My significant other has really pissed me off. I have told her several times not to do that, but today I am going to teach her a lesson.
I grab my belt or a branch I saw while I was walking into the door. As soon as she sees me she starts to run, but there is no escaping what is coming to her.
I corner her, make her strip and start beating her with my belt while she screams she is sorry and she didn’t mean to do it.
When I am done she is bruised, bleeding from her private area and scarred all over her body. This information gets out to the public and when asked to explain why I beat her my answer is this.
“It is how I was raised, it is how my father and uncles treated their women, it isn’t abuse, it is discipline, you wouldn’t understand that is just how it is, I did nothing wrong, I am know I am good man.”
Would that excuse fly in 2016? Would the NFL and media just dismiss it as “discipline”? Would the legal system just let it go? Would social media not be enraged? Would there not be protests and calls for that athlete to be banned from the league? Would the term abuser and woman beater not be attached to his name for life?
Now imagine that same scenario not playing out against a grown woman but a 4-year-old child? A defenseless 4-year-old child at that. Why is that abuse is justifiable and so readily accepted by not just the NFL, but media and people in general.
Here is how Adrian Peterson’s son described how he was “disciplined” him.
According to police reports, the child told authorities that “Daddy Peterson hit me on my face.” The child also expressed worry that Peterson would punch him in the face if the child reported the incident to authorities. He also said that he had been hit by a belt and that “there are a lot of belts in Daddy’s closet.” He added that Peterson put leaves in his mouth when he was being hit with the switch while his pants were down. The child told his mother that Peterson “likes belts and switches” and “has a whooping room.”
Here is how Greg Hardy’s Ex-girlfriend describe how he beat her.
“I tried to get up, he pushed me,” she said, “then I started fighting back, he threw me into the bathroom, I hit the back of the shower wall and fell into the bathtub where he pulled me out.”
He dragged her out by her hair and picked her up again, she said, throwing her onto the futon, which had several weapons—what she described as “guns from … the Army or … I mean like from video games”—on it. She landed on top of the rifles and then fell onto the floor. In her telling, he stood above her and strangled her with both his hands.
Both are horrible and I wouldn’t wish on anyone and this isn’t about what is worse, it is about essentially dismissing the punching of a 4-year-old in the face and beating him on consistent basis as discipline. Peterson admitted to also beating his other children, these are not isolated incidents, but a pattern of abuse.
Ray Rice has been banned from the NFL for punching his wife in an elevator. Several college football players have been either arrested, suspended or dismissed completely from their teams for singular striking a woman during an altercation.
Adrian Peterson beat his children consistently and it is never spoken about. If you believe that Greg Hardy or any abuser shouldn’t be in the NFL, but you have no issues with Adrian Peterson beating children, that shows you think beating a child isn’t as bad as beating a woman.
Peterson still doesn’t think he has done anything wrong and thinks he is a wonderful father and husband even though he has multiple kids by multiple mothers and while he was engaged got two other women pregnant.
Peterson maintains his innocence. He says he understands why people who saw the police-report photos of the child’s injuries, which were illegally leaked shortly after the indictment, may never forgive him. But he does not believe his actions constituted abuse, and he doesn’t particularly care when others—doctors, social workers, parents across the country—think they do.
I know in my heart there’s not many fathers better than me. I’m that father that the kids run to. I’m the father they want to wrestle and play with.
A child who rarely gets to see his father and that father happens to be a famous football player is always going to be happy to see him. The fact that Peterson thinks it was ok, means it is highly likely to happen again.
If you are an abuser, but you rationalize your abuse, then it will return. This is no different from women in abusive relationships who never leave. The immediate question is “why”, but there is an emotional attachment and possibly fear that is keeping them there. There is no bigger emotional attachment than with your parents so of course the kids want to see him, but I am sure they don’t want to be beat until their scrotum bleeds.
Peterson first reaction to criticism was more violence.
“Cris Carter, he had so much to say,” Peterson says. “In that stage, if I would have seen Cris Carter, I probably would have slapped the taste out of his mouth.”
The black community as a whole should understand better than anyone that what was right in 1960, doesn’t mean it is right in 2016.
But, often times when rationalizing bad behavior that is exactly what we do.
To Peterson, how outsiders view his case is an indication of a cultural misunderstanding. He says he disciplined his child the way his parents disciplined him, which is the way many parents punished their children where he grew up. No one there called it corporal punishment or child abuse. They called it parenting, even good parenting. That’s why Peterson scoffs at the notion of redemption, because he doesn’t think there’s anything for him to redeem. “That’s our culture,”
It was also common culture that domestic and sexual abuse was not widely report within the black community, so the next time someone slaps or rapes a woman, can the culture be used as a defense?
It is cop-out for abusers like Peterson, it is time to wake up and realize that child abuse is a serious issue and should be looked at as seriously as domestic abuse. Honestly, it should be looked at more, because while a woman has the means to contact police and tell her story clearly, small children do not.
I am not suggesting that Adrian Peterson should be banned from the NFL. The NFL is a sport and all the men that play it aren’t honorable. I have no issues with Peterson playing and giving him credit for his exceptional play on the field, but that doesn’t change that he will always be a child abuser in my eyes. Someone who beat and stuff leaves in a 4-year-old’s child mouth just because he was upset with him.
If Greg Hardy and others are monsters, Peterson is the biggest monster of all.