Last week the popular gossip site TMZ.com capped off two weeks of baseless, sensational conjecture and assumptions by publishing a photograph of pop star Rihanna's bruised and bloody face following an alleged attack by R&B artist Chris Brown.
The Los Angeles police department has been tight-lipped since the initial reports that Brown had been arrested on the night of the Grammy awards, the biggest night of the American music recording industry. In the absence of any credible information, people made up their own, relying on what appears to be widely held myths about domestic violence.
Because Rihanna and Brown are celebrities, we've wasted no time turning the entire case into an exploitive mockery resembling a sporting match where people declare allegiances based on which artist they've downloaded most onto their iPods – Team Chris v Team Rihanna. Some went as far as to design their own T-shirts declaring: "Rihanna deserved it." YouTube parodies are already cropping up.
Some of the discussions make you wonder if all of the public-education funding in the world will be able to combat this massive display of collective ignorance and lack of compassion.
If there is a silver lining to the dark cloud of delusion that has been gathering in mainstream media and online, it's that now we have definitive proof of what people don't know.
Major media outlets spent days trying to ponder what possibly could have "caused" Brown to allegedly attack Rihanna. After all, he had such a "clean cut", "squeaky clean" image. The most egregious media platforms crossed the line from victim blaming right into victim defaming, with music network MTV leading the way. With one hand they published rumours that the provocation of the attack was a communicable disease and on the other hand they ran a television special on dating violence and lamented that some of their female posters appear to be blaming Rihanna for the attack: "Based on comments MTV News has received on the incident, a surprising number of people – some of whom are apparently female, although screen names often aren't gender-specific – are blaming Rihanna for the alleged incident."
Since everyone is engaged in drawing conclusions without any supportive facts, here are a few of my own.
Its a myth that a man can be too clean cut to be violent and if he did get violent some external force (ie Rihanna) must have triggered it. Not every act of violence is based on an uncontrollable impulse, nor is abusing women necessarily an aberration. Anyone can be a batterer. There isn't a profile for how a batterer looks. Domestic violence cuts across all races, classes, and socio economic background. You can't look at someone and determine whether or not they are abusive.
It is a myth that a woman is responsible for her own beating. Experts attribute battering to internal psychological struggles within the batterer. Some batter for power or control. Some batter as a result of alcohol or drug abuse. Others, because they are modelling behaviour they learned as children. Some batter, ironically, because they are dependent on their victim. The reasons vary, but none are an excuse.
It is a myth that any physical damage short of death is inconsequential. Anytime a human being touches another without their permission, it matters. When they leave behind bloodied, swollen lips, bruises and knots indicating blows to the head, that's serious. Each year women in the US experience 4.8 million physical assaults and rapes from their partners (pdf).
While both men and women can be the victims of intimate partner violence, generally speaking, men and women are not equally matched in a physical confrontation. Irrespective of who initiates the violence, women are seven to 10 times more likely to be injured. Of the 1,500 people who were killed in the US by their partners in 2004, 75% of the victims were women.
This is also the point where I am supposed to tell you that according to the Centres for Disease Control, one in five high school girls in the US reports being the victim of dating violence. As a result of this violence, teens are more likely to be injured, go to the hospital and engage in risky behaviour such and drinking, drug use and suicide that lead to teen pregnancies and STDs.
Rattling off a string of statistics is useful when attempting to obtain funding or legislation, but not necessarily compelling when battling attitudes about violence in our culture. As irritating as I may find the coverage and the comments, they are instructive because they may help advocates sharpen their focus.
People have the right to wallow in their own ignorance, but those acting on the erroneous belief that they are entitled to brutalise the body of another human being for whatever reason should be punished. While we wait for the effort aimed at education and prevention to take root, we still have to rely on the law for protection. Individual value systems vary when it comes to physically attacking another human being, but the laws in most states do not. Discussions are necessary, but so are prosecutions.
