#WhyIStayed/#WhyILeft Movement
In September 2014, a video was released of NFL Baltimore Ravens running back, Ray Rice, assaulting his fiance, Janay Palmer. The incident took place in February of that year and before the video was released, Rice and Palmer got married. Palmer received heavy amounts of victim-blaming on social media for staying with Rice after the assault. To combat this discourse, a domestic abuse survivor, Bev Gooden, created the viral #WhyIStayed, sharing her story of staying in an abusive relationship. This hashtag directly contested the master narrative of domestic violence and highlighted counter-stories of psychological abuse, abuse within LGBTQ relationships, and mostly, the reasons that individuals sometimes do not leave an abusive relationship. [1] Many of the stories shared by survivors gave reasons for staying such as finances, family, self-esteem, shame, and cultural norms. [2] It didn’t take long for this hashtag to go viral along with another parallel hashtag, #WhyILeft. Within two days, both hashtags had more than 100,000 mentions. [3] These hashtags together helped spread awareness and show first-person stories of domestic abuse that differ from the widely thought of master narrative of domestic violence, “a villainous male and a passive, guiltless damsel involved in ongoing, physical abuse until the victim flees her abuser.” [4] This online platform spread awareness of forms of domestic abuse that individuals may be experiencing without understanding that those actions are abuse such as economic and psychological abuse, giving individuals the knowledge and courage to leave their abuser.
Some scholars argue that the problem with the misalignment with definitions and standards between the legal system and those accepted by the majority of individuals as societal definitions is that the criminal justice system treats many different types of offenders in the same way. [5] This is because many states have very broad definitions of domestic violence that include intimate partner violence and family violence. [6] One of the common consequences for an abuser after a domestic violence court case is attendance to a Batterer Intervention Program which many argue does little to address violence that occurs outside the “traditional” partner violence narrative. [7] Because of these systems that constrict the views of domestic violence to that of the master narrative, it is important that legislation keeps up with the changing societal definitions to address the intersectionality of race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and economic status and how these characteristics form experiences that don’t fit the master narrative mold.
Notes
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Danielle Corple, Jasmine R. Linabary, and Cheryl Cooky, “‘He Never Hit Me #WhyIStayed’: Countering the U.S. Domestic Violence Master Narrative,” Journal of Applied Communication Research 49, no. 5 (November 2021): 532–50, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00909882.2021.1942134.
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Corple, Linabary, and Cooky, “‘He Never Hit Me #WhyIStayed.”’
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Corple, Linabary, and Cooky, “‘He Never Hit Me #WhyIStayed.”’
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Corple, Linabary, and Cooky, “‘He Never Hit Me #WhyIStayed.”’
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Briana Barocas, Danielle Emery, and Linda G. Mills, “Changing the Domestic Violence Narrative: Aligning Definitions and Standards,” Journal of Family Violence 31, no. 8 (November 2016): 941–47, http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10896-016-9885-0.
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Barocas, Emery, and Mills, “Changing the Domestic Violence Narrative.”
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Barocas, Emery, and Mills, “Changing the Domestic Violence Narrative.”
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