‘We Have to Look at How Tolerant We Are of Violence in Homes’

Janine Jackson interviewed Soraya Chemaly about the Orlando massacre for the June 17, 2016, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

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Janine Jackson: Corporate media seem to be coming off the ISIS angle with regard to the Orlando massacre, but it’s not clear how deeply they will look into the other issues calling out for acknowledgement and discussion, especially those they have a history of minimizing or skimming over. One of those issues is domestic violence, and the echoes between so-called personal violence and that on the order of June 12.

Writer and activist Soraya Chemaly directs the Women’s Media Center Speech Project and is organizer of the Safety and Free Speech Coalition. She wrote on this issue for Rolling Stone magazine. She joins us now by phone from Washington, DC. Welcome to CounterSpin, Soraya Chemaly.

Soraya Chemaly: Thank you so much.

JJ: I’ll start where your article starts: I was not, in fact, surprised to learn that the killer in Orlando had a record of domestic violence. Why wasn’t I?

SC: I think time and time again we’ve seen examples, and I mean we could go through a list, Sandy Hook, the Sydney shootings—I’d forgotten about that, but that had started in domestic violence—the Colorado abortion clinic attack. And so, when you see it happen, and it’s such a distinct pattern in the course of the violence, you sort of wait for the other shoe to drop.

And I think what happens is that most people who maybe aren’t attuned to this particular dimension will see items in the news that are fairly poorly framed, are given headlines that don’t really address perpetration but instead identify victims. It’s hard to then understand the wider context for this idea that it’s violence in homes and tolerance, societal tolerance, for violence in homes, that is the necessary precursor to all of this public violence.

JJ: Connecting dots between coercive and abusive behavior, some of which is considered “normal,” and lethal violence doesn’t mean saying every domestic abuser is a mass murderer in the making, but it’s a value in seeing these echoes, right, in terms of telling us all of the points that we need to engage?

SC: That’s right. I mean, I think a lot of people hear 57 percent, I think it’s 57 percent of mass killings start in acts of intimate partner violence or family violence, whether it’s sons killing parents and siblings or fathers killing entire families or ex-spouses attacking intimates. They leap from that to hearing, instead, all domestic abusers are going to be mass killers, which is obviously just kind of a breakdown in logic.

But I think that as a society, we’re trying to figure out why this is happening, how can we prevent it from happening. And very clearly one thing we have to do, otherwise I really do believe efforts will fail—even though, clearly, better gun control would reduce the number of gun deaths we have—but clearly one of the things we have to do is really take a step back, introspectively, and look at how tolerant we are of violence in homes. Very hands off about it still.

JJ: Right. And of course you don’t want to be framing it as, let’s pay attention to men who commit domestic violence because they might go on to do something else.

SC: No. That’s right.

JJ: The point is what they’re doing now. Well, some people—not enough, maybe, but some—noted that a week before the killings, conservative Christian leader James Dobson had suggested that men take up arms to defend their wives from trans people in bathrooms. He said:

If you are a married man with any gumption, surely you will defend your wife’s privacy and security…. If this had happened a hundred years ago, someone might have been shot. Where is today’s manhood?

Well, there’s a line between that and killing queer people in a club, and it doesn’t pass through Islam.

SC: Right.

JJ: At the same time, Dobson said, Barack Obama is “a tyrant, he is determined to change the way males and females relate to one another.” And I think that gets at something that you wrote about as well.

SC: What we’re looking at here is this clash of some very, very fundamental beliefs about gender roles and gender identity. And there simply are people who, for whatever reasons—psychological, emotional, financial—they really believe in binary gender roles, rigid gender roles; and changes in the culture that destabilize that belief are highly threatening. So that’s why public bathrooms are such a flashpoint. I mean, the point is that women and children are much, much, much, much, much more vulnerable in their own homes and in places of worship to sexual assault than anybody is in a public bathroom. I mean, that’s just clear, factually, on the basis of what we know. So the public bathroom flashpoint is more symbolic of the fear that people have about those cultural changes.

And in this shooting, you know, we really don’t know enough about the man as an individual in terms of sexual shame or sexual practices, but we do know is that he was extremely abusive to his first wife. He treated her like a piece of property. He held her hostage, he violently assaulted her and he thought that was his right. And in point of fact he wasn’t really challenged in that ultimately because, while she was removed from the home by her family, the family, for a wide variety of reasons, as families often do, don’t want to criminalize the person.

And so there ends up being, for lack of a better way of putting it, a kind of hermeneutic void in public understanding, because we are so silent, so shamed by what is happening in homes that we cannot construct the language or the public policy to make sense of it and to then prevent it.

JJ: And with that is an inability to collect data, I heard you say on Democracy Now!, to collect the kind of data that would make it a coherent issue so we could see the scope of —

SC: Absolutely.

JJ: Right. Well, I remember in 2014, a man came to New York City and killed two police officers, and the media were like, basically, oh, right, and before he shot his girlfriend. You know, it was very clearly segregated, it was not of a piece in the story.

SC: No. It’s like incidental. Oh, by the way.

JJ: You know, it was like what happened before he was violent.

SC: Yes.

JJ: Stopping doing that would be good. Stopping saying that people had “no history of violence,” when they have records of domestic violence. What else would you ask for from media in terms of this issue?

Soraya Chemaly: “We’re not asking the right questions, so we cannot end up with the right headlines.”

SC: Well, I’d like media to diversify its own management. Because as long as we have distinctly not-diverse management and ownership of media, we will continue to have these kind of epistemologically skewed understandings of the world. We’re not asking the right questions, so we cannot end up with the right headlines or the right counter-narrative. And that connection is, I think, also fairly elusive. I mean, it’s hard for media to critique itself, right? I mean, the reason that we don’t have a good understanding of domestic violence and sexual violence and the role that those play in persistent misogyny and racism is, frankly, because we don’t have a very diverse media. And so people tell stories that tend to reflect their own experiences, or that they understand, and as a result of that, you just don’t see these stories in dynamic profusion.

JJ: Right. And you sometimes wonder why some stories do rise to the surface. The Stanford rapist, for example: You feel grateful for the opportunity to shine a light on certain things, but part of you says, you know this happens every day, right?

SC: Right.

JJ: But for media, it’s almost as though the everydayness of a problem means it gets less attention.

SC: It’s interesting. I actually just this morning published a piece about why the Stanford story became viral.

JJ: Uh-huh.

SC: What was that? Because it is something that happens absolutely every day, and there are some other really horrific stories that are extremely similar, like the Vanderbilt gang rape case last year, that didn’t raise any public alarms.

And what I think is interesting about the Stanford case is that it brought together the Title IX movement and the Black Lives Matter in a very graphic way. I mean, Brock Turner’s face really became a graphic symbol of those two issues coming together in their mutual critique of fraternal white male supremacy. And it just happened to be at this moment of time that those two forms of entitlement, which are often exercised in rape, came together.

JJ: And people were able to see it for the opportunity to look at those issues and to not look away, I think, which was what was so gratifying. And maybe it was social media much more so than media media.

SC: Oh, I believe that to be the case. Because what you saw was mass social media movement, right? There were petitions. The judge was just removed from a case yesterday that involved an unconscious woman and a male nurse. There’s no doubt to me that the grassroots activism of both of those movements was largely enabled because of the power of this media; [that] is what is creating these challenges.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Soraya Chemaly of Women’s Media Center. You can find her piece “In Orlando, As Usual, Domestic Violence Was Ignored Red Flag” on RollingStone.com. Soraya Chemaly, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

SC: Thank you so much for having me today.

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