(ThyBlackMan.com) Last week the gossip website TMZ released a video of NFL running back Ray Rice punching his then fiancé Janay Palmer while in the elevator of an Atlantic City casino. The controversial surveillance footage set off a firestorm of public outcry as the NFL scrambled to justify previously suspending the Baltimore Ravens star only two games.
More image problems surfaced for the NFL Friday morning when another star running back, Adrian Peterson, of the Minnesota Vikings was indicted in Montgomery County, Texas for reckless or negligent injury to a child for whipping his 4-year-old son. Official police photographs of the young boy’s injuries surfaced over the weekend which depict numerous lacerations and bruises to the child’s thighs, arms and back. In a text message sent by Peterson to the child’s mother he admits to accidentally striking his son in the scrotum during the altercation.
These two recent incidents highlight America’s culture of violence. Too often in America acts of violence are committed by men against those in the least position to protect themselves – women and children – making Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson’s actions a continuation of America’s long history of treating women and children as property rather than human
beings.
Before 1839, when the Married Women’s Property Act was first enacted in Tennessee, women possessed no legal rights apart from their husbands. For all legal purposes, women were the chattel of husbands and fathers, and were disallowed from owning property, entering into contract or earning a salary. It would be another fifty-one years, 1920, before white women could vote in the United States, and a full forty-five years longer before African-Americans – men or women – could cast a vote without discriminatory practices nullifying their efforts.
During this era of pre- women’s suffrage domestic violence abuse was commonplace. In the last 150-plus years women have experienced increased access to voting polls, corporate offices, and property rights, by virtue of this progress, one could assume women today occupy a world much safer from domestic violence than that of the past, but is it really?
According to data and statistics collected by the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence:
• 85 percent of domestic violence victims are women.
• 83 percent of girls aged 12 to 16 have experienced some form of sexual harassment in public schools.
• Nearly 7.8 million women have been raped by an intimate partner at some point in their lives.
• 11.8 percent of new HIV infections among women more than 20 years old during the previous year were attributed to intimate partner violence.
• Intimate partner violence accounts for between 40 and 70 percent of female murder victims.
These numbers are not surprising when we survey the culture boys are born into in America – one of misogyny, objectification and hyper-sexualization of women’s bodies for male-dominated financial enrichment. We witness this systematic devaluing of women in politics (see Sarah Palin), news media (see Fox news female anchors), and entertainment (See Popular music, professional sports, Hollywood movies and adult film industry). It is as American as firecrackers on the fourth of July.
Men rarely take time to pause and assess the damage done and how they contribute to it. Could this be why some men chose to decry the so-called domestic violence double standard rather than denounce Ray Rice for left hooking his wife in the face? Tortured “fairness” arguments fall flat when we take another look at the data which indicates men overwhelmingly commit acts of domestic violence against women, not the other way around. Could this be because men possess male privilege in a sexist world and are naturally stronger than women? I think so. It is a moral frailty for the strong to prey on the weak.
There exist no class of citizens who occupy a weaker position in society than that of a child, yet, corporal punishment (infliction of physical pain upon a person’s body as punishment for a crime or infraction) of children is legal in every state. Twenty states still allow corporal punishment in schools.
Adrian Peterson, like many parents, continue to spank, whip, beat, whatever you wish to call it, their children despite mountains of research indicating the harm it causes. The fact that America, in 2014, still allows parents to legally abuse their children, while at the same time will prosecute dog owners for fighting pit bulls, illustrates a nation’s upside-down values.
According to Safe Help, a child abuse advocacy group, a case of child abuse is reported every ten seconds, and more than four children die every day as a result of child abuse. I can hear some people shouting already that these statistics only reflect the “real” cases of abuse not the “good” kind of spanking that was “done in love” by their parents, and their parents before them. Yeah…right.
If we are honest, we will admit that those bruises, welts, and cuts caused many of us to fear our parents, not love them more; made us reticent to question authority even when that authority was wrong. For many of us these “spankings’’ resulted in increased anxiety and transformed our personalities in significant ways – often negative. The brutality inflicted upon us by those we trusted the most altered how we chose to trust others the rest of our lives.
If the best argument for whipping a child is that the same was done to you, we have immeasurably failed our children. When children witness men abuse the women in their lives, another misogynist, abuser, and tyrant is birthed.
In 1993 hip-hop recording artist Tupac Shakur penned a warning within his song “Keep Ya Head Up,” which cautioned his listeners about the consequences of victimizing and abandoning women, and the devastating generational effects this abuse has on children:
“And since we all came from a woman
Got our name from a woman and our game from a woman
I wonder why we take from our women
Why we rape our women, do we hate our women?
I think it’s time to kill for our women
Time to heal our women, be real to our women
And if we don’t we’ll have a race of babies
That will hate the ladies, that make the babies…”
Sadly, I think we’ve confirmed Mr. Shakur’s worst fears.