Saying No to Abusive Behavior

“There is no excuse for it. I was wrong.” So said former Rutgers basketball coach Mike Rice in his apology speech before cameras.

Most people who have watched the video of Rice abusing his players agree that he was wrong. He was wrong to push players around. He was wrong to throw basketballs at them. He was wrong to use homophobic slurs.

Not everyone agrees. At least one commentator on Fox took the stance that coaches use such physical and emotional violence to toughen up players; no harm was intended or done.

When the Athletic Director, Tim Pernetti, saw the videotape he agreed it was wrong and suspended the coach for three games (pay forfeited) and fined Rice an additional $50,000. It was a “first offense” and Rice was to receive counseling during his suspension. Implicit in Pernetti’s decision was that Rice’s behavior was not sufficient to warrant terminating his contract.

The reaction of the players recorded on the videotape to Rice’s abuse was telling. They did not act surprised, angered or cowed at the abuse. Why? My assumption is they were inured to it. This was no first time offense, it was habitual behavior.

Once the video went viral the university fired Rice and a couple of days later fired Pernetti. An assistant basketball coach and university lawyer have also resigned.

Why did the public release of the very same video Rutgers was provided in November 2012 now lead to Rice’s termination in April 2013? Apparently only because that’s when the allegations of misconduct became widely known. Pernetti did not immediately indicate upon its release that he had erred in his earlier judgment to suspend rather than terminate Rice. No, he justified his actions.

Which means he too showed insufficient judgment to represent the university and had to go. According to at least one source, one of the Board of Trustees also saw the video in November. If, as has been reported, an outside director requested the president see the video, and the president decided it was not important enough to spend his precious time, the president too should resign. After all, the entire video is only thirty minutes long and the president was quoted as saying, “it took me five minutes” to decide to fire Mr. Rice.

If the Trustee did not continue to work to have Rice terminated; if he stopped when he met the presidential stone wall, he too should resign. I have no clue who else at the university saw the video before its viral release, but if they had any authority over the situation, they should also resign.

As reported in the New York Times, the university’s legal investigation focused on the technical question of whether there was a “hostile working environment.” They concluded it did not meet the legal definition. The problem with asking lawyers a narrow question is that you get a narrow answer.

The highest priority for any school should be the protection of its students. There should be zero tolerance for the kind of behavior demonstrated on the video and zero tolerance for those who cover it up.

~ Jim

Overlooking The Obvious

Many mystery writers include pets in their stories. It adds a cozy element that I like. An author can show their main character’s softer, human side through interactions with a pet. How people treat their pets says a lot about them. Although adding pets occurs frequently in cozies to show the positive slant on human-animal relations, using pets to show cruelty isn’t an often-used device—no, it sure isn’t cozy—and yet I’m amazed that in the real world and in fiction, pet cruelty is overlooked (with the exception of author Sandra Parshall).

Studies have shown that abusive pet owners are more likely to abuse humans. Some studies have shown that those who abuse animals are five times more likely to turn their violence on humans, and the term “abuse” includes murder. Here are a few chilling items listed on PETA's website, which also lists the primary sources for this data. 

·      Albert DeSalvo (the “Boston Strangler”), who killed 13 women, trapped dogs and cats and shot arrows at them through boxes in his youth.

·      Serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer impaled frogs, cats, and dogs’ heads on sticks.

·      Dennis Rader (the BTK killer), who terrorized people in Kansas, wrote in a chronological account of his childhood that he hanged a dog and a cat.

·      During the trial of convicted sniper Lee Boyd Malvo, a psychology professor testified that the teenager, who killed 10 people with a rifle, had “pelted—and probably killed—numerous cats with marbles from a slingshot when he was about 14.

·      High-school killers such as Kip Kinkel in Springfield, Oregon, and Luke Woodham, in Pearl, Mississippi, tortured animals before starting their shooting sprees.

·      Columbine High School students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who shot and killed 12 classmates before turning their guns on themselves, spoke to their classmates about mutilating animals.

“There is a common theme to all of the shootings of recent years,” says Dr. Harold S. Koplewicz, director of the Child Study Center at New York University. “You have a child who has symptoms of aggression toward his peers, an interest in fire, cruelty to animals, social isolation, and many warning signs that the school has ignored.”

We seem to have a predictive tool, one that correlates animal cruelty to human violence, and we aren’t using it. In April 2012, The Animal Welfare Institute released a study showing that although the FBI is aware of the connection between animal cruelty and human violence and has been since the 1970s, documentation and reporting of animal cruelty crimes is lacking. The FBI is working to include animal cruelty reporting as part of the Uniform Crime Reporting Program, but Idaho, North Dakota and South Dakota still do not have felony statutes for animal cruelty as part of their criminal code.

Here are other findings from this report (ca-12fbireportfinal040312_0.pdf):

·      67% of offenders are males

·      83% are white

·      46% of animal cruelty crimes are committed in the home

·      Almost 27% of cases involve subjects between the ages of 25-34

For many, abuses to humans weigh far greater than cruelty to animals. After all, we kill animals everyday to put food on the table. While that maybe true, to overlook a correlation that has been accepted by the FBI for the past 40 years seems shortsighted. After the shooting sprees in the last few months killing many people, we cannot overlook this correlation as a predictive tool, one that could be more valuable than psychiatric analysis.

