‘Make It Stop’ is an interactive film from the Metropolitan Police that allows the viewer to decide how to respond to a domestic violence incident. Would you call 999 or ignore what’s going on next door?
(From New Zealand’s domestic violence support organization Women’s Refuge. H/t: copyranter.)
(AmberWatch Alert. H/t: to the Daily Dish.)
We can see by the image of Lady Gaga above how sex and violence are deeply embedded in the American identity/mythology. Sexuality is portrayed to us as fantastical versions of how we actually experience it in our daily lives. According to popular culture through films, home made videos, television shows, music, and advertising sex is something to be openly displayed and exploited for commercial purposes. As far as violence goes the same can be said in terms of how much of who and what is displayed and exploited becomes a part of our identity and world view through commercialization. The danger is that we too readily accept these fantastical representations of sex and violence as who we are or want to be as individuals and a culture. Read more…
Read the NYT review of this film titled “Where Life Is Cold, and Kin Are Cruel.” Here is an excerpt:
This is not a story about drugs and family life in a particular region of the United States, even though it displays some impressive local knowledge (much of it derived from Mr. Woodrell’s book). It is more deeply about tribal ties and individual choices, about a stubborn girl’s sense of justice coming into sharp and dangerous conflict with deep and intractable customs.
In Ms. Lawrence’s watchful, precise and quietly heroic performance, Ree is like a modern-day Antigone, making ethical demands that are at once entirely coherent and potentially fatal. After his last arrest, her father, Jessup, put up the family property — including the house where his wife and children live — as bond, and if he does not surrender soon, it will all be taken away.
As major animal lovers, dog owners, and investigators of child abuse and domestic violence cases who have also worked with children and adults who have tortured and abused animals the NYT article titled “The Animal-Cruelty Syndrome” resonates with us. Here is an excerpt:
Before 1990, only six states had felony provisions in their animal-cruelty laws; now 46 do. Two years ago, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals formed the nation’s first Mobile Animal Crime Scene Investigation Unit, a rolling veterinary hospital and forensic lab that travels around the country helping traditional law-enforcement agencies follow the evidentiary trails of wounded or dead animals back to their abusers.
In addition to a growing sensitivity to the rights of animals, another significant reason for the increased attention to animal cruelty is a mounting body of evidence about the link between such acts and serious crimes of more narrowly human concern, including illegal firearms possession, drug trafficking, gambling, spousal and child abuse, rape and homicide. In the world of law enforcement — and in the larger world that our laws were designed to shape — animal-cruelty issues were long considered a peripheral concern and the province of local A.S.P.C.A. and Humane Society organizations; offenses as removed and distinct from the work of enforcing the human penal code as we humans have deemed ourselves to be from animals. But that illusory distinction is rapidly fading.
We often note how women, both friends and clients, talk about their confusion regarding men, dating, and finding a life partner. For each of them, how men behave in reality becomes wrapped up in romanticizing about finding the right guy. Many men don’t live up to the myth of being the one because expectations for them are either so unrealistically high or unacceptably low. Men’s expectations and how they perceive and fantasize about women is of course a problem adding to this confusion. Read more…
