Did Janay Palmer Set Back the Cause of Battered Women Everywhere?

Ray Rice and wife Janay

Yes, the horrid video of this young woman being knocked out cold by her soon-to-be-husband, NFL player Ray Rice, is nightmarish.  The casual way the assault was treated by law enforcement and initially by the NFL management was disgraceful.  One would think that it would draw greater attention and possible understanding and support to the cause of battered women.  Maybe it does in some quarters, but not in the cubic centimeters of my brain devoted to such tragedies.

My first reaction was to rage against the Las Vegas hotel, the police, the prosecutors, the NFL.  What parallel universe was I inhabiting without knowing it?  What if I had gotten into a Las Vegas hotel elevator and some crazed maniac had knocked me out cold.  Was the protocol for the security merely to check to see whether I was alive, while the perp shrugged his shoulders and walked away.  Back to the case in point, how did Ray Rice know for certain that I wasn't dead, or permanently brain damaged?

When I listen to his many apologists, I wonder at what point in Aaron Hernandez's psychopathic fall from grace, they stopped apologizing for him??

And now I move on to Janay Palmer Rice. I shouldn't have watched the video. It keeps replaying itself in my head.  I understand the concept of "battered wife syndrome" but some illnesses look better when described on paper then when witnessed in real life. The woman's Instagram message blaming the public and the media for her misfortune but neither her psycho husband or her co-dependent self, taught me something.  I am not as compassionate as I would like to think that I am. Some illnesses are just too complicated and thus require too much time, resources and attention taken away from more solvable social problems.  In cases like that of Janay Palmer's, prosecutors say that the battered spouse often drops charges or refuses to bring them in the first place.  Believe me, I understand the deep emotional need we all feel as married women to weather the storms in our relationship, but not at the cost of our lives, of course.  So if the police are often times putting themselves in a deadly situation, prosecutors are wasting their time, anger management classes don't work, group and other therapy classes cannot get these women to leave the abusive husband, and so on, I would much rather see some of those resources go to early childhood education, or free music lessons for disadvantaged children.  By the time two people are of marriageable age, the psychoses causing these problems are far too deeply embedded for society to do much about them.  I'm not saying that their families, friends and loved ones should give up.  I'm merely saying, that the society as a whole should invest in music, or dance, or drama classes for disadvantaged children and other such programs, to help give them a sense of wholeness before it's too late.