It’s ironic that the uproar over Ray Rice’s brutal beating of his now-wife and the NFL’s shamefully lenient response is occurring exactly 20 years after Congress enacted the Violence Against Women Act. The legislation was designed in part to bring public recognition and more government resources to the problem of domestic violence.
Despite that act, it’s safe to say that domestic violence continued to be considered by many as a “women’s issue,” lumped with rape, inadequate day care, pay inequity and other social conditions lamented by women’s groups. It’s also safe to say that much of America still didn’t “get it.”
Well, they get it now.
Indeed, the graphic and hideous video of Rice bashing his then-girlfriend Janay Palmer in a hotel elevator may well be the turning point in society’s recognition of just how horrendous domestic violence is, and how ignorant and irresponsible it is to brush it off.
The image of a prominent athlete smashing his fist into the face of a woman he supposedly loves — and then handling her inert body like a sack of potatoes in the aftermath — can’t be, and won’t be, soon forgotten. It’s a snapshot imprinted in our national consciousness of the physical and mental torture that one in five women in this country are said to endure.
Nothing in the world is more macho than the National Football League. And if the NFL can be publicly shamed into taking domestic violence seriously, into suspending Rice indefinitely from playing pro football, that is a milestone that can’t be understated. That’s true especially since the league and Rice’s team, the Baltimore Ravens, reacted so tepidly to Rice’s arrest after the beating.
They knew what he did and basically ignored it. Then they saw, with the rest of us, what he did, and knew they could ignore it no more. There’s speculation that they saw what he did prior to the video’s public release and still responded with wildly deficient consequences — suspending Rice for two games — until the public uproar forced their hand.
The video showed what every victim knows: that appearances can deceive, that a man who appears to be a “good guy” in public can be a violent and vicious beast in private. It may have been difficult for some people to imagine that anyone could be that duplicitous. Now, they don’t have to imagine it: they have seen it.
We can only hope that the enlightenment provided by this ghastly incident might lessen society’s skepticism and make it easier for victims to come forward to tell their stories.
The tape and its aftermath is also a sad and chilling insight into the way some victims respond: they blame themselves, they withdraw criminal charges, they reconcile with their abusers, they direct their anger elsewhere.
Janay Palmer, who married Rice after the beating, publicly apologized for what she may have done to provoke the beating — as if anything could justify a huge man knocking a woman unconscious — and she blamed the media for blowing it out of proportion and ruining their lives.
Tragically, her reaction is not atypical. Victims of domestic violence are demoralized, brainwashed into taking responsibility for the violence against them, made to feel worthless, guilty and powerless — and, most importantly, they are legitimately terrified of being murdered if they try to end the relationship.
Next month is Domestic Violence Awareness Month. It took more than 20 years, but perhaps this time, all of us “get it.”