Domestic Violence In Sports

Domestic violence is a type of abuse that involves injuring someone; usually a spouse or partner, but it can also be a child or another family member. The abuser uses fear, guilt, shame, and to keep the victim under his or her control. The abuser may use many different types of abuse to assert this power, and the overall framework in which the abuse occurs may follow a pattern called the cycle of violence. There is an estimated four million incidences of domestic violence against women that occur each year, per the Office on Women’s Health (OWH) in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (2000). On average, twenty-four people per minute are victims of rape, physical violence or stalking by an intimate partner in the United States more

From 1989 to 1994 alone, 140 current and former professional or college football players were reported to police for violent acts against women, the Washington Post reported in 1994.

Basically, violence against women in sports is a locker room conversation between players. Many players feel that if it happens off the field and does not affect the game, it is none of the League’s business. The League had effectively kept the domestic violence issue within the confines, however, “between 2006 and 2015, more than fifty domestic violence incidents with at least sixteen resulting in discipline, were reported by the NFL”, so domestic violence was nothing new to the League (Brown 2016). Unfortunately none of these athletes’ names were every made public.

One prominent player accused of domestic violence was publicly shown on video violently attacking a woman in an elevator. In the blink of an eye, domestic violence in the NFL took center stage. The attacker a Baltimore Raven running back named Ray Rice and the victim Janay Palmer, his finance, he was a role model for the team, she his life partner and the mother of his

To everyone the couple could not look happier, however, as the evening went on, they consumed more alcohol.

Alcohol use and abuse are more than likely to be the cause of domestic violence consuming too much will impair an individual ability to think rationally and reaction will be futile as Rice was not aware of the severity of his action, or the argument that erupted, because they both had been drinking heavily prior to the fatal incident in the elevator.

Nevertheless, the elevator incident forever changed the way the League addressed the issue of domestic violence among their players. The owners set up an enforceable personnel conduct policy (Ambrose 2007). That outlines punishable guidelines for players violating the new policy, whether on or off the field of play.

In the case of domestic violence, the owners gave resources for families and victims in the new policy, while before, the blame was on the victims, whose abusers were quietly taken care of by a League which treated women as the cause and not equal