A cycle of violence: when a woman’s murder is called ‘understandable’
(killing your wife is "understandable". does anybody seriously think there is any real difference between that attitude and the attitude that includes "honour killlings" and the terrible rapes in india? reallllly?? all have one thing in common--women are expendable, not worth any kind of respect or acknowledgment as human beings)
A cycle of violence: when a woman’s murder is called ‘understandable’
Lance Hart killed his wife, but reports implied guilt on her part. Couching male violence against women in terms that absolves the perpetrator of responsibility reinforces a culture that doesn’t value female lives
Spalding shooting victims – Charlotte Hart and mother Claire Hart. Photograph: Facebook
I can think of many words to describe the murder of a woman by her own husband. “Understandable” is not one of them. Yet this is the word that Dr Max Pemberton chose to use when he weighed in on Lance Hart’s recent murder of his wife, Claire, and their 19-year old-daughter, Charlotte. Writing in the Daily Mail, and referencing the recent breakdown of the Harts’ marriage, he said:
Of course, such men are often motivated by anger and a desire to punish the spouse.
But while killing their partner as an act of revenge may be understandable, for a man to kill his children (who are innocent bystanders in a marital breakdown) is a very different matter.
I believe it is often a twisted act of love, as the man crassly believes that the crisis in their lives is so great that the children would be better off dead.
In this short extract, Pemberton describes the “understandable” murder by a man of his own wife as a “very different matter” to his killing his child – an “innocent bystander” – implying guilt on the part of the wife. He seems to suggest that, by ending their marriage, Claire had – at least in part – brought her death upon herself. Later referring to men who kill their own children, he goes on to use the phrase “act of love”, implying that perpetrators of such crimes are overtaken by passion – that such men should not necessarily be held fully responsible.
. . . . .
This is not just a matter of semantics. The way our media reports male violence against women can have a huge impact on societal perceptions of the problem. As Polly Neate, the chief executive of Women’s Aid, says:
The reporting of this case is deeply irresponsible because it minimises the culpability of Lance Hart, portraying him as an equal victim in a tragic case, rather than a man who chose to kill his wife and daughter. The phrase ‘twisted act of love’ is particularly harmful, and shows why journalists need robust training on domestic abuse and homicide. Unless the lives of Claire and Charlotte are considered more important than some of the so-called ‘reasons’ Lance killed them, we will never move to a culture that values women’s lives enough to make them safer.
Perhaps most worryingly of all, media responses such as those described above actively relieve perpetrators of responsibility and, by failing to set such incidents like this within a wider context of male violence, erase the societal problem they represent.
. . . . .
Having completely divorced an incident from the systemic violence men inflict on women and girls, this is an unsurprising conclusion to reach. Which is why such narratives must be challenged, and why they are so dangerous. We must identify examples of male violence as just that: male violence against women. We must hold perpetrators fully accountable, and we must report responsibly on these cases. Only then will we as a society be able to recognise that, in fact, there is so much more that could be done.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/womens-blog/2016/jul/26/womans-murder-called-understandable-lance-hart
= new reply since forum marked as read
I can understand honor killings and "heat of the moment" killings. They're comprehensible. One can make sense out of them, and use them to make sense of the cultural framework in which they not just committed but sanctioned or considered acceptable.
What's happened is that "understand" has acquired new touchy-feely meanings. It's one thing to understand, to comprehend, to grasp the conditions for something and the implications of that same something. It's another to view it sympathetically or tolerantly. Some people have so shifted the meaning of some words that they've blurred really, really useful distinctions--and insist that these distinctions must not exist. Understanding can lead to empathy or sympathy; it isn't entailed. Mercy and sympathy are choices.
I understand Hitler's anti-Jewish fervor. I understand why Stalin put millions in the GULag. That doesn't mean I view them with sympathy or tolerance, and resent any sort of broad-brush that tries to define what I mean.
One cannot, without stripping out meaning from language, simply say that because a word has one meaning in one context it must always have that meaning in all contexts ... Simply because one person says it's evil for it to be polysemous. It's manipulative and not only agrees with the "authorial fallacy" but denies people who use the word in "disapproved" ways agency. I don't get to say what I mean. Somebody else gets to define me for me, like I'm chicken liver waiting to be chopped. This has been a mainstay of a lot of rhetoric for decades, esp. on the left (those who like Whorf-Sapir, Derrida and such approaches to "though"
.
It's the same kind of linguistic bleaching that's making "I feel" into a synonym for "I think." Feel is gut; think is brains. And many intellectual movements don't like the idea of logic and syllogisms because, well, they don't lead to what the emotions say must be true. Similarly, the writer gets the "logic" of what "understand" implies wrong. She's inferring something that's probably not there, because she so feels it has to be there.
If you don't understand a problem then you can't really deal with it. You can call it bad names, you can dehumanize the people involved, you can call for forcible re-education, but that's about all. It's crush or be crushed, complete us-vs-them binary thinking that depersonalizes and dehumanizes some actual people for the Cause. Since there's no understanding, just sympathy for the victim, the "other" has to be viewed holistically.
I suspect the writer does understand why the guy killed his wife. It's harder to understand why he could kill his kids. If there's no understanding, it means that there's nothing to fix. No solution available. What she really wants is for there to be no mercy for certain category of crimes, these and those who commit them must be hated with a pure, white-hot hate and judged as harshly as possible. So she objects to the word used because then she can dupe people into being as hard-nosed in other cases as they should be in this one.
