Occasionally two completely different stories in the news overlap with their wording and it’s impossible for my brain to ignore it.
So I’m going to do a small reflection on an overlap that happened this week.
The sentence that jumped out at me from both the news stories was:
“THE RIGHT TO SELF DEFENCE”
If you live in Australia it’s very likely that you have heard about a famous “influencer” being arrested for strangling his wife.
What makes this newsworthy is that Sam Wood is known as the “good guy” who has built his multi-million dollar empire thanks to women trusting him as their fitness guru.
His “good guy” persona was pretty much bestowed upon him for being a saint for choosing a single mother as his partner in the “Bachelor” TV show a decade ago or so. I don’t want to go into too much detail since it’s actually not important and I’m very aware that using someone else’s painful experience to illustrate a point is not really kosher.
So to be brief - Sam ended up marrying the single mother and they went on to have three more daughters. So the “ good guy” is now also a “ girl dad”.
What we know is that Sam got angry with his wife Snezana. And pushed her into a wardrobe. He then went to attack her 21 year old daughter who wanted to help her mother. When Snezana saw Sam go to attack her daughter she tried to stop him and that’s when Sam shoved her on the floor and tried to strangle her.
Now this is the important part:
Sam would easily be at least double the size of his wife Snezana.
When I read that his lawyer is very likely going to claim it was an act of self defence…
I nearly spat my tea out.
In no reality could someone the size and strength of Sam Wood need to strangle a woman at least half his size for self defence.
And then four days later it was October 7, and we held vigils around Australia to commemorate three years of genocide.
And later that night I listened to a news reporter claim that Israel had used self defence against the people in Gaza.
It’s lucky I wasn’t drinking tea.
I often talk about power dynamics. And when we look at the world through power dynamics lenses….”complicated” things become clear.
These two are perfect examples of that.
Both Sam Wood and Israel are not the victim, even if both used to be perceived as the “good guy”. And neither of them should be able to use self defence as an excuse to justify their brutality.
Anyways…I hope this is another little micro reminder to always be on the look out for power dynamics…not just politically and in society, but also in our families and for ourselves personally. It’s eye-opening!!