From the
New Yorker
“To be honest with you, I feel very confident with my actions because I know my intent,” Adrian Peterson told police officers who’d come to find out why the body of his four-year-old son was lacerated with what a doctor judged to be the marks of
two beatings. His comments were in a police report obtained by CBS News in Houston; the incident took place while the child was on a visit to Peterson, a running back for the Minnesota Vikings and one of the best-known players in the N.F.L., at his house in Spring, Texas. The four-year-old, according to Peterson, had pushed another of his children, who was about the same age, from his place in front of a video game. Peterson got a slim branch from a tree, stripped the leaves to make a switch, pulled down the boy’s pants and underwear, and whipped his bare skin. He guessed that he’d struck his son ten or fifteen times but couldn’t be sure, he said, since he didn’t make a practice of counting off the blows when he “whooped” one of his children—something that, he made a point of noting, he did regularly, as if having a routine for the beating of preschoolers was a point in his favor. In photographs taken a good week after the whipping, the welts Peterson left on his son’s legs still look raw. The child, in his own interview with the police, said that his father also hit him in the face and stuffed a fistful of leaves in his mouth.
Last Friday, a grand jury in Texas indicted Peterson—or “true billed” him, in the state’s terminology—on charges of injury to a child. The news came just a few days after the release of a video showing Ray Rice, a running back for the Baltimore Ravens, punching his fiancée (now wife) in the head. The N.F.L. had known for months that he’d knocked her unconscious, and had only suspended him for two games; only the video turned that penalty into an indefinite suspension. For a moment, it seemed like the beating of a four-year-old might be too much for a league that had clearly underplayed the Rice case and too many like it. Peterson was deactivated, and without him the Vikings lost their game Sunday against the Patriots, 30-7. The next day, the team’s owners announced that after “significant thought, discussion and consideration” they were
reinstating Peterson as “a matter of due process,” to “allow the legal system to proceed so we can come to the most effective conclusions and then determine the appropriate course of action.” The plan is for him to be on the field next Sunday.
The N.F.L. has a personal-conduct policy that was recently updated with supposedly stiffer penalties for domestic violence. When asking whether Adrian Peterson should be allowed to play, it’s worth looking first at the violence he’s openly acknowledged. Peterson’s lawyer said Friday that “Adrian has never hidden from what happened,” as though abusers only operate in dark, furtive places—as though they never brag. What Peterson has acknowledged doing is bad enough. His defense, basically, is that he is a child beater, not a child abuser. In a
statement Monday, Peterson, after mentioning that his earlier interviews—notable to the police for their lack of remorse—had been made “without an attorney,” said, “I want everyone to understand how sorry I feel about the hurt I have brought to my child.”
I never imagined being in a position where the world is judging my parenting skills or calling me a child abuser because of the discipline I administered to my son.… I am not a perfect son. I am not a perfect husband. I am not a perfect parent, but I am, without a doubt, not a child abuser. I am someone that disciplined his child and did not intend to cause him any injury.
How, one wonders, could whipping a child with a switch reflect an intent not to cause him “any injury”? Peterson said, “My goal is always to teach my son right from wrong and that’s what I tried to do that day.” It was “discipline.” Peterson was going to improve his son. He was going to make him his idea of good. It just might hurt. How many children have heard a line like that in the moment before a grown-up hit them hard? A statement of this “goal”—you are bad, it is your fault, you made me do this—may be more the rule than the exception. Maybe it’s a seat in front of a video game. Maybe it’s taking
an extra container of yogurt from the refrigerator.
Peterson, his lawyer, and his supporters have tried to frame this as a cultural question: To spank or not to spank? They’ve had a certain amount of success. Charles Barkley, the former basketball player, defended Peterson on CBS this past weekend by saying, “Every black parent in the South is going to be in jail under those circumstances.” (The next day, he
added, “A lot of my friends who are white and Italian sent me a last night saying, ‘I don’t know why you’re making this a black thing. Our parents spanked the hell out of us, too.’”) When it was suggested to Barkley that there was something else going on—that the boy’s wounds might not be what even he would call normal—he said, “And I think Adrian said ‘I went overboard.’
But as far as being from the South, we all spanked our kids.” (As it happens, Peterson, in a text to the boy’s mother, said, “Never do I go overboard! But all my kids will know, hey daddy has the biggie heart but don’t play no games when it comes to acting right.”)
The best, most powerful rejoinder to Barkley on the matter of culture came from Cris Carter, of ESPN, and
should be required viewing. “This goes across all racial lines, ethnicities, religious backgrounds—people believe in disciplining their children,” he said.
My mom did the best job she could do, raising seven kids by herself. But there are thousands of things that I have learned since then that my mom was wrong. It’s the twenty-first century. My mom was wrong. She did the best she could, but she was wrong about some of that stuff she taught me. And I promise my kids I won’t teach that mess to them. You can’t beat a kid to make them do what you want. Thousands of things we have learned since then.
Carter added that the only thing he, as a former Viking, was proud of was that the team had taken Peterson off the field. “Because, you know what, as a man, that’s the only thing we really respect. We don’t respect no women; we don’t respect no kids. The other thing Roger [Goodell] and them do—take him off the field because they respect that.” Now what is there to respect?
This is a valuable, crucial conversation, and Carter is an important voice. It’s not, though, what we’re really talking about in the Peterson case. This preschooler wasn’t paddled or, as Peterson put it to police, “swatted”; he was whipped with a stick and left with open wounds on his body. It’s also not obvious that Peterson has been at all straightforward. (This is something a jury or judge will work out.) In his statement, Peterson said, “I have to live with the fact that when I disciplined my son the way I was disciplined as a child, I caused an injury that I never intended or thought would happen.” This is apparently a reference to the specific wound to the child’s scrotum and a particularly ugly one to the leg. (In another text message, he told the boy’s mother the same thing, adding, “Got him in nuts once I noticed. But I felt so bad, n I’m all tearing that butt up when needed!” He also wrote that she would probably get “mad at me about his leg. I got kinda good wit the tail end of the switch.”) Peterson claimed to the police that he hadn’t noticed that the “tip of the switch and the ridges of the switch were wrapping around” the boy’s thigh.
He saw the switch in his hand hitting his son. When one blindly beats a child, losing track of where all the blows fall, this is, to say the least, a dubious defense. Peterson also, as described
in the CBS report of his interview with the police, “expressed regret that his son did not cry—because then, Peterson said, he would have known that the switch was doing more damage than intended.” Is it the job of the four-year-old, and not the professional football player, to calibrate his pain? And why would a preschooler not cry when he is beaten? It might be because of what has happened when he has been beaten, and when he has cried, before.
