On Adrian Peterson and Where to Go From Here

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Sep 12, 2014

First, Prevent Child Abuse America has an “A” rating from Charity Watch and three stars from Charity Navigator, with full marks for transparency. You can donate here. I urge you to learn about who they are and what they do so you know exactly what you are supporting. I prefer Children’s Defense Fund, but they are a much broader organization in terms of what they advocate, including work to address children’s poverty and deal with social safety nets.

Additional details pour in on the Adrian Peterson child injury case, and it’s difficult to keep up to date with all of them in one post while also collecting my thoughts or providing information on the mechanics of what the team will do.

 

There are unique aspects to this kind of case that pull it away from some other instances of violence or indiscretions by players, like driving while intoxicated or simply getting high. Often, discussions of domestic violence focus on spousal relationships, and usually opposite-sex relationships where the male partner is exerting power and engaging in acts of violence against a female partner. While this may ignore instances of female-to-male violence, or violence with same-sex (or couples with different gender identities) and cases of emotional or verbal abuse, it all remains distinct from violence against children for a number of reasons.

When discussions about violence against women or other kinds of abuse come up, there are often issues of perspective and privilege that permeate the conversation, and it’s difficult for people to overcome those kinds of barriers in those discussions.

But distinctly, everyone has been a child. Everyone acknowledges that children are one of, if not the singular, most vulnerable groups in society. We take particular responsibility to protect them and care for them. We rightly carve exceptions for them in the law, both as offenders and victims. We also bring to bear our experiences as a child when it comes to discussions of them which means we all have a stake in the conversation as well as some relevant experience.

Adrian Peterson, reportedly and very likely based on his own accounts, disciplined his child with a switch, and the discipline reached the point of serious injury.

I am not particularly interested in the debate over corporal punishment. As a child, I was subject to corporal punishment from my mother and grandparents and occasionally my father. I never regarded it as abuse and I still don’t, but that doesn’t mean I think it’s an appropriate way to raise a child. Regardless, we often see phrases like “I was hit as a kid, and I turned out fine,” or the more direct “It is because I was hit as a kid that I turned out fine.”

I’m not sure that was the case for me, and I do think it probably hindered my development more than helped, but I can’t really know that. There are a lot of people I know that were extremely difficult children that turned into fine adults without the use of corporal punishment. It is difficult to create a universal framework for child-rearing, especially because environment and income play a huge role.

Regardless, the conversation about child discipline, abuse and injury is different than any other conversation regarding domestic violence because everyone has a personal narrative to offer and elucidate with.

In most states, it is not illegal to punish your child with physical discipline or use an instrument in doing so. In every state, there is a threshold before that punishment becomes abuse. The evidence we have would suggest that Peterson definitively crossed that threshold without much leeway in that regard. The pictures are disturbing, and even more disturbing in the context of the purported timeline, with the pictures reportedly taken a week after the incident—those lacerations are what remained after healing.

I think people are fairly certain and unanimous (with some exceptions, as always) about the law’s role in this situation. The confusion about the initial grand jury’s no billing of Adrian’s case is a little off, but everything else is pretty clear in terms of what will happen or need to happen.

In regards to the NFL’s role and the team’s responsibility, there’s a lot more debate. Stephanie Stradley, a lawyer and sports blogger has this to say:

I do not think that the NFL Personal Conduct Policy as it is currently being enforced dents American principles like due process or innocent until proven guilty at all. I think, instead, the Goodell-revised policy is a reflection of those principles already being eroded in our cynical, plugged-in society. People think they know the facts, whether they’ve been accurately reported or not, and make their judgment. The “primacy effect” with how memory works means it is an uphill battle to overcome people’s initial judgments, even when shown facts that challenge their assumptions.

In all cases, high-profile or otherwise, criminal defense lawyers have to spend a good amount of time during voir dire, the pre-trial questioning of jurors, making sure that jurors truly understand innocence until proven guilty and keeping an open mind until they hear all the facts.

