Others

I had been starting to feel kind of isolated in my reaction to the Virginia Tech Shootings.

I don't watch TV except when I am in the coffee counter line at the student bookstore. The past two days I've stood there watching the images of the shooting and the aftermath. This aspect of my reaction is a common grief. In it I know I am far from alone, even if I am the only one blubbering into her hot chocolate.

What feels lonely is the accumulating despair as I read more and more media accounts which unquestioningly repeat the "domestic" violence presumption, which sift through each excruciating detail but leave out any examination of the wider aspects and implications of horrible conclusions from that erroneous assumption, and which in any number of ways offer glimpses directly at the bare veins of misogyny in our social belief systems.

It's rare to get such a public and direct view of them. They are present publicly (oh dear lord see Cat Lady's post on one such sighting) but more often they appear indirectly. Now that I think of it, I suspect a better word might be "misdirectly", e.g. how public misogyny is presented to and received by the masses when can be waved away as "entertainment" or "humor".

When it informed the mistaken belief that the first two murders on the Virginia Tech campus were "domestic" and therefore not the same as what, "real" violence (?), it seemed so clear to me that the misogyny could not have been so easily brushed aside, yet I hadn't seen much evidence that the ever present (and necessary) social critics were looking at it. This was completely missing from the public discourse on this and other school/campus attacks. So I thought. And then I stumbled upon this article at Salon.com:

A handful of bloggers are wondering, just wondering, what would have happened if police had not, accurately or otherwise, labeled that first shooting a "domestic" (or "lovers") dispute. Was that, at least in part, why students weren't warned immediately that there could be a gunman on the loose? Could it be, wonders MojoMom, the kind of "complacency" also apparent in, for example, the Akron Beacon Journal? Her citation: "At first, the shootings seemed like the sort of thing police around the country are called to every day. A domestic dispute in a dorm room, something that could happen on a big college campus without every student feeling touched by it. Certainly not the beginning of the worst shooting rampage in modern U.S. history."

"This sense of complacency over domestic violence adds to the tragedy, and possibly the outcome," writes MojoMom. "Someone shoots two people in cold blood and leaves the scene. In what universe is it okay to minimize the seriousness of the scenario because it [allegedly] began as a domestic dispute?" (Early reports suggest the police had reason to believe the killer had left the campus.)

Update: More others
Just A Domestic Dispute (The Fat Lady Sings)
The Policy Implications (Tapped)
33 Dead Because It Started as "Just" a Domestic Case (Wassup!)
Virginia Tech Assumed What? (Fibrodenial)
Well, Damn (A View from a Broad)
Virginia Tech Shooting (It Makes for Light Bathroom Reading, Anyway)
April 16 (Gwappa's LJ)