CT Teens Make a Small Error in Avenging ‘DV’
My guess is that the teenagers in this story have seen one too many episodes of "The Shield" (MSNBC, 7/2/09). In that seemingly endless series, super tough guy detective Vic Mackey routinely plays the avenging angel, not infrequently for maidens in distress. A guy whose temperature never falls below a slow boil, Mackey burns particularly hot when a woman is injured or threatened. "The Shield" of course is fiction, so Mackey is pretty much always right about who needs his clock cleaned.
Unfortunately, for the teenagers in Torrington, Connecticut, life may imitate art, but sometimes not well enough. A 17-year-old girl heard screams and possibly an impact coming from her mother's bedroom. Concluding that her mother was being beaten by her boyfriend, the girl rounded up some guys who rounded up some baseball bats, broke into the bedroom and whaled away on the boyfriend. The only trouble was that he and the girl's mother were making love, not war. The sounds the girl heard were entirely consensual.
The girls and her friends were arrested and are now charged with assault and conspiracy.
I suppose it had to happen. With the amount of time and resources we devote to domestic violence, there's a heightened sensitivity to it. Literally dozens of articles about DV are written every day. We spend billions of dollars pretending to combat domestic violence. It's a topic for television and radio news; over the years, we've seen and read countless fictional portrayals of DV. Almost without exception, men are portrayed as the perpetrators and women the victims. That contradicts the massive weight of social science on DV that clearly shows that men and women are equally likely to commit and to initiate DV.
But the media don't report the facts about DV, so we can't very well expect the teenagers of Torrington, Connecticut to know those facts. When the whole story about DV is "men bad/women good," can we pretend surprise when a young woman calls on her male friends to play Vic Mackey for a day, and they do?
Thanks to "Fonz" for the heads-up.
|
| More from Robert Franklin, Esq.
Stumble It!