Have you included animal cruelty as an element in your killer’s profile? As writers, we need to emphasize this correlation in our writing to educate the public. It’s not quirky, it’s not creative, and it’s sure not fun or cozy—it’s reality.

Bullying the Bullies—Two Wrongs Don’t Make a Right

I intended to write this week’s WWK blog about something else, but this takes precedence. I won’t be adding graphics because I can’t think of any that wouldn’t trivialize this situation. 

There’s a disturbing trend involving Goodreads reviewers and authors, and I think it’s something we all need to look at and think about where we stand on it because it’s going to be happening more and more—until sooner or later one of us on Writers Who Kill or one of our blog-reading faithful are going be sucked into the whirlpool.

Warren and I have made joking comments a time or two on this blog about Amazon and Goodreads reviewers who trashed our books because of trivialities such as not liking the cover or the name of the protagonist and then at the end of the review mentioning that they didn’t read the book. To an author, of course, these kinds of reviews feel terrible, sitting out there forever on the internet, but as a professional, you just suck it up and shrug your shoulders. Maybe make a joke on a blog by authors with lots of authors who read it. Notice what Warren and I did not do, however. We did not post hostile or defensive comments on these reviews and get in a fight with the reviewers. We did not link to the reviews to send out our fans to comment and tell them they’re crazy and awful people. Above all, we did not search the internet to find out their real names and personal info (including children, physical location, etc.) and post it to the internet, encouraging our fans to stalk and bully them because we felt bullied by their reviews.

Common sense, right? Common decency, certainly. However, a site has sprung up to do just that. (I won’t post a link to it or any of the supposed GR bullies’ reviews and comment streams because I don’t want to send traffic to either side of this, but if you want to see for yourselves, just Google “Stop the GR Bullies,” and they’ll all pop up.) Their stated mission is to “stop the GR bullies.” What they’re actually doing, however, is bullying the Goodreads bullies. They keep their identities hidden, but of course, what goes around comes around, and soon someone will be posting their personal info on the internet to incite people to go after them.  One woman identified as a GR bully on this site has received threatening phone calls at her home. Hello? Could we have a little sanity here, folks?

This is not to say that some (a tiny percentage, I think) of the reviewers on Goodreads aren’t bullies in some ways. And I’m not talking about the reviewers Warren and I mentioned. Those reviews were bad reviews but not bullying reviews. I’ve seen some nasty, mean, profane, personal-attack-on-the-author reviews on Goodreads. It’s the internet, folks. It often brings out the pathetic teenager in some of us. Responding to bad reviews is simply not good professional behavior. The Amazon and Goodreads sites are sites for readers, not really for authors. They have a right to dislike our books. They even have a right to dislike us. We don’t have a right to “punish” them for not liking us or our work.

As more and more of the review function in publishing moves to the internet, we will see these things more often. It seems to be mostly a problem with self-published authors, though I have read of a couple of experienced, traditionally published authors responding hostilely to bad reviews. One of the self-published authors these Goodread reviewers attacked grew so upset that she swore off writing in a long public post. I felt sorry for her pain as I read the post, but I believe she may have made a good choice.

Writing professionally is a career, a business. As one of my friends on the Jungle Red Writers blog put it, “Writing is not for sissies.” Most of us who’ve been traditionally published (and this includes by the many fine small presses that help keep literature alive in this country) have had our skin toughened by years of form rejections and nasty comments from potential agents and editors. Writing is one of the hardest jobs out there in terms of the emotional punishment we take. Even after we’ve been published, we run the gamut of poor (or no) reviews or lack of sales or our publisher may drop us, often for something over which we have no control, such as their decision to stop publishing the genre or sub-genre in which we write. It happens. 

I know a successful male writer whose once-acclaimed, hardnosed private eye novels suddenly weren’t wanted by publishers. None of them. PIs were out, he was told, and he couldn’t sell under his own name any longer. So he took a woman’s pseudonym and started a very successful cozy mystery series. Now, that’s a professional. Every door slammed in his face. He probably drank, yelled, cussed, whatever his personal reaction to devastating news happened to be. Then, he picked himself up and reinvented himself. Check out the careers of a lot of successful writers, and you’ll find stories like that.  What he didn’t do was take out a contract on the editors who dumped him or send stalkers after them or anything like that.

I think we each need to have a conversation with ourselves to ask, “If some amateur reviewers ganged up on my book or me on Goodreads or somewhere else, how would I handle it?” I think the possibility of people not liking their work or themselves or, worse, being mean to them had never occurred to these folks, so they were sideswiped and reacted foolishly on impulse, guided by their emotional pain. Let’s be ready. We’re all on the internet, and it could happen to one of us next. Perhaps, if we’re prepared, we can be the mature professionals that we really are.

What do you all think about this phenomenon? What would you do if your book was attacked by one or a group of these reviewers?