'The domestic violence gender trap: Hope Solo, Ray Rice and the tired myopia of “women do it too”'

Article here. Excerpt:

'Last week, writers for the New York Times and the Washington Post asked why, as we continue to confront domestic violence and likely coverups within the NFL, “no one” is talking about Hope Solo, a goalkeeper for the women’s national soccer team who was this summer was charged with assaulting her sister and teenage nephew. “When Ray Rice, Greg Hardy and Adrian Peterson were arrested, there were loud calls for those players to be suspended,” Juliet Macur wrote for the Times. “The response to Solo’s case? The sound of crickets — except on game days, when it changes to applause. And that’s inexcusable.”
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We are often asked to divert our attention from the systemic violence that women face with cries of “women do it, too” or “sometimes women lie about abuse.” When this happens, we are asked to take these claims — statistically and historically different — as the same. These are derailing tactics, more often than not. When we read about sexual assault, we are asked again and again to consider the incidence of false allegations. When we learned each new detail of Ray Rice’s brutal assault, we were asked to remember that Janay Rice hit him too. And now that we are using the NFL as the lens through which we can view our culture’s deadly domestic violence problem, we are being accused of unjustly focusing our anger. It seems that the only time people want to talk about the violence that women commit is when we seem to, for once, be talking about the violence that women experience.