The amount of domestic violence that is reported in the news would make anyone think it’s not an issue when, in fact, it is quite the opposite.
Domestic violence in our society is very prevalent, but only makes the news when accusations against a high-profile person are made or if the incident is so horrific it becomes newsworthy.
Otherwise, domestic violence rarely gets news coverage.
Maybe because we don’t want the daily reminder that our culture is dysfunctional or maybe domestic violence doesn’t get coverage because our society doesn’t really care about ending it.
In America, we treat domestic violence as entertainment value.
We binge watch “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” a show that highlights sexual crimes against women.
We buy and play video games that encourage players to assault, beat up and sometimes rape victims in order to progress in the game.
We love to read news stories about high-profile individuals printed for its newsworthiness, in other words, stories intended to get readers attention.
Nearly half of all women and men in the U.S. have experienced psychological aggression by an intimate partner in their lifetime and according to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, intimate partner violence affects more than 12 million people each year in the U.S.
With numbers such as this coming through the fold and no real effort to acknowledge it in our media or effort to mitigate it by our own government, one could assume domestic violence is not a priority.
The shaming of our most high-profile offenders is just another example that points to domestic violence as entertainment.
Many might remember the recent actions taken by the federal government to investigate vaping products after the reported 1,479 cases of vaping-related injuries across the country.
We have 12 million people affected each year by domestic violence. Where is the public outrage? Where is the government action?
Most of us who have witnessed domestic violence in some way know it has negative implications for victims in our community
but as a society we are rarely asked to confront it. Instead we are encouraged to pretend as though it exists only on our television screens.
News coverage reflects the most pressing issues of a community and based on how often domestic violence gets covered it’s not high on our list of concerns.
Despite intimate partner violence affecting at least one out of every four American families, according to the Spartans for Safety website.
We will not end domestic violence by ignoring the incidents that take place every day all around us or by calling out only the most high profile offenders.
Ending domestic violence means ending the cultural norms we teach our young men; that masculinity means asserting some control.
In that same way we need to stop rewarding passivity as a feminine quality.
These dysfunctional norms have been deeply embedded in our culture and its results are open for all to see.
It has not contributed to a better culture because it ignores the obvious implications it has produced and instead of addressing it, we exploit it as entertainment.
Society is not interested in taking domestic violence seriously.
Taking it seriously means we stop celebrating it on television, in video games and stop minimizing its prevalence by reporting on it
more often.
