A societal mirror and a force for change

Abstract

Domestic violence is not limited to the National Football League (NFL). Other professional sports leagues and university athletic departments often have players and sometimes coaches accused, arrested, charged, and/or convicted of the crime. That domestic violence is often filtered through a discussion about the players of the NFL as perpetrators of that violence is unsurprising given the racialized way our culture frames crime. What the NFL said in 1996 about potentially stereotyping their mostly-black players as criminals by focusing on a societal-wide issue like domestic violence through the specific lens of the NFL was a fair concern. There is one more, important complicating factor. What is best for our culture at large or even a specific community cannot trump what is best for individual victims, which makes solving the issue of domestic violence specifically with NFL players very difficult. There are no easy answers when it comes to the NFL and domestic violence committed by players off the field.