I think NFL fans in general tend to like the policy unless it involves one of their star players, and they don’t understand or like the punishment. Lots of “due process” and “innocent before proven guilty” talk thrown around by Steeler fans after the Ben Roethlisberger suspension, for example.

In general, however, people want to throw the book at criminals. Politicians get elected making harsher and harsher sentences against criminals and get thrown out of office if they are perceived as being soft on crime. Most people think that if someone is arrested, it means they are guilty, even if the American system of justice has a presumption against that.

I feel Goodell changed the policy because he knew fans don’t care to have all the facts before making judgment and trusts his own judgment as a substitute for the legal system. In particular, society as a whole resents the rich and famous, and feel that athletes get special treatment (even if they do not). Few have patience for dealing with how long the legal system typically takes to come to a final resolution. The policy arose out of fan frustration that a player like Adam “PacMan” Jones could repeatedly get into trouble, sometimes of a serious nature, and that he wasn’t being punished in what they saw as a timely manner.

. . .

So what Goodell is doing is fairly similar to what most anyone’s employer could do. His policy isn’t changing society but rather a reflection of general American attitudes that only respect due process and innocent before proven guilty when it happens to benefit them.”

I think it’s a solid point and very good analysis, weighted by her role as a lawyer. The NFL does represent in a big way what society does, and I’ve often worried about the “primacy effect” as it relates to player reputations and the types of punishments doled out.

We don’t expect the NFL to be the “law” or be the arbiter of justice, but that doesn’t mean the NFL doesn’t play a role in how things are framed. I think Stradley is half-right when she says the NFL policies are a reflection of society. Like most public commercial enterprises, it is co-productive. The NFL reflects societies values, but also critically has the opportunity to affirm or deny them.

What’s great about that is we see all sorts of things receive the attention that they need to. Though there deserves to be a debate about the NFL’s relationship with Susan G. Komen, it’s clear that they did a good thing by promoting cancer awareness.

Generally speaking, people are OK when the NFL affirms values, like cancer awareness, respect for the military or various charitable works.

The NFL, correctly, adjusts itself to the national psyche. It was very important to the NFL, and people responded, when they postponed games on September 11. When the AFL postponed games in response to the assassination of John F. Kennedy but the NFL didn’t, the NFL took a lot of heat.

National tragedies are not personal tragedies, and we don’t expect the NFL to postpone its games because of an instance of in-home violence. But because of the central role that the NFL has in reflecting and shaping values, we expect them to punish offenders. It’s not because the NFL is a retributive tool for justice. People don’t think six games is an appropriate punishment for domestic violence. People think six games plus a sentencing at a trial by law is an appropriate punishment (and of course, not all people).

The NFL is not a typical employer. A typical employer does not play a significant role in society or in shaping values. You expect your corporate partners to be ethical, but often you do not compel most employers to provide a positive ethical role in asserting morality.

We know that the NFL plays a big role in positively influencing moral outlooks. Sports themselves are a big part of community. I’ve written at length about the role sports plays in our lives. It’s part of our cultural heritage and a big part of how many people grow up. Mark Rosentraub, director at the Center for Urban Policy and the Environment at the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University, wrote in a 1996 article in the Journal of Urban Affairs:

This pervasiveness builds a number of emotional attachments to sports for men and women. Many people can remember where they were when they heard President Kennedy and Dr. King had been killed, what they actually did on Woodstock weekend, what they were doing when Neil Armstrong proclaimed his small step as a giant leap for mankind. Many also can recall with equal clarity where they were when the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team upset the Soviet Union, when the Amazing Mets of 1969 won the pennant, and when the Boston Red Sox collapsed on any of several different occasions. Sports is also a frequent medium for political messages and actions: the US boycott of the Moscow Olympics, the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, the killing of the Israeli athletes at the 1972 games, and the protest of African-American athletes at the 1968 games in Mexico City. While many dislike the idea, sports defines an important part of many people’s lives and of our society’s values.

This was a central part of Rosentraub’s analysis of public funding for stadiums and the stadium debate in general. He did not think stadiums provided positive economic value, but he forwarded a recommendation that there be public financing of stadiums because of the central role sports plays in our culture.

