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Domestic Violence in the Public Eye Again

            It’s early fall, the start of football season, but what dominates the headlines in the sports world is yet another instance of a star athlete using physical violence to control the woman in his life.  Unlike most instances of domestic violence, this incident is very public.  So much of what goes under the name of domestic violence—physical assault, intimidation, restraint, economic or sexual threat—takes place in private.  It happens in the home, in the car, in those private emails and text messages.  We usually don’t see the violence as it happens.  But in the current highlight we see a professional football player, one Ray Rice of the Baltimore Ravens, spit at his fiancée, punch her in the face, and then drag her unconscious out of the elevator.  By now you have probably seen the video tape of this assault more than once.

            It seems that every few months a story like this appears.  A star athlete slaps around his girlfriend, wife, or an anonymous woman he met in a bar.  Why are these accounts of domestic violence so newsworthy, while the domestic abuse down the neighborhood goes unreported?  I fear that the answer to that question is that we really don’t want to hear about couples fighting, threatening or beating one another.  In some sense we don’t know what to do with this problem.  We don’t have much to offer as an alternative.  Just how do we teach couples to solve problems in a mutually respectful manner?  How do we teach men, who we often reward for their ability to dominate and impose their will on an opponent, to communicate and negotiate a mutually acceptable solution to the differences they have with their partners? 

            Celebrities, because of their public personas, draw our attention to incidents of domestic violence.  But that is just the tip of the iceberg.  The non-celebrity stories of domestic violence are private, or at least kept between the police and the parties directly involved.  For the most part, the public does not know, is not outraged, and does nothing to prevent his violence from happening again in the future.

            Let’s hope it is a step in the right direction toward safety and justice for women that the National Football League now has a policy on domestic violence where players will be suspended for single offenses and banned for repeated offenses.  This kind of public policy by a major public entertainment entity serves to reinforce the standard that violence against women is not to be tolerated.  Let us extend that intolerance to the less public reaches of our community.  And let us change the climate that encourages strong and powerful men to employ their power to control the women in their lives.  That kind of change is needed in our homes, in our schools, and in our institutions.  Together we can make this change.  Together we can offer a new focus on relationship education that offers a respectful alternative to the violence and threat that characterizes so much of our public and private problem solving.