Recently a suburban Chicago teacher who was in the middle of cancer treatment was stabbed to death by her husband as she was trying to leave the abusive situation.
Can you imagine a bigger monster than a man who purported to love a woman but instead abused and terrorized her regularly and then snuffed out her life while she was dealing with a terrible illness?
I can't, but apparently my local newspaper and society as a whole can: the real culprit is the woman herself. An article ran about this murder today in the Chicago Tribune. It's a fairly long piece, on page 9 of the front page section. The headline reads:
"Reluctance to Accept Help Called Warning Sign."
The article then begins with a description of a teacher who warned her students about unhealthy and abusive relationships. To me, that sounds like a woman who was trying to spare young people the pain of what she was living with, but I guess I'm just an idiot, because really what was happening was "as students, teachers and friends cope with the news of Cunningham's death, they are wondering how she fell victim to the abuse she warned others about."
Really? This woman is murdered and the community is wondering how she "ended up" in the situation? I'll tell you how: there are men who think that other people are their property, who will terrorize their own family members, significant others, or even strangers into submission. There are men who believe that they are entitled to total control over every aspect of another person's body and life and will use force and intimidation to get that person to submit out of desperation and fear. I want to believe that the community wasn't thinking that at all, that they were thinking things more along the lines of the student who called the murdered woman "a nonblood mom." I hope that it is just the media that chose to frame her death as some kind of avoidable mishap if she had just been enough of a fighter or a badass or whatever trope we throw out there to enable us to blame people for the horrible things that happen to them--especially when other people are at fault for the horrible things.
The article goes on to talk about how fear of involving the police is a "warning sign." It goes on to tell "you" what "you" should do if you "find yourself" in an abusive situation. The whole thing reads to me like a condemnation of women who are abused by men who choose to abuse them. Apparently these women don't do the "right things" to get away; there is no mention of men doing the right things to stop being horrible excuses for human beings. There's nothing about how "you" should not terrorize and abuse people and feel entitled to their personhood. Of course, even if "you" do the right things to get out of a situation (the murdered woman here had only been married to this man for a year and a half and spent the last year fleeing him at various times), you might end up dead (Cunningham had called the police and was picking up her belongings when she was murdered). I found myself hoping that the quotes attributed to a woman representing a domestic violence agency were taken out of context. The paper claims that this representative "insists that the violence will continue if victims stay" though no direct quote is given. So the violence continues because of the actions of the women? How hard is it to reframe that language? "The violence will continue as long as the abusive man continues to believe he has the right to engage in it."
A few pages later, another horrible story is related. This is the unbelievably sad and terrifying case of a man who chose to shoot a 4 year old girl in a road rage incident. He was arguing with her father when he aimed a gun into the backseat and killed the baby in front of her father and sibling. I remember when I was first married and my husband would yell at other drivers. I told him that was a dealbreaker for me, that you had to leave any kind of anger at home on the road, because everyone has a gun and everyone is crazy and even if that's not always true, it's not worth it to be in the one situation when it is. However, it seems obvious that anyone who would do something so horrible as what this man did to this little girl is an undeniable monster and no one is at fault for that but him. The headline for this story reads "Man Confesses to Killing Girl, 4, in Road Rage Case." Note it does not read "Fathers Chooses to Argue with Stranger, Daughter Ends up Dead." Nor should it, because her father is not at fault--the killer alone is at fault for this horrible crime.
Think about it. Think about the kid who killed a bunch of sorority girls because he was pissed women had scorned him (because, I'm assuming, he was violent, delusional, and filled with rage) and the countless websites and commentary from other angry men about how the bitches deserved it, about how this should be a lesson to women to learn to pay attention to men. Think about the video trending on YouTube showing a guy throwing a basketball at a girl and knocking her off her bike because she was "rude" to him when he talked to her. The majority of comments I've seen on that story say that she was "out of line" and "deserved" what she got. I can't even get into the victim blaming of every single rape or sexual assault case portrayed in the media. I am astounded that anyone reports such crimes. Who wants to be the subject of a headline about "Woman Exists in Public Space, Somehow Ends up Brutalized"?
I could say so much more, but I'm tired. So let me help you, Chicago Tribune. Your headline reads:
"Reluctance to Accept Help Called Warning Sign."
Take a page from your own book of headlines about horrible people who do horrible things and change your headline to:
"Abusive Man Stabs Cancer Patient Wife to Death, Kills Self, Two Children Left Motherless."
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