Congrats to you both on quitting but your reasons should have been more like those proffered by Leaper in Post 107. The institution is the real problem.
Wow. I am not sure if you are being purposefully dense here, but I am amazed at your take on this. I apologize in advance if I am misreading your post. Can I ask if you are a Ravens fan?
First of all, to say that they need therapy, not jail is, IMO, just not getting this. Watch the video again. That is a perfect example of assault. If that ISN’T assault, what in your mind is? And if it IS assault, he should be in jail. If, for example, Rice pulled a gun and shot her in the foot, and Janay still didn’t want to press charges, is your attitude the same? There are times when the legal system decides that an action warrants investigation, charges, and/or prison time/punishment. By your way of thinking, it is up to the abused person whether or not the State pursues charges. So, if he shoots her and then says, “this is between us, no one else.” Would you let that slide?
If Rice wasn’t a pro football player, he would have been thrown into jail after that video was viewed. He went to Rutgers, right? And this happened in AC, New Jersey? Who is to say that the prosecutor isn’t a Rutgers fan, or a Ravens fan? It is possible, given the proximity. I am sure there are going to be investigations into this whole matter and how it was handled, and why charges weren’t brought in the first place. I will be curious to see what, if anything, comes out of it.
I am very interested in hearing a lucid explanation as to why AC police or DA didn’t seek to press charges. I have not heard a real explanation yet.
Also, i have to ask this… If you haven’t seen the video, please don’t comment on what happened. To say that SHE spit on HIM is a gross distortion. I don’t see that at all. To me, it appears by his head movement and her reaction, he spits on her TWICE. once at the very beginning of the video, and once in the elevator, before the big punch. I have looked and have not seen any indication that she spit at Rice. If she did, I would like to be directed to where you see it, so I can revisit the clip.
You discussed “the puzzlement over the fact that many choose to stay with the abusers, and the need to attribute it to supposed victim complexes and other dubious motivations” (your words), implying that there are motivations for a victim to stay with her abuser that are not “dubious”. What non-dubious motivations are there for a victim of abuse to stay with her spouse?
Nope. The NFL does not reward violence and aggression against domestic partners anymore than a demolition company rewards blowing up someone else’s building.
Reread what I posted.
"True, but the corporation I work for does not encourage and reward violence and aggression as a part of my job. The NFL does.
The NFL rewards violence and aggression as a part the job of being an NFL player. Imagine my lack of shock when I see that behavior spill out into the real world.
In part of Ray Rice’s world, he was trained. encouraged, rewarded, and applauded for being tough, physical, violent, and aggressive. Is it really so much of a stretch to see a connection when he responds to domestic situation with violence and aggression?
I had some (ahem) very tense (ahem) moments with the ex-wife. Ya know what I never did? Never once. Not even close. If that makes me “holier-than-thou”, then fuck yes, I am.
Seriously? You can’t think of one? What a world you must live in.
Nope… which ones can you think of?
What’s this?
You claimed I implied “that the fact that she chose to marry her abuser somehow sheds light, or complicates in any way, an analysis of this confrontation”, and when I point out that I’ve implied nothing of the sort you just glibly move on to unrelated questions? Can you somehow tie this in to your earlier claim, or do you just like staying on the offensive?
[FWIW, one obvious non-dubious reason a victim might stay with her abuser is that on the whole, the entirety of the relationship considered, she thinks she’s better off with him than without him. But that wasn’t what I was talking about here. What I was talking about here was that she might feel that she had some degree of control over the abuse, as was apparently the case here. FWIW. I’m not sure I’m up for a conversation about it with you, in light of the above.]
:rolleyes:
Maybe he should be in jail, maybe not. That’s a broader debate. Whatever that result it has nothing at all to do with the NFL. The US has the highest incarceration rate in the world and we lock people up out of pure reflex. This isn’t a successful strategy. In my view prison should be primarily used to separate dangerous people from the rest of society. It’s a complex issue and there is a use for it as a deterrent and punitive measure that can be decided on a case-by-case basis. But, for me, it seems very unlikely that Ray Rice is a threat to start punching random people and that this was a loaded, emotional situation. He might punch his wife again and they need to find a way to prevent that, but jail is a heavy handed, socially expensive mechanism for that. The only obvious benefit from locking him up is silencing those in the mob screaming for his head and that’s a shitty reason.
Did I ever say anything like that?
This is 100% not true. In fact, that he’s a public figure probably increases the likelihood of prosecution by several orders of magnitude. People get punched hundreds of thousands of times a day in this country.
Dude, you have some serious issues with sports. You’re bringing a lot of baggage to this debate.
That’s a hell of a lot more relevant debate than attacking his wife, the Ravens, the NFL or the fans.
You seem to think the debate is about spitting…it’s not.
The two things seem to be very obviously related to me – they were in the same post I criticized, both about victims who stay with their abusers.
This strikes me as pretty dubious, and ‘Stockholm syndrom-y’.
She may have felt this, but this also strikes me as a pretty dubious reason – many victims think ‘if they just behave a certain way, they can avoid the abuse’, but this is a dubious belief.
You mean to actually have your posts picked apart and challenged?
What of it?
Nothing to do with it. Possibly you don’t know what the Stockholm Syndrome is and are glomming on to a useful term.
