The 26-year-old white man named Devin Patrick Kelley who allegedly killed 26 people Sunday as they attended church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, had a history of domestic violence. He was court-martialed on charges he repeatedly hit his wife and attacked his stepson. But after he was kicked out of the Air Force with a bad conduct discharge, officials failed to report his crimes to a federal database, so Kelley had no problem buying the gun he used Sunday.
Soraya Chemaly talking:
we see this pattern over and over again, which is one in which the incidence of domestic violence is minimized or trivialized in some way. It’s not considered serious enough to merit sustained public attention or the allocation of resources so that we can really understand the dynamic better. I mean, we really do know—there’s absolutely no doubt—that the practice of violence within a home, in an intimate setting, with people that theoretically the aggressor loves, opens the floodgates to public violence.
I think that, clearly, within the context of his being confined, with his being convicted—he admitted that he had done this—what he did in his own family was taken seriously. But in the larger context of how domestic violence or other forms of gendered violence are treated in the military, I think there’s a clear issue.
So, even if you think about the language of how he was discharged, he was discharged for bad conduct. And “bad conduct,” honestly, it sounds as though a high school student misbehaved, right? And there are different categories of discharge based on the severity of the crime at hand or the behavior that led to the discharge. If you look at sexual violence in the military, perpetrators of sexual violence are discharged honorably far more often than victims of sexual violence. Victims of sexual violence are much more likely to be discharged involuntarily, to leave the service with a type of discharge that actually is, in some ways, more harmful when they return to civilian life than not. That’s not the case with alleged perpetrators.
And so, there is this bigger question of how we treat private violence, how we treat sexual violence, how we think about gendered violence. And so, the public-private divide that we’re working with does us a real disservice, because we tend to aggregate this private, terroristic violence in a way that seems irrelevant publicly. I mean, if you think of the fact that there are three women a day in the U.S. killed by an intimate partner, if that happened in one incident and we were talking about between 20 and 25 women a week being killed in one incident, people might sit up and pay attention.
– many folks who come out of the military end up then involved in some of these violent incidents afterwards, especially those who were involved with domestic violence while they were attached to the military.
I think there are several things. One is, the military is an organization of hierarchy, authoritarianism, power and control. A lot of those dynamics are implicit in intimate partner violence, right? I mean, the military regulates violence. People have a place. They have a role. They have a reporting structure. And so, the structure of the military itself is kind of a very intense microcosm of a mindset that we see over and over again within homes, within homes especially where there is violence that’s being enacted in these ways.
The second thing is, the military is filled with people who have incredibly stressful jobs, who are traumatized themselves by violence. And until we deal with what that means for those people themselves, I think we really—we can’t really focus in on why they’re acting out in these ways when they leave the service. And so, there are very high incidences of domestic violence, not only in the military, but also in our policing forces. Policing families have high rates of domestic violence. Those numbers are sort of hard to secure, actually, but, in some cases, estimates are that the rates of domestic violence among the police is two to four times the national average. And so, we can’t really separate those cultures of regulated violence from the unregulated violence that we see in the home.
Mariame Kaba talking:
I think part of what we have to talk about is the fact that one of the main tricks, I think, of white supremacy is that it invisiblizes both kind of structures of violence and tries to focus mostly on individual forms of violence, right? So that when we see a situation where, for the most part, the people who are doing these mass killings are mostly young white men, the story gets told that that is a form of violence that’s kind of an acceptable, normal form of violence. When people of color and others commit forms of violence, we are told and taught to see that as somehow outside of the norm of general kinds of violence, and we tend to catastrophize that. And then that also leads to certain kinds of policy responses that are intended to actually continue to oppress the groups that are very much already targeted and oppressed. So, I think that that is a big aspect of this that we have to look at, that you can’t look at these mass shootings without understanding also the ways in which violence is the glue that holds forms of oppression in place. And one of those forms of oppression is white supremacist kinds of forms of violence and oppression.
– Shaun King tweeted, “Don’t worry everybody”—this was on Sunday—”Don’t worry everybody. It was a white man who slaughtered half of the church in Texas. That means everything is just fine. No terrorism.”
And so that’s the point that I’m making. I also think that we are getting too—we get too caught up in trying to label forms of violence as terrorism. You know, we are—that is a state label that has a specific focus and an intent behind it, that leads to catastrophic consequences for the communities that are further criminalized. And so I’d like us to really just do the thing that we need to do, which is that the inability to end violence against women, gender-nonconforming people and children is at the root of these forms of gun violence and mass shootings. Let’s focus on trying to end those other forms of violence, which are themselves forms of mass violence.
I think we’re going to have to look at—be much more creative in the way that we address issues. I tend to be skeptical of gun control, in general. I see it often as a way to criminalize communities of color further. But there are things that people are offering, like disarming domestic abusers, which would mean we have to disarm a lot of people in the military, as you just talked about, and in the police structure, as well. We should also look at personal liability. We should look at the things that could happen at the state level that might, you know, help reduce the number of people who are harmed and killed by gun violence.
Soraya Chemaly talking:
I think that there’s no doubt that we don’t have the political will in Congress to pass even the most basic forms of legislation. And I want to go back to something that Mariame said, which is the way that white supremacy works. And there’s a particular issue with gun control in terms of risk perception and risk assessment. And this is a long-studied phenomenon. In the U.S., it’s called the white male effect. And what it’s related to is the different ways in which people assess risk based on threats to their own identity. And so, when you look at the Congress and the way it approaches questions like climate change, environmental degradation, gun control, abortion, what you end up with in terms of policy is a very distorted sense of what the risks are, what the costs are, that’s directly related to our lack of inclusivity, diversity, and to the very real representation, or misrepresentation, of the population at large, because we have a Congress that is over 80 percent white and over 80 percent male.
And so, 20 years of studies show that conservative white men are outliers in terms of risk assessment, and that the ways in which the rest of us might look at problems in society just are different for them. And so, we need to really realize that the ways in which politically we’re represented matter deeply to the resolution of these problems. And in terms of gun control, it just doesn’t strike this group of people that are leading our country as as dangerous or as risky as it does for the people who are being killed and hurt and penalized on a daily basis. And I think that we need to speak directly to that as a function of who our leaders are and why it’s important to vote and why it’s important to understand that we need much, much, much more robustly diverse representation in all stages of government, so that we don’t have these kinds of outlier risk assessments that are truly debilitating to us as a society.
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Soraya Chemaly
director of the Women’s Media Center Speech Project.
Mariame Kaba
an organizer and educator who works on anti-domestic violence programs.
— source democracynow.org 2017-11-08