'Video, or it never happened!' - Ray Rice, and the NFL's horrible, awful message
There is a long, long, history of tragedy around not believing victims of domestic violence. I could pick a million data points, but one should suffice: Here is testimony from a woman named Amy Castillo who couldn't get a protective order against her estranged husband even after he threatened to kill their three children and let her live, so she would have suffer with the loss for the rest of her life. The woman, a pediatrician, couldn't get the order; he drowned the kids. The link, if you can bear to follow it, leads to her testimony before the Maryland state legislature about a bill that would lower the requirements for obtaining protective orders. The legislation was killed.
The National Football League, the Baltimore Ravens, and a whole long list of others are a part of the very same problem. I watched the Ray Rice elevator video today, and I hope you did, too. Nothing surprised me. Let's assume none of those parties saw this footage before today, as they claim. So what? What did they expect to see? What else could possibly have happened on that elevator? Cutting and suspending Ray Rice today is an incredibly hollow act that follows the tragic pattern -- people don't believe victims; they often blame victims. And how do they do this? Because they seem to lack even the smallest capacity for empathy. They apparently can't imagine in their mind's eye what it's like. Without video, it didn't happen. Without video, they can turn away.
And that's the only explanation for today's events. Now, there's video. Now, they can't turn away. As I've already said, that standard is abominable. The message seems clear: commit violence, just do it away from cameras, because then, it won't exist.
Evidence is evidence. People are convicted of crimes every day in America without video or eyewitness testimony. These are judgment calls made by juries and judges. They aren't perfect, naturally. But we would live in a very different society of convictions and lawsuits required video evidence.
We live in an age where an incredible amount of our lives are now on camera -- voluntarily through selfies, and involuntarily through surveillance cameras. This fact makes me scared for victims, because perhaps it will raise expectations that if there's no video, it didn't happen. Those of us in the news business already understand this phenomenon well. Tell people that there's ethnic cleansing going on, and they yawn. Show them a video of a mass grave, and they might be interested.
But there are few cameras in the bedrooms and kitchens and moving cars of America where domestic violence happens. You can get rid of the selfies, and the webcams, but you won't lower the number of domestic violence incidents by one.
What do we need to do? Believe our own eyes and ears when the evidence is there. We need to believe victims. We need to use our brains. There's something really, really wrong with us if a 4-second clip of a punch changes our impression of a story we already should have seen in minds.