuses her mother. She is every girl who has wished she could make it all stop.

What else could she have done? What else could she have done when all those around her were victims, too? What else could she have done when she was slowly dying on the inside, her scars either invisible or ignored?

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“She watched her father punch, kick and stomp her mother,” Ian Friedman, Bresha’s attorney, told the Huffington Post last year. “That, in and of itself, is traumatic. The kids witnessed their father’s drinking and drug use lead to escalated beatings that would, at times, end with their mother being unconscious.

“She lived a life that no child should,” Friedman continued. “She took the only step that she could, in her mind, to save her mother’s life and that of her siblings.”

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She is just a girl. She should not have had to be a hero.

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Bresha’s family has set up a GoFundMe page for help with expenses. Wolfe and Friedman are litigating her case pro bono, but the family still needs help piecing their lives back together, which includes relocation expenses and payment for prior inpatient treatment.

Judge Rintala will rule on Monday whether or not Bresha is able to go home to her family until her May 22 trial date. Until then, she continues to wait.

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“On the whole, Bresha is optimistic,” Wolfe told The Root. “She is grateful for the support and hopes to be home soon.”