Sports are so central to our culture, that they affect mental health.

It’s not that we become more depressed when our team loses or stave of depression when the team wins—that might seem superficially true, but does not address a lot of the underlying conditions associated with depression. Instead, sports provide social cohesion, sometimes to people who are critically lacking in social contacts or feel excluded for whatever reason. The continued performance of a sports team in a sports event has shockingly strong ties to someone who has become part of that teams’ community.

Simon Kuper wrote about it in Soccernomics:

A statistician who works with Petridou and Papadapoulos, Nick Dessypris, went through the numbers for us. He found that in almost every country for which he had numbers, fewer people kill themselves while the national team is playing in a World Cup or a European championship. Dessypris said the declines were “statistically significant”— unlikely to be due to chance.

Let’s take Germany, the biggest country in our study and one that always qualifies for big tournaments. Petridou and Papadapoulos had obtained monthly suicide data for Germany from 1991 through 1997. A horrifying total of 90,000 people in Germany officially killed themselves in this period. The peak months for suicides were March through June.

But when Germany was playing in a soccer tournament … fewer people died. In the average June with soccer, there were 787 male and 329 female suicides in Germany. A lot more people killed themselves in the Junes … when Germany was not playing soccer. In those soccerfree Junes, there was an average of 817 male and 343 female suicides, or 30 more dead men and 14 more dead women than in the average June with a big tournament. For both German men and women, the June with the fewest suicides in our seven-year sample was 1996, the month that Germany won Euro ’96.

…

[W]hen the country was playing in a soccer tournament, there were fewer suicides. … the lifesaving effect of soccer was sometimes spectacular. Our data for Norway, for instance, run from 1988 through 1995. The most soccer-mad country in Europe played in only one tournament in that period, the World Cup of 1994. The average for the seven Junes when Norway was not playing soccer was 55 suicides. But in June 1994 there were only 36 Norwegian suicides, by far the lowest figure for all eight Junes in our data set. Or take Denmark, for which we have suicide tallies from 1973 through 1996, the longest period for any country. In June 1992 the Danes won the European championship. That month there were 54 male suicides, the fewest for any June since 1978, and 28 female suicides, the joint lowest (with 1991) since the data set began.

Social cohesion is the key phrase here. This is the benefit that almost all fans—potential suicides and the rest of us—get from fandom. Winning or losing is not the point. It is not the case that losing matches makes significant numbers of people so unhappy they jump off apartment buildings. In the US, fans of longtime losers like the Chicago Cubs and the Boston Red Sox baseball teams have not killed themselves more than other people, says Thomas Joiner, author of Why People Die by Suicide, whose own father died by suicide.

Joiner’s article “On Buckeyes, Gators, Super Bowl Sunday, and the Miracle on Ice” makes a strong case that it’s not the winning that counts but the taking part—the shared experience. It is true that he found fewer suicides in Columbus, Ohio, and Gainesville, Florida, in the years when the local college football teams did well. But Joiner argues that this is because fans of winning teams “pull together” more: they wear the team shirt more often, watch games together in bars, talk about the team, and so on, much as happens in a European country while the national team is playing in a World Cup. The “pulling together” saves people from suicide, not the winning. Proof of this is that Joiner found fewer suicides in the US on Super Bowl Sundays than on other Sundays at that time of year, even though few of the Americans who watch the Super Bowl are passionate supporters of either team. What they get from the day’s parties is a sense of belonging. That is the lifesaver.

For better or worse, we have let sports into our lives. There have been a few summary studies on the role sports has in shaping morality and the language of ethics. Associate Justice Antonin Scalia even argued that athletes and how athletes are treated by their participant organizations should play a strong role in youth development, in Veronia School District v. Acton

It seems to us self-evident that a drug problem largely fueled by the “role model”
effect of athletes’ drug use, and particular danger to athletes, is effectively addressed by making sure the athletes do not do drugs.

