Juxtaposition

Yesterday, I wrote about Ms. McDonald, whose ex-boyfriend is charged with her murder. The article posted on http://www.wral.com/ has the headline: Woman fatally shot outside textile plant; suspect caught.

Today, in the News and Observer (Raleigh, NC), there is an article with the title: Abused Afghan women often wind up in jail, with the subtitle: Women who flee domestic violence are imprisoned as adulterers.

Now, here is the thing. When a woman is murdered in the state of North Carolina and the prime suspect being held without bond is the woman's ex-boyfriend, the headline and the article never use the words domestic violence. The headline doesn't even allow you to see that her past intimate partner is involved. From just reading the headline, one may even think it was a disgruntled employee or something random.

When the News and Observer has an article about women in another country, the words "abused" and "domestic violence" show up, not only in the article, but in the headline. Is this purely accidental or is this a commentary on our community and culture? We will call it abuse and domestic violence when it's in another country, but when it's in the U.S., we suddently start talking about alcohol, drugs, mental illness, a bad childhood, crime of passion, snapped, and jealous rages - just to name a few of the "explanations" that I have seen offered up through the years in articles about a domestic violence homicide. And we have headlines that talk about a "suspect" instead of headlines that say: Ex-boyfriend arrested for murder of girlfriend.


I'd like to believe it's random, but I'm not buying it. Why? Because I have been reading articles about domestic violence since I moved to NC in 1990. It's a pattern. We talk about battered women being caught in cycles and patterns of abuse? Let's take a look at our own pattern of not calling a domestic violence homicide a domestic violence homicide.