The Domestic Violence Awareness Mural: "A Survivor's Journey" (2010) by Joel Bergner
While O.J. Simpson was standing trial for the murder of Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman 21 years ago, it was revealed that he had repeatedly beaten his wife. One incident that landed her in a hospital occurred on
January 1, 1989. Confronting the LAPD officers who were responding to his wife's frantic 911 call, he berated them for attempting to arrest him:
"The police have been out here eight times before, and now you're going to arrest me for this?" Simpson is quoted in one report as yelling to two police officers who were responding to a 911 call. "This is a family matter. Why do you want to make a big deal out of it when we can handle it?"
In January 1989, domestic violence was still being treated as a family matter, of little concern to the police or to society at large. A major result of the murder trial that followed within five years was an increased public awareness of domestic violence as a serious crime. Shortly after the trial, the
Violence Against Women Act was passed through Congress and signed into law by Bill Clinton.
Two years later, in 1996, Congress passed a law preventing domestic batterers from purchasing guns, and by 2008 domestic homicide rates had plummeted 53%, according to the Department of Justice.
In Nicole Brown Simpson's case, knowledge of the abuse she suffered made Americans aware of the fact that sometimes, some men who beat up women end up killing them. Domestic violence was no longer a family matter, but a crime. Please keep reading for a look at how the beating of Janay Palmer by former Baltimore Ravens player Ray Rice has impacted our view of domestic violence in the year since it occurred.
Little more than a year ago, an Atlantic City casino elevator
security tape showing Ray Rice slugging his fiancee was released by TMZ and went viral. One hard hit and she fell to the floor. Another video showed the running back dragging her limp body out of the elevator.
This assault prompted an entirely different reaction than the one committed by Simpson 25 years earlier, according to Charlotte Alter. One year ago in Time, she wrote:
For one thing, this week’s Ray Rice incident is less about raising awareness and more about the public demanding retribution. Experts say the reaction to the elevator beating is much stronger than anything they’ve seen before. “We didn’t see this kind of outrage over when that happened with Chris Brown and Rihanna,” says Katie Ray-Jones, president of the National Domestic Violence Hotline. “Back then, we still heard a lot of comments saying ‘we don’t know what happened in that car,’ and our hotlines were flooded with Chris Brown fans supporting him.”
“The Ray Rice video really gave a face to the issue — we throw a lot of statistics out there in the field about ‘1 in 5 women,’ ‘1 in 7 men,’ but when you see a video like that, you say, ‘Oh my goodness, that is outrageous,'” Ray-Jones says.
The calls for retribution rose to a roar when it was revealed that Rice had been allowed to enter a
pre-trial intervention program (PTI).
Under the terms of PTI, Rice was ordered to take anger management counseling and be supervised for a probationary period of 12 months, court records show. Proof of participation was required by the court. If Rice stayed out of trouble for the 12 months, there would be no trace of the case on his record.
...
Richard Sparaco, a defense attorney practicing for more than 30 years in Atlantic County, said, "I can't say I've ever had a violent crime of this nature accepted into the PTI -- in any county."
According to ESPN's
Outside the Lines, this option was offered to less than 1 percent of domestic violence offenders in New Jersey between 2010 and 2013. New Jersey Senate President Stephen Sweeney said at the time, "If everything was done right and this was acceptable, then we have to change our laws."
It was. They did. The New Jersey Legislature passed a new law in August 2015 that sets up more stringent requirements for domestic abusers to be accepted into the pre-trial intervention program.
The law would treat third-degree offenders in domestic violence cases differently than all other third-degree offenders by taking away the presumption of non-incarceration for a first-time offense, and requiring a guilty plea before a defendant could be accepted into PTI.
"The reason why we're changing that is that the assemblyman and the other sponsors felt that, particularly in domestic-violence related cases, the individual being charged is typically more dangerous to their victims than a typical third-degree crime," said Marshall Spevak, spokesman for co-sponsor Assemblyman Vince Mazzeo. "We are doing this to protect families and protect victims of domestic violence. That's why we're treating this in a different way than a typical third-degree crime."
In May 2015, the
domestic violence charges against Ray Rice were dismissed upon the completion of his year of PTI.
Another big change resulting from the video happened at the National Domestic Violence Hotline’s call center. Operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week, the hotline juggles hundreds of phone calls every day. The calls come from men and women in danger who are seeking a way out. Federal sequestration had put a severe restraint on the ability of the call center to provide all of the help that was needed.
In what may have been a public relations move, Roger Goodell visited the call center just three weeks after the Ray Rice videos were released. The center had experienced an 84 percent increase in calls since the video, and had to leave many calls unanswered. The NFL committed to provide $25 million to the Domestic Violence Hotline over five years, at $5 million a year.
In the three weeks after the NFL pulled out its checkbook, the Hotline added 30 employees. Advocates who had been part-time went full-time, and those who were relief staff got permanent jobs. Forty more people have been hired since, and all but seven of those 70 are advocates.
The most crucial impact may have been on all of those women who had been silent for so long. Janay Palmer was criticized for not only remaining with Ray Rice, but then marrying him. People wondered why any woman would stay with a man who hit her. Domestic abuse survivor Beverly Gooden sent the tweet that would start an avalanche:
I stayed because I thought it would get better. It never got any better. #WhyIStayed
Soon other women were finding their voices and writing, in 140 characters or less, #WhyIStayed. They were joined by those who wrote #WhyILeft. Some of the shame and stigma was washed away in this public acknowledgement of the hidden cost of domestic violence. The conversation became larger and attracted the
attention of a startup that was looking to develop data-driven solutions to domestic violence. They collected the data from the tweets and announced:
...the release of new insights into the impact of domestic violence on women, including why many stay in abusive relationships and why they ultimately leave.
...
Big Mountain Data, which uses advanced analytics and data science to help solve pressing social problems in the fields of domestic violence and family abuse, recognized the importance of this Twitter phenomenon as a turning point in the public conversation on domestic violence. The organization aggregated the activity over the period September 8 to December 1, 2014, to reveal the scale and magnitude of the survivor voices who came forward. The conversation spiked on September 9 with 77,544 tweets in one day. With 85,687 original hashtagged posts and mentions, and nearly 185,794 posts and retweets for #WhyIStayed and 63,883 posts and retweets for #WhyILeft, the results provide a glimpse into the complexity and scale of intimate partner violence.
Click to enlarge
A larger version of the entire graphic can be downloaded
here.
When a professional athlete abuses an intimate partner, it obviously generates a great deal more press coverage than when an unknown person does the same thing. That coverage, and the pressure it can bring to bear on the NFL, can lead to changes in how we view domestic violence and how we respond to it.