A couple weeks ago I was sitting in my college dining hall, sipping tea and scrolling through Facebook before my morning class, when I stumbled upon any social media user’s worst nightmare. A post titled "College Student Murdered" with a picture of one of my high school friends attached. My heart raced as I frantically waited for the article to load on my tiny screen and there it was- it was not her. Through my feverish scanning, my brain had picked out the deceased woman’s name, and it was not a match. My friend was alive and well. Relieved, yet still curious about the fate of the poor look-alike, I decided to read the rest of her story. My friend’s doppelgänger (let’s call her Amanda) attended a college a few hours from my hometown and had recently broken up with her long distance boyfriend. It was a Sunday morning when he drove to Amanda’s off campus house, found an unlocked door, and killed her and a male student he found with her, while the rest of the house’s residents slept. There were multiple accounts that he had been excessively drinking and talked of suicide in days prior to the murder.
Does that story bore you? "Heartbroken Teen Kills Ex-Girlfriend,” “Husband Beats Cheating Wife to Death,” “Crime of Passion: Man Murders Girlfriend, Then Commits Suicide,” are headlines that I have seen running along the bottoms of TVs and read on the front pages of newspapers for as long as I can remember. But it took an (almost) personal account to open my eyes to how disturbing these headlines and stories really are. The murderer: heartbroken, depressed, suicidal, the victim: cheating, heart-breaker, caused the incident by… you can fill in the rest. I read comment after comment along the lines of “I feel so bad for the new boyfriend, he died and was completely innocent in this whole thing." Excuse me? Was Amanda not innocent? Or are you trying to say that he was more innocent? Would you to walk up to Amanda’s family and tell them what Amanda did to make herself less innocent or somewhat guilty in her own death? As you have probably concluded, these commentators are saying that Amanda somehow contributed to her own death, and the other students, by ending her relationship. That the breakup drove him crazy, that he was depressed over it, that these cases happen all the time, and… why am I bothering to write about it?
Thinking back on why that specific murder case made me so upset, more so than the ones I see in the news every day, I came to a stark realization. Terminating a relationship is not a crime, neither legally nor morally, yet our society has a bad habit of demonizing “heart-breakers” and blaming victims of relationship violence for their situations. The majority of people do not end relationships for the sweet satisfaction of causing someone psychological agony. And even if they did, it is still not a crime. Neither is falling out of love with someone, getting out of an abusive situation, finding someone new, or even cheating. We stopped burning people alive for adultery (which was almost exclusively applied to women, by the way) centuries ago. Divorce is extremely common. Yet I still see rational adults imply that the unfaithful, and even those that break up with partners for socially acceptable reasons, deserve some sort of punishment for their actions. Sure, we harbor bad feelings towards those that cause us emotional distress, but chances are, most of us that have experienced rejection have also rejected others. In our culture of casual dating and marriages made out of mutual love, most go through multiple partners in our lifetimes. And, news flash, no one is entitled to have anyone date them. We tell victims to leave their abusers and start anew, yet we say “maybe that was not such a good idea” if they are killed in the attempt. This attitude blames their actions as the cause of their own murders, instead of addressing why this violence happened and how to prevent it.
This apathetic attitude probably stems from the fact that most victims of relationship violence are women (although society refusing to acknowledge male victims is another huge problem). Our country’s roots in witch-burning and forced female submission now disguise themselves as the poisonous fruits of rape culture and victim blaming. The headlines of "A Crime of Passion" and "Killed Out of Love"are examples of how media coverage conforms and regurgitates this redirection of anger from the perpetrator to the victim, and normalizes the action. Also, the labeling of these “love killers” as emotionally inexperienced, heartbroken, depressed, etc. are a tactic often used by defense attorneys to elicit sympathy from juries and obtain shorter sentences for their clients if they are found guilty. They try to direct any personal misgivings we may have towards our past partners onto the victims in these cases by labeling them as “bad” boyfriends/girlfriends or spouses and therefore worthy of anger and even violence. Also commonplace is the practice of by portraying the accused as mentally unstable or “crazy” in another attempt to push the blame away from the accused onto “love-sickness”. Not only is it another attempt to gain sympathy, but it furthers the stigma surrounding mental illnesses by implying that violence is something that is to be expected from those with emotional or psychological disorders.
This brings me to my final point: people don’t kill their (ex) partners out of love, they kill them because they are jealous, egotistical, and think that those that hurt them deserve to be punished. That being “dumped” is shameful, they have a right to their partner’s bodies, and controlling behavior is normal behavior. We need to do a better job as a society of teaching the importance of consent and mutual respect in relationships to our children, starting at a young age. That just “being a nice guy/ girl” doesn’t entitle you to a boyfriend or girlfriend, and partners are not trophies to be won and kept forever, nor property to be owned. Only then we will see both the number of these cases decrease, as well as the apathy that surrounds them.
Rest in peace Amanda.
