Don’t Let Belcher Off the Hook: About 1.3 million women are assaulted by their partner each year.
Don’t Let Belcher Off the Hook : CJR
After NFL player Jovan Belcher killed his girlfriend, Kasandra Perkins, and then himself on Saturday, it seemed the media had one question: Why did he do it?
After all, said the first media reports, Belcher was not a bad guy. Surely, something tipped him over the edge. Something extraordinary must have happened to make Belcher kill his girlfriend and then commit suicide.
Maybe, the media speculated, it was too many concussions. Or perhaps it was steroids. Or stress combined with heavy drinking. Or maybe it was that his girlfriend was moneygrubbing and “lazy,” or that she had made him angry because she was out late the night before at a concert.
This was a guy that people liked and respected, a guy who played well on the field. So something wacky must have happened to make him do this, right?
No. Nothing wacky had to happen. Because this wasn’t extraordinary at all. This wasn’t a man-bites-dog event. This was a man killing his girlfriend. And that sort of domestic violence happens all the time. About 1.3 million women are physically assaulted by their partner each year, and nearly one-third of female homicide victims are killed by an intimate partner, according to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence.