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" This morning, TMZ published a video of what appears to be Solange Knowles attacking her brother-in-law, Jay Z, in an elevator at New York&amp;#039;s The Standard Hotel the night of the Met Gala. She lunges at him, punching and kicking, while he tries to keep her at arm&amp;#039;s length. A bodyguard intervenes, and soon enough the elevator doors open and everyone walks out like nothing happened. On Twitter, the jokes came quickly, as users speculated about #WhatJayZSaidToSolange. Is the video hilarious meme fodder? Or did we just watch a disturbing act of family violence?  Even if most rational adults agree that Solange behaved poorly, the popularity of the #WhatJayZSaidToSolange hashtag implies that maybe Jay Z did something to deserve it. Was he cheating on Beyonce? Insulting Solange&amp;#039;s career? Memes aside, the speculation starts to sound disturbingly close to victim-blaming. But the incident itself, and the Internet&amp;#039;s collective response to it, tells us a lot about violence against men and how we treat victims.  Anti-feminist &amp;quot;men&amp;#039;s rights activists&amp;quot; like to trot out figures showing that women are nearly as likely to have committed an act of violence against their partners as men are, but that&amp;#039;s far from the whole story. Although women are certainly just as capable as men of being violent, many acts of female violence against male partners are defensive. Others are in the context of a generally violent and volatile relationship and are less physically harmful than what comes back \u2014 a push versus a punch to the face. Statistically, women are still much more likely to be killed or injured by an intimate partner than men are. When there are significant size differences, the larger party \u2014 often the man \u2014 is better able to defend himself. That&amp;#039;s obvious in the Solange and Jay Z video: She is clearly the aggressor, but he&amp;#039;s able to hold her off until a bodyguard jumps in. Had the situation been reversed, it&amp;#039;s hard to picture Solange walking away unhurt.  But that doesn&amp;#039;t mean the attack is cute or funny, or that men don&amp;#039;t suffer from violence.  &amp;quot;It is harmful when we make light of women&amp;#039;s violence against men,&amp;quot; Liz Roberts, Chief Program Officer at Safe Horizon, the nation&amp;#039;s largest victim services organization, told Cosmopolitan.com. &amp;quot;If we don&amp;#039;t create space and a context where we can acknowledge that men are victimized and it doesn&amp;#039;t make them any less men, we aren&amp;#039;t going to end violence.&amp;quot;  While the second-wave feminist movement forced a national conversation about domestic violence and children&amp;#039;s rights advocates put the term &amp;quot;child abuse&amp;quot; in the American vernacular, less discussed are other types of family violence. According to Roberts, most of the clients she sees are domestic violence survivors, but a small percentage are fleeing family members other than a husband or boyfriend \u2014 a parent, a child, a brother, or a sister. It&amp;#039;s not so unusual, then, to see an act of family violence between a woman and her brother-in-law.  Roberts also also cautions that there&amp;#039;s only so much we can know based on one incident. &amp;quot;One of the things we see in domestic violence cases is that to understand what&amp;#039;s going on in the relationship you need to look at the pattern of behavior over time,&amp;quot; Roberts said. &amp;quot;If you take a single incident out of context, you may get the wrong impression. That&amp;#039;s a dynamic we notice a lot, because when the police come out, they may focus on one incident and miss the pattern.&amp;quot; This doesn&amp;#039;t mean that violence for purposes other than self-defense is OK. But it does mean that a one-time bar brawl (or elevator attack against a physically larger victim) operates differently from a sustained campaign of physical abuse against your partner, both in the psychology of the violent actor and in the culture at large.  Law enforcement used to largely classify intimate partner violence against women as a personal problem, not a criminal one. While there&amp;#039;s still deeply held shame and stigma around domestic violence, there are at the very least some mechanisms in place to recognize that violence as a crime and a major social problem: domestic violence shelters, restraining orders, criminal codes. But violence against women remains pervasive, with one in four women experiencing domestic violence in her lifetime. When you grow up female, you live with the understanding that men \u2014 even men you love \u2014 can do you real damage. That scale of gender-based violence saturates the American psyche and perpetuates assumptions of male power and female vulnerability. But those same assumptions harm male victims, too, making them unlikely to report violence at the hands of women. After all, if she &amp;quot;hits like a girl,&amp;quot; what does it make you if you say the hit really hurt?  All of us should pause and ask: Is the elevator video really that entertaining? Talking about abuse and highlighting incidents of violence can be important awareness-raising tools, as feminist activists realized when they put a woman&amp;#039;s bruised face on the cover of Ms. Magazine in 1976 to illustrate a story on battered wives. But there&amp;#039;s an ocean between measured reporting about an under-covered issue and a jokey hashtag. While Solange&amp;#039;s alleged attack on Jay Z isn&amp;#039;t the same as domestic violence, it&amp;#039;s still no laughing matter. &amp;quot;Any time an incident of violence is handled in the public eye in a way that is gossipy and salacious, that sends the wrong message,&amp;quot; Roberts said. &amp;quot;It trivializes the harm the violence can do to its victims and it suggests that the sensational value of the incident is more important than the rights and the privacy of the people involved. The message it sends is that victims should keep the information to themselves, and that coming out in any public way will lead to a lot of gossip and, potentially, ridicule. That&amp;#039;s not helpful.&amp;quot; RELATED: Is This a Video of Solange Kicking Jay Z in an Elevator? 10 Domestic Abuse Myths, Debunked Follow Jill on Twitter. Photo credit: SplashNews "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.cosmopolitan.com/entertainment/celebs/news/a6775/solange-elevator-attack/?click=rel>