Texas Nonprofit Wages Ad War Against Domestic Violence

Everything about Texas is big. And now they’ve launched a big ... and very controversial ... war against domestic violence. Beginning last month, nearly 350 Dallas city buses began carrying a series of illustrated public service ads calling attention to DV. The ads show the innocent faces of a young boy and girl. Above the girl’s photo the headline reads, “One day my husband will kill me.” And above the boy’s photo, it reads, “When I grow up, I will beat my wife.” So, has this campaign attracted any attention? Are you kidding? “The calls (for help and support) are more than we can handle,” according to the director of the family support agency that initiated the campaign.

Now for the controversy: Glenn Sacks, a representative of a Massachusetts-based advocacy group calling itself Fathers & Families, is indignant. He says the bus ads unfairly “stereotype men as batterers and women as just victims of DV”. And one Canadian columnist writes, “ the juxtaposition of the fresh-faced innocence of childhood with words that evoke violence and hatred between the sexes is viscerally distressing, because no child should be thinking such thoughts, let alone speaking them aloud without shame."

I don't get it. Are these ads shocking because they SHOW reality, or because most people don’t want to SEE the reality?

Pamela