The story: An abusive dad (took parenting classes after assaulting one of his children a few years ago) kills himself and his five children after learning his wife (the children’s mother), who fled several days before, is with another man.

The headline*: “Breakup Ignited Dad’s Deadly Rage”

The definition: Ignite: To set afire; to set in motion

The lesson: A man rapes a woman; the woman “is raped.” A man kills five children and blames a woman, the woman “ignites” the man’s actions. Her actions set him off; his actions were prompted, involuntary.

Or, as Shakespeare’s Sister put it, “Yep—Mom did it.”

*from the Seattle Times, where most commenters are blaming the woman for a) being a slut (“I hope you had a good time) or b) fleeing (she “obviously cared for herself only and her comforts”)

64 replies on “Passive Voice, Active Voice”

  2. The Times headline implies that the killings were incited by someone not actually threatening the life of the suspected killer at the time the murders were commited, which is about the only justification I can think of for pointing to another’s action as having any role in what the killer did in this situation.

    I agree, the headline blames one of the victims.

  3. Yeah, the Times headline really needs to be rewritten, especially because so much of the coverage of this crime is slanted. I just listened to the news story on KOMO 4. They show footage of the mother talking to the press, saying she wasn’t having an affair, talking about the situation, encouraging women who are abused to leave their spouses. Then the reporter ends the story with “the sheriff’s department stands by its claim that she was having an affair” or somesuch. SERIOUSLY? That’s what the sheriff’s department is busy making a stand on? For real? Give me a fucking break.

    Anyway, you’re right, commenter up above–one can’t convince people to consider the deeper meaning of words when they’re simply unwilling to do so. It’s annoying as hell, though.

  4. Ew. Have you seen her? Go to the Seattle Times home page and check out her photo. She’s no prize. A lifetime diet of high-fructose corn syrup, McDonald’s, GPC menthols, five kids by the age of 30 (starting at 13 – classy!), ciggie in tattooed hand…

  7. You know what, ECB is absolutely right, although the real issue here goes back much further than the tragic culmination of what was obviously a fucked up situaton.

    The real question I would have for this woman is: If this guy was so abusive, such a jerk, so unstable, blah, blah, blah, how the FUCK did you end up married to him AND spawning 5 kids???? that’s not some one-time deal…..

  8. @47:

    “Breakup Ignited Dad’s Deadly Rage” is most certainly not in the passive voice.

    Yeah, it puts the blame squarely on “the breakup.”

  9. As a sensitive, educated male, I completely agree because I recognize this breakdown of privileged linguistic framing from my Women’s Studies class. There is no reason to look for “motives” or “explanations” for actions like this man’s, because doing so just perpetuates the idea that women have no agency, and speak in the passive voice.

  10. If the situation was reversed and an unstable woman killed her children and herself because her husband had been sleeping around and was going to leave her, and the headline read “Breakup ignited mom’s deadly rage”, would you have written this post?

    If the situation were reversed, that wouldn’t be the headline.

  12. @30 Thank you. That is exactly what the headline should have said. I have been angry about the way the headlines blamed the victim for days. The headlines inflamed the misogyny of the worst of the obsessive newspaper commenters.

    That man didn’t kill his children because of a breakup. He did it because he chose to, he did it because he had guns, because he felt he owned his wife, because he was threatened by his perceived loss of control over her sexually and otherwise, because he felt entitled to control her, because he had no tools to deal nonviolently with the jealousy and loss he felt, because he had a depraved indifference to human life, because he was more willing to kill his child hiding in the bathroom than he was to deal with his own ugly worst self. He killed because he was a murderer.

    I know about people like this first hand.

    Many years ago my friend’s boyfriend tried to kill her because he was paranoid that she was cheating on him with another man, and he became enraged and violent. I happened to be there, and because of that simple fact, he tried to kill me too. He failed. Unfortunately, he was never prosecuted for those crimes.

    A few years ago he killed his wife by suffocating her with a plastic bag after she initiated divorce proceedings. In retrospect, he pretty much always had it in him to do something like that.

    Also in the last couple of weeks, there was Robert Stewart who killed eight in the NC nursing home while most likely trying to kill his estranged wife; as well as 73 year old William McTonic who killed his 73 year old wife because he was already murderously upset about the situation of their three week old marriage.

    We treat stories like these murders as if they are aberrations of society, unconnected to each other and random. I don’t think they are. I think they are part of a continuum of violence against women, and a symptom of the unequal power and position, worth and respect as independent beings that women are afforded.

    I think a study needs to be done to examine the root causes of this kind of violence against women and children by their intimates, with an eye towards preventing it by teaching strategies of coping with difficult feelings to everyone starting at an early age– that loss and grief don’t have to be expressed as murderous rage, and even murderous rage doesn’t have to be expressed as murder. Can this be taught, or are we just rampaging apes?

    That man didn’t kill his children because of his wife’s actions. He did it because his fantasy that he was in control of his wife and the family was threatened, and by killing his children he took ultimate control.

    It is an unconscionable tragedy, but it will happen again. The papers need to develop some perspective in their reporting instead of making it worse.

  13. Check this one out:

    http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/new…

    See? That’s “Crazed mom guns down son”
    Not “delusional visions tell mom to kill son,” not “shooting range environment ignites trigger finger,” not “religious fervor causes mother to shoot son,” not “son’s drinking milk straight from the carton drives mother to kill.” It’s just “crazed mom guns down son.”
    When a woman kills, no matter if she’s so mentally ill she’s seeing goblins from hell bouncing around and chattering away all over the place, no one’s to blame but her. When a man kills, the nearest woman, usually his victim, “made” him do it.

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