The Courier Mail reported that Bradley Paul White pled guilty to charges of assault, grievous bodily harm, and choking in a domestic setting. According to the article, he went to the home of a woman he had been seeing to demand she delete her Tinder profile. He threw her to the ground, kicked her, strangled her, knelt on her chest, and wrapped a towel around her neck so she couldn’t breathe. The injuries he inflicted on her, according to the Crown prosecutor, were life threatening.
This was not a “Tinder argument”. It was not an argument of any kind. It was a controlling, violent, criminal act that Bradley White chose to commit against a woman who played no part in that choice.
The Oxford Dictionary defines “argument” as “a conversation or discussion in which two or more people disagree, often angrily”. This assault was not any of those things.
Media reports that frame domestic violence as an act in which both people participate, rather than a mindset of violent entitlement and control, are ill-informed, inaccurate, and misleading and have no place in responsible journalism.
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