This is illogical.
No, to have them distorted. Possibly you have a hard time discerning the difference between these two, which would explain a lot, frankly.
That’s how I tied it to my earlier criticism – they were about the same thing.
Possibly I made a mistake. My understanding of Stockholm Syndrome is when a victim of kidnapping starts to feel sympathy for her kidnapper. This seemed similar (but certainly not identical) to your suggestion that an abuse victim might believe she’s better off with the abuser than without him.
How so?
I’ll admit to reading into some implication and nuance when I discuss things with people, and using my intuition about what someone is trying to say. Sometimes this fails, but I don’t think it has here. You certainly complain about it a lot!
iiandyiii, what exactly is your position on this whole issue? I don’t want to be a pain but there’s a bunch of stuff I don’t feel like scrolling through.
That it’s wrong to criticize abuse victims, and that whether or not the victim stays with the abuser sheds no light on the abuse itself. If I’m being unclear on something, I’d be happy to try and unscrew myself.
Eh, I don’t know; I mean, I think it’s just as accurate to say he was defending her as it is to say he was criticizing her.
It’s super-complicated, right? On the one hand, we’re talking about an adult who ought to have total agency over her decisions, and there’s a reasonable point of view that says that ought to be the end of it; if she believes there’s more to the story and that she played a role in it then who are we to question it. On the other hand, we have the practical knowledge that battered person’s syndrome is a real thing, and that people in abusive situations will say that they’re making their own decision to stay in the relationship, and then later say they realize they needed to be out but that their ability to accurately evaluate what was going on had basically been rewired.
It is a bit of a black-and-white perspective to say that based on this one thing we know about the relationship between these people, we’re in any sort of position to say what can and what can’t be in her head about it. It’s also true that sometimes no amount of information is going to make it seem reasonable to want to be around somebody that vicious. I don’t know if that warrants calling it criticism of the victim to say that she might be right in her belief that she contributed to the escalation of the violence.
Reading over the past several posts, I can see that I may have presented my views in a confusing manner.
I’ll try and summarize – poster F-P brought up the fact that many victims of abuse stay with their abusers as if this somehow complicates our understanding of events like this. I challenged this point because I think that it’s utterly irrelevant whether the victim excuses her abuser or not – that it’s, unfortunately, very common for victims to do this, and therefore should not be considered in one’s condemnation of the abuser’s actions.
It’s possible if I misunderstood F-P’s intent. If so, I apologize.
Have you actually seen the video?
No-one is arguing that women have a free pass to assault men. Working as a bartender when i was younger, i saw a few women who clearly believed that they could attack men with impunity because they believed the men would not defend themselves or hit back. That sort of thing is unacceptable.
I can envision a possible scenario where a woman attacked a man—even a much stronger man—and he might be justified in defending himself to the extent of landing a knockout punch. As RNATB has said, these are things that need to be evaluated in both legal and moral terms, and sometimes those two sets of criteria don’t match. In some cases, we might conclude that a person’s conduct was morally wrong, but that he had a legal defense, and vice versa.
But, to be honest, i cannot imagine looking at that video from either a moral or (admittedly amateur) legal standpoint and arguing that Ray Rice was in any way justified in his actions. Morally, i take into account the size and strength discrepancy in evaluating his actions, and i would like to think that the legal system would be able to do that too. It might not, but that would be unfortunate.
And anyway, i’m talking about the NFL here. Roger Goodell himself has shown in the past that he doesn’t necessarily need to wait for a legal determination in order to act on behalf of the league. There have been cases where the NFL has punished players who received no legal conviction at all, or where the NFL’s punishment far outweighed the legal penalties.
As for the legal system, if the judge and prosecutor in this case saw that elevator video and still decided that all Ray Rice needed as punishment was a diversionary program, then maybe that needs a pit thread all of its own.
Can you give this schtick a fucking rest, please?
Yes, some Ravens fans are probably still supporting Rice and/or the Ravens and/or the league, but as far as i can tell, both from this message board and from the much broader national discussion, where people come down on this issue is not, for the most part, determined by what football team they support.
That seems reasonable to me.
But one doesn’t follow from the other. Even if your second question was valid it would not follow that the implication in your first email was valid.
No, it has nothing to do with it. Stockholm syndrome is about someone whose entire relationship with another person is being kidnapped by them, and they form a bond of sorts as a result of that relationship. What we’re discussing here is someone who has a broader relationship which contains positive and negative aspects and they decide the positive outweighs the negative.
No need to interpret everything in terms of buzzwords that you may have heard.
It’s illogical to assume that the actions of one person in a relationship have no influence on the actions the another person.
This seems fairly obvious to me, and I don’t anticipate responding further to faux-innocent questions of this sort.
Possibly I discuss things with you too much. Something to think about.
No, that’s not what I said.
I said people’s tendency to see things in black-and-white simplistic terms 1) contributes to shock and horror at statements of the sort the victim made in this case and 2) also contributes to assigning dubious motivations for victims who remain in the relationship.
I did not say anything at all about this particular woman’s decision to stay in the relationship, let alone that this decision complicated our understanding of the event.
This should be obvious to anyone reading the post, but it’s no longer on the same page. It’s post #122.