You corrected me about part of my criticism in the first message – my second post expanded on the part that I didn’t get wrong (I don’t think).
Okay, I’ll replace my ‘Stockholm syndrom-y’ comment with ‘battered woman syndrom-y’. I probably should have used that in the first place. My larger point is that whether or not she stays with him is totally irrelevant to the discussion of the abuse itself, and so you shouldn’t have brought it up.
As a rule, abuse is about the abuser, and not about the abused. An abuse victim may have some shred of influence, in an ‘act like an obedient silent slave and I might not get abused’ kind of way, but I wasn’t talking in absolute terms like this (and I don’t think it’s useful or reasonable to).
News flash – I use nuance sometimes. Not every statement is absolutely literal.
I enjoy our discussions very much. When I stop enjoying something on the Dope, I just step aside.
Why would an employer have any right to fire an employee unless they were convicted of a crime? Every employee handbook I’ve seen makes it clear being convicted for a serous crime will result in termination. The rules are a bit more vague on getting arrested. If you bail out and report to work on time then it’s really none of the employer’s damn business. Real world there are exceptions for violent crime arrests. It is a bit tricky because technically you’re innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Firing somebody for getting arrested can results in lawsuits.
Why is the NFL supposed to be the Nanny for these players? The NFL teams are simply employers no different than any 9 to 5 office job. Your boss doesn’t snoop into your private life. Or at least he’s not supposed to. Only when you’re convicted is it any of their business.
Was Ray Rice even arrested? If not then the NFL has no standing to do jack shit.
I don’t want my employer or any employer playing God. I owe those people 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. What I do in my private life is none of their business.
Just chiming back in to say that not only do I completely agree with mhendo and andy, but also that Janay’s statement is totally consistent with that of a severely absurd woman who is now in a defensive position and, unfortunately, still loves her POS husband. It’s incredibly sad that some people don’t understand that or extrapolate that out to me women = always right in domestic situations and men = wrong. What horseshit.
I’m not sure what you mean by “in general”. But I’m not denying that what you describes exists or making any claims about its relative prevalence.
But what I am saying is that there are also a lot of women who have a lot more influence on their spouses’ acts (which, again, is not to excuse it) and this plays a part in many women’s thinking in terms of how they view their spouse and the relationship.
[I once read a study of abused women which made this point rather strongly (i.e. the first part - about how women in these relationships acted - I don’t recall if it discussed how this influenced the women’s thinking) but briefly googling failed to turn it up.]
There are reasonable arguments to be made about whether an employer should terminate an employee based on things he or she does while not on the clock.
But your argument about “standing” is completely and utterly wrong.
As has been made clear on this message board about a gajillion times, basically every single employment jurisdiction in the United States is an “at-will” jurisdiction, which means that your employer can fire you for pretty much anything, as long as he or she does not do so based on your membership in a legislatively or constitutionally protected class. Hot tip: “domestic abusers” do not, as far as i’m aware, constitute such a class.
As has already been made clear in this very thread, people have been fired for wearing offensive Halloween costumes, for berating public service employees, and for a whole bunch of other things done outside of work. Hell, we had a thread some years back about someone who was fired for refusing to remove (IIRC) an anti-Bush bumper sticker from his car.
About the only thing that would (legally) prevent the Ravens or the NFL from firing Rice over this incident is if there is something specifically written into the Collective Bargaining Agreement, or his contract, that says they can’t fire someone unless that person is convicted of a crime.
NFL contracts are not guaranteed. They can be terminated for almost any reason. End of story.
I’m not sure I can handle all the irony here. Nannies care for their charges and the NFL is facing a tremendous lawsuit for not just failing to watch out for the health of its players, but actively covering up the truth about the danger its players were facing. That’s one level. Then there’s the fact that nannies take care of children. A lot of them are women, and this is about the NFL and a player and too many fans not caring about a woman. I guess I’m saying this was not the best time for this hoary and condescending metaphor.
None of this is right. Think about endorsements, product placement, the media, and the NFL’s charity programs.
From my understanding (and reading of things like this wiki article and this one), the kind of dynamic you describe is not a factor in the large majority of abusive relationships. In a cursory search, I couldn’t find anything to suggest otherwise.
I think it’s a dangerous precedent for the NFL or any employer to start snooping and playing God. If someone beats up their wife it’s a criminal matter. Let a court decide if the person is guilty and assign an appropriate punishment. To fire somebody before they’ve even had an opportunity to have a court hear the case is a bad idea.
I think it’s dangerous to start making sweeping pronouncements before doing even the most basic background research. Rice was charged with battery and entered a pretrial diversion program. Under New Jersey law, he was not required to enter a plea to enter PTD. His court case is over, and the NFL isn’t “playing god”, it’s protecting its business interests.
The NFL did what they did because of business concerns, not moral or legal concerns. When a big organization gets rid of someone after a scandal, it’s almost always because of business/PR concerns – not moral concerns. That’s not playing God – it’s playing CEO.
There seem to be a kind of “No True Scotsman” aspect to those cites, in that they define abusive relationships as these domineering and violent relationships and try to depict the dynamic based on that premised definition. I’m not sure if these people would claim that every relationship that includes occaisional physical violence is what they refer to as an “abusive relationship”.
Me neither. The problem is that you get so many links to helpline type sources that it would take forever to sift through them to find ones that focused on dynamics of relationships that included physical violence.
Agreed! Whether they avoided the video deliberately or saw it and are lying about it now, their early decision was pretty clearly the wrong business decision.
I’ve never been in or very close to an ongoing abusive relationship (that I know of), but I think it’s fair to describe any relationship that includes even occasional physical violence is an “abusive relationship”.