This ever-widening gap between perception and reality has real consequences, say many in the field: it has made it harder to get public acceptance and support for programs and initiatives that law-enforcement officials and women’s advocates believe would help solve the growing problem. And even as these advocates advance their understanding of the problem — which they see as being largely rooted in domestic tensions — they find themselves understood, and heeded, less and less.
If anything, says Mary Lauby, executive director of Jane Doe Inc., “the attention and focus on keeping these practices and services and responses not just fully funded, but fully embraced, is moving backwards.”
Resisting the obvious
Advocates of women’s issues contacted by the Phoenix are hard-pressed to explain why the recent parade of stories about victimized women failed to register as such.
After all, it’s fairly obvious that most of these stories became big news in the first place largely because the victims are women. That’s why Jill Carroll’s abduction stood out among the dozens of reporters kidnapped in Iraq; why Christa Worthington’s murder still fascinates four years later; why the Dorchester murder of Nhaun Nguyen made the front pages, unlike the stories of so many young men shot down in the city.
And yet, we look for other storylines. For example, on October 2, a gunman took a group of girls hostage, killing five of them and injuring five more. You might not remember the incident by that description; the words “Amish school,” however, probably ring a bell.
Not only was that massacre transparently gender-driven, it came just a week after a remarkably similar event in Colorado, in which a gunman abducted and sexually assaulted six girls, killing one. Another school-based shooting, in Essex, Vermont, a month earlier, targeted women, leaving two dead.
As New York Times columnist Bob Herbert later wrote, this obvious targeting would have dominated coverage, had it been based on race or religion — and the incidents would have been labeled, properly, as hate crimes.
Instead, the coverage and discussion focused exclusively on the school-shooting and Amish angles. That was a wake-up call to women’s advocates, says Lauby. “We were stunned, and then livid, waiting for somebody to talk about violence against girls and women,” after the Pennsylvania shooting, she says.
And just then, Kerry Healey unleashed Benjamin LaGuer.
LaGuer became a central figure in the political campaign when Healey charged Deval Patrick with siding with criminals over victims, because at one time he had supported parole and re-examination of the evidence for LaGuer.
Healey launched a television ad showing a woman in a dark parking garage, apparently being stalked, while the voiceover reminded viewers that Patrick described LaGuer as “eloquent” and “thoughtful.” The ad then asked: “Have you ever heard a woman compliment a rapist? Deval Patrick should be ashamed, not governor.”
This stranger-danger stereotype is far from the norm. Yet it seems that violence against women gets our attention only if we think of it as random. We quickly lose interest if a case turns out to be — as most of them are — an act of domestic violence committed by someone known to the victim.
This was one finding in an academic study on media coverage of domestic violence, published this year in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence.
