The video speaks for itself. Ray Rice, NFL football player for the Baltimore Ravens, knocks out his future wife (they marry a month after the incident) while in a casino elevator in Atlantic City. It’s caught on tape. There are consequences. Ray is fired. Is his professional football career over?
In response to this video exposure, Janay, the wife, seemingly blames herself, and the media, but not her husband.
There are many issues here, and many questions. Should the video have been made public? Were the consequences too harsh? Has he really changed (if it happened once, has it happened before, will it happen again)? Is this no one’s business but their own, a completely private matter?
Good question: should this incident have remained private? Well, the incident did happen in a public setting and they are a kind of “public” couple, having a semi-celebrity status. But, more to the point, the fact is—this kind of incident is already of public/community interest by its very nature. Why? We are stakeholders. We have an interest in the welfare of women, children, and men that make up homes within our communities. That is, our communities have an interest in minimizing and preventing spousal abuse as much as we have an interest in reducing and preventing child abuse or bullying in our schools.
That being said, should Ray Rice now be labeled for life as “Ray Rice the wife-beater!”? Is he now human scum, lost forever? Should he be deemed a continual threat to wife and family? In other words, is there no possibility for redemption? Can he change? If so, will he? Can they both change, Janay and Ray? What are their prospects for a long-lasting and happy marriage, given this rocky start? Well, it all depends.
Obviously, if their marriage is to last, they have some hard work ahead of them. Still, it is not impossible. People do change. But transformative change does not just happen, willy-nilly. Not without determined effort, along with the supporting help of a social network of family, friends, and wise counselors or mentors. Change must be sought after with intention and purpose. And, change does not happen by withdrawing into the privacy of one’s own world and keeping close significant others at a distance. In that sense, it is not a private matter. It requires a real community having a real interest in the couple’s success as a couple. Here is where the couple needs to embrace a certain amount of openness and vulnerability in order to constructively move forward.
However, for the most part, we the public, the National viewers of this video, are simply engaging in voyeurism, satisfying our lust for a good scandal, having very little care for what’s best for this couple in seeing that their needs are being met—their true relational, mental, emotional, and spiritual needs. And that is what is at stake here. Do they have a close knit community of supportive and caring people that will help them move toward redemptive transformation? This kind of positive and supportive community purpose or end goal for a troubled couple is what the media often generally ignores in a scandal of this kind. And here too is where we, the National audience, also show a lack of interest. We fail to be positively supportive and redemptively engaged where it really matters.
They do need a certain amount of healthy and respectable privacy. They need space. But they also need to be held accountable by caring stakeholders who are concerned for their welfare, who will hold them accountable in the right way with the right aim in mind—healing and wholeness and transformative renewal.
There are many women who are battered by their husbands in our communities. They need our attention. The men need hope for change—without fearing they will lose everything if they should admit to battering their wives. The women need hope for empowerment and security. Our communities need to provide that hope in tangible ways while avoiding simplistic kneejerk reactionary or condemnatory rejection of victim or offender.
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