Aaron Gordon affirmed the power of the NFL in particular in this regard:

That’s fair enough; there’s a lot to be said for the power of cultural trendsetters to lead crusades against societal ills. The NFL in particular has undeniable power in shaping public debate, perhaps just as much as any other American entity. For better or worse, Michael Vick’s cruelty shed tremendous light on the dogfighting underworld. Richie Incognito’s viciousness made workplace bullying a topic of discussion in one of the only developed countries yet to protect employees from such behavior.

The biggest issue is that while specific lessons, usually verbal, are given to children about what constitutes appropriate behavior, children are often quick to acknowledge the letter of the moral lesson, but emulate the moral failings of sports role models at the same time. That is, simply teaching them good things is not enough. It must be such that prominent figures embody those things as well.

There are entire fields devoted to Sports Sociology and the impact that professional sports has on our culture. It’s nearly unassailable that the NFL plays a role in shaping the cultural responses to moral quandaries.

It’s not just children, either. The field of Sports Sociology covers the pervasive societal effects of the moral decisions the NFL makes. Even if everyone reading this is confident that their moral response to discussions of ethics wouldn’t change in regards to the NFL, the general outcome is that it indeed does.

Normalizing harmful behaviors also does more than simply dull or change our reactions to violence. It changes how violence and other unethical behaviors are talked about, whether they are talked about and what are important sticking points in those discussions.

Even for what we think are black and white issues, like child abuse or injury, there are dozens of nuances in the discussion that impact how we treat the fact and act of injury, from how often we discuss it, to how we propose solutions to it, the language we use when discussing it and focusing on responsibility and ethical outcomes.

Besides, why would we be so willing to accept that sports affects our language, our relationships our understanding of geography, our entertainment, our food and the very foundations of our culture if we weren’t willing to accept that it affected our understanding of ethics? People develop visceral reactions to a rival’s colors sometimes without knowing it. It’s strong.

Sports have a strong effect on the framework of the human experience no matter how external to the sports community a particular individual is. Aside from the powerful effect of framing the conversation and “setting the table” so to speak on moral issues, it also conditions outlooks and responses.

I think it is appropriate to ascribe an ethical obligation to a team or an organization for what’s happening here. An important piece of context: it’s clear that amid all the disturbing imagery and harm that Adrian Peterson inflicted upon his child that he didn’t know what he was doing was wrong.

In reading the alleged texts to the mother of his child, he even seemed proud of what he did.

That’s why it’s more important than ever for the NFL and/or the Vikings to act with as much force as they can muster. Not to make a statement about corporal punishment, but injury to a child.

This isn’t the first time an athlete was indicted for actions that were complicated by the fact that they didn’t know their own strength. Over Twitter and other mediums, there are athletes who have praised their parents for harsh discipline and the use of a switch. The NFL needs to make the point that they are not their mothers and that NFL-caliber athletes possess a lot more power and responsibility to use that power than their parents, and that child discipline is simply not as simple as it was for their parents.

It also provides an opportunity for Adrian, who said in the Houston CBS story that he didn’t know how badly he was hurting the child because the child cried out, to learn from his mistakes in a very forceful way. If the law doesn’t come down on him in a big way, it’s imperative that the NFL does.

Michael Vick didn’t know that dogfighting was wrong. His actions were immoral, unethical and disgusting, but conditioned by his surroundings.

Vick said that the dangerous environment in which he was raised in Newport News, Va., contributed to his perception that dogfighting was not a problem.

“You see all this violence and it becomes the norm,” Vick said. “It made it seem like it was right because it was so consistent, night in and night out, day in and day out. You start to believe that there are no consequences behind it.”

Vick said that before he became interested in dogfighting, he had a positive “passion for animals” and cared for a dog with his own money, despite his mother not letting him keep the dog in the house.

“The day I saw that [first] dogfight, something changed,” Vick said. “I didn’t know dogs could react the way they did.”

He added that among his friends and acquaintances growing up, “no one said [dogfighting] wasn’t the right thing to do.”

“You can only go on what you see at such a young age, and I just fell into that trap and started believing what I wanted to believe,” Vick said. “There was never a point at which someone tried to correct me and tell me it was wrong.”

Other players didn’t see it as wrong.

