NFL sadly slow to act on spousal abuse
Among the items on “5 Things You May Not Know About Ray Rice,” a yearold page that as of Tuesday could still be found on the Baltimore Ravens website, is that Rice is a left-handed pass thrower. That is, his left hand is the dominant one. The one he used to knock out his now-wife, Janay, with a punch in February.
It also mentions that the couple has a young daughter, Rayven, named for the team that released Rice on Monday, seemingly for having been exposed doing what it was already pretty clear he did.
Children are one of the main reasons why a woman chooses to stay with someone who has assaulted her. There are others: fear, money, helplessness and, yes, love. It’s that last one that Janay Rice cites repeatedly in the statement she released through social media on Tuesday, which professes deep “hurt” — not at her husband but at the media for displaying what he did. That the media, she wrote, has “(made) us relive a moment in our lives that we regret everyday is a horrible thing.”
Janay Rice’s statement underlines the difficult nature of domestic violence cases for those in law enforcement. The store owner who gets robbed rarely expresses “regret” for having tempted the thief. And while we can’t know the specifics of the Rice household, we do know that statements such as hers are not uncommon in cases where a partner has been abused.
“It’s a common myth that if a woman stays in the home,” she does so because everything is fine, says Nneka MacGregor, executive director of the Women’s Centre for Social Justice in Toronto. A mother might not want to be responsible for taking a child away from their father. She might fear reprisal. She might genuinely care for her abuser and believe that she can help him overcome his flaws.
Again, whether any of this applies to Janay and Ray Rice, we don’t know. But for those now suggesting that the Ravens and the NFL overreacted in dropping a player whose own victim stands behind him, “it’s important for the public to understand that there are reasons why a woman may not leave,” MacGregor says. “It’s not just because she’s naive.”
But it’s also true that such cases are not as simple as those insisting that Ray Rice should be in prison, full stop, would like to believe. The justice system has generally come to a point where the victim in a domestic violence case cannot put a halt to proceedings just because she wants things to go back to normal. The Toronto Police Service’s procedures for domestic assault, for example, state that “the decision to lay charges shall not be influenced” by factors such as the “victim’s unwillingness to attend court” or “fear of reprisals.”
Nor is New Jersey, where the Rice case took place, Saudi Arabia in this regard. Ray Rice was arrested and charged, and agreed to enter a pre-trial counselling program to avoid a conviction. Such options exist in Canada, too. In Toronto, it’s called the Partner Assault Response program, and it allows certain people to agree to 12 weeks of counselling if approved by the court. Firsttime offenders, as Ray Rice was, are the most likely candidates for such a program.
But that there is so much grey area in domestic abuse cases is precisely why the National Football League’s response here is so appalling. When it metes out punishment to its employees, it operates largely outside the constraints of the legal system and, when the mood suits it, it employs frontier justice with little mercy. In 2011, it spent months investigating a system of “bounties” that New Orleans Saints coaches paid to players for on-field hits, later saying it had reviewed 18,000 pages of documents. Coaches were issued year-long suspensions. In 2007, while investigating whether New England Patriots coaches were videotaping opponents’ signals, it ordered the team to turn over those tapes as part of the probe.
The coach was fined and the team was docked a valuable draft pick. Then there are the countless drug-related suspensions, where players routinely are given suspensions much longer than Rice’s original two games even for use of a drug that has zero performanceenhancing qualities, and even if they use it in the offseason. As another point of comparison, Major League Baseball has gone after its own with zest, employing dozens of investigators and cutting deals with witnesses who have helped bring down some of the biggest stars in the game, such as Alex Rodriguez, in the never-ending steroid scandal.
The NFL, quite plainly, had every opportunity to pursue the Rice incident with some degree of diligence. It was all on tape. That it chose not to says a lot about the seriousness with which it takes domestic violence, as opposed to, say, amphetamines.
What happens all too often in cases like this, MacGregor says, is if an employer is able to “keep it quiet,” then “we seem to think it’s a better investment to keep the silence.”
The fact that in the early going of this story, there was considerable belief that “she must have done something to provoke him,” is still disappointing, MacGregor says. But maybe some good will come of the attention, she allows.
“I’m appalled we are still having this conversation in 2014.”
The NFL, slow to adapt? You don’t say.