What the Vikings and the NFL have done is legitimize child abuse [View all]

[cali]

they're sending a big honking message that what AP did to his sons isn't really abuse; it's discipline. hey, he may have gone a little overboard accidentally, but his intent was good. AP is a loving daddy and he wants to raise respectful children. He says that it was similar discipline that was instrumental to his success and that kept him from being a street punk.

By justifying this shit, the NFL is sending a message to its millions of viewers- and its one that will do real damage.

Amy Davidson wrote a great piece in The New Yorker:

Adrian Peterson’s Intent

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The N.F.L. has a personal-conduct policy that was recently updated with supposedly stiffer penalties for domestic violence. When asking whether Adrian Peterson should be allowed to play, it’s worth looking first at the violence he’s openly acknowledged. Peterson’s lawyer said Friday that “Adrian has never hidden from what happened,” as though abusers only operate in dark, furtive places—as though they never brag. What Peterson has acknowledged doing is bad enough. His defense, basically, is that he is a child beater, not a child abuser. In a statement Monday, Peterson, after mentioning that his earlier interviews—notable to the police for their lack of remorse—had been made “without an attorney,” said, “I want everyone to understand how sorry I feel about the hurt I have brought to my child.”

I never imagined being in a position where the world is judging my parenting skills or calling me a child abuser because of the discipline I administered to my son.… I am not a perfect son. I am not a perfect husband. I am not a perfect parent, but I am, without a doubt, not a child abuser. I am someone that disciplined his child and did not intend to cause him any injury.

How, one wonders, could whipping a child with a switch reflect an intent not to cause him “any injury”? Peterson said, “My goal is always to teach my son right from wrong and that’s what I tried to do that day.” It was “discipline.” Peterson was going to improve his son. He was going to make him his idea of good. It just might hurt. How many children have heard a line like that in the moment before a grown-up hit them hard? A statement of this “goal”—you are bad, it is your fault, you made me do this—may be more the rule than the exception. Maybe it’s a seat in front of a video game. Maybe it’s taking an extra container of yogurt from the refrigerator.

Peterson, his lawyer, and his supporters have tried to frame this as a cultural question: To spank or not to spank? They’ve had a certain amount of success. Charles Barkley, the former basketball player, defended Peterson on CBS this past weekend by saying, “Every black parent in the South is going to be in jail under those circumstances.” (The next day, he added, “A lot of my friends who are white and Italian sent me a last night saying, ‘I don’t know why you’re making this a black thing. Our parents spanked the hell out of us, too.’”) When it was suggested to Barkley that there was something else going on—that the boy’s wounds might not be what even he would call normal—he said, “And I think Adrian said ‘I went overboard.’ But as far as being from the South, we all spanked our kids.” (As it happens, Peterson, in a text to the boy’s mother, said, “Never do I go overboard! But all my kids will know, hey daddy has the biggie heart but don’t play no games when it comes to acting right.”)

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http://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/adrian-petersons-intent