NORFOLK, Va. –  Washington Redskins players Clinton Portis and Chris Samuels defended Michael Vick on Monday by ridiculing the notion that dog fighting is considered a crime.

In an interview with WAVY-TV, Portis said that if the Atlanta Falcons quarterback is charged and convicted of being involved in a dog fighting operation, then authorities would be “putting him behind bars for no reason.”

“I don’t know if he was fighting dogs or not,” Portis said. “But it’s his property; it’s his dogs. If that’s what he wants to do, do it.”

Portis said dog fighting is a “prevalent” part of life.

Portis, a native of Laurel, Mississippi, added: “I know a lot of back roads that got a dog fight if you want to go see it. But they’re not bothering those people because those people are not big names. I’m sure there’s some police got some dogs that are fighting them, some judges got dogs and everything else.”

“Politicians,” added Samuels, who found it hard to keep from giggling while Portis was talking.

“Presidents,” added Portis with a laugh.

The response to this was appropriate. When the NFL suspended him indefinitely without pay, they were asserting the moral wronghood of what he did with full force. The point that he didn’t know what he was doing (as for Peterson) is not to absolve Vick of his moral responsibilities, but to provide a context to prove that there are opportunities to provide lessons to those who don’t know what they did. One way, and a good way, to provide that lesson is not to reduce the moral obligation of a person by acknowledging their environment, but by providing an avenue for them to understand the moral issues behind their actions.

It’s clear that Peterson wasn’t acting with malicious intent. He also did a repulsive thing. Peterson was whipped with a cord as a child, and he responded with surprise at the suggestion that he would—he would never do that. He cares about the kid, but doesn’t seem equipped to carry out what that might mean. It’s clear that even after this became news that Peterson wasn’t exposed to the extent of the damage he caused or can cause.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I don’t think there’s any other reasonable conclusion than what Nick Wright tweeted out.

The NFL has an opportunity, just like with the Vick case, to provide an avenue for affirming an important social value by suspending Adrian Peterson indefinitely while Adrian is released from the Vikings, with the NFL lifting the suspension upon completion of a program and demonstration of genuine change in his approach towards children.

The Michael Vick case ended up creating a positive impact in the efforts to fight dogfighting, though much of that was media coverage. The effect the NFL has had is hard to parse from the media, and there are some complications it has been more good than bad.

I say this knowing that the case hasn’t gone to trial or has been examined in a rigorous sense with lawyers in a court of law. Generally speaking, I would prefer the NFL wait on the legal process. But there are no extenuating circumstances—this is less ambiguous than the initial Ray Rice case—Peterson did what he said he did. The NFL has a powerful investigative arm and they can determine, as independent employers (and again, with a public stakeholdership) what to do.

The arm of the law needs to protect the accused, but that comes in the context of a hegemony of force, a global history of abusing power, rampant discrimination and a real concern about the ability to engage in fundamental rights: the rights to your own space, the rights to speech, the rights to vote, and so on. Prison is so much more a serious consequence of adjudication that we must wait our due, especially because the miscarriage of justice is a greater risk, anyway.

But the NFL’s decision to suspend a player doesn’t come with that heavy burden on someone’s fundamental rights. Though the right to employment is sacrosanct to some, the right of employment to a specific organization never should be.

 

We tend to leave childrearing alone. Though individuals are more than happy to dispense advice to their friends about how to raise kids, there isn’t a societal standard for what it means to raise kids. There are different cultural contexts for raising children, but we tend to learn the most about how to raise children from our parents, if we have them. And often that will mean passing down abusive and injurious behaviors, sometimes well-intentioned and sometimes not.

There’s an opportunity here not just to give Adrian Peterson a personal redemption story, but to emphatically make the point that injuring a child is not only not something to be tolerated, but no small issue.

I’m cheering for his son to recover. I’ll also be cheering for Adrian to learn and revive his reputation and career.

And once again, find a child abuse prevention organization and donate if you can. Prevent Child Abuse America is a good one with a narrow focus that many of you will like. My preferred organization is Children’s Defense Fund. Help any way you can, if you can.