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How the Travis Decker Case Illustrates the Media’s Propensity to Downplay Male Violence
Headlines shouldn’t have read “slain children” instead of “murdered by their father”
The first headline I saw about the disturbing Decker case was something like Father of slain children still missing. I didn’t do a deep dive into the story — I honestly couldn’t handle any more tragedy. I just remember wondering if he had witnessed the murders, and feeling heartbroken and worried about him. Had the murderer killed him, too, and authorities just hadn’t found his body yet? Had he narrowly escaped, and now he was trying to survive in the wilderness until he could be rescued, all while carrying the heavy burden of having just lost all three of his children?
The headlines a week later read something like, Father of slain children still on the run.
Oh, I thought. Well, that’s an entirely different story.
This time, I clicked and read through the details that were available at the time.
I was as horrified as I had expected to be, discovering that the slain children were three little girls, ages 9, 8, and 5. I can’t even bring myself to paraphrase what happened to them, so I’m going to include that information as it was reported in Newsweek:
