Chris Brown's actions are inexcusable, but what he says about male violence is vital

Chris Brown's new documentary is a reminder of how male violence can be taught and passed down

Published October 20, 2017 6:58PM (EDT)

“Chris Brown: Welcome to My Life” (Gravitas Ventures)
“Chris Brown: Welcome to My Life” (Gravitas Ventures)

Singer Chris Brown's documentary "Welcome to My Life," released via Netflix this month, is a retelling of his rise to fame and the controversy that mired it. It seems, even by its packaging, that it's a bid to complicate and add nuance to the unfavorable headlines and numerous courtroom dates that have defined Brown's career as much as his music has over the last eight years.

"I'm tired of giving people something to talk about," he says at the beginning of the film. "They should be talking about how I’m the baddest motherfucka onstage, instead of I'm the baddest motherfucka in the courtroom."

Overall, the documentary feels distant. There's too much footage of celebrities such as Jamie Foxx, Jennifer Lopez, DJ Khaled and Usher offering glowing praise for the superstar — talking-head advertorials with no real depth. While media, including myself, reported on the snippet released this spring, in which Brown opened up about his 2009 assault of Rihanna publicly for the first time, the most profound moments in "Welcome to My Life" come when Brown talks about the physical abuse he witnessed growing up.

Chris Brown's mother, Joyce Hawkins, describes the night where he turned Rihanna's face black, blue and bloody, as the worst day of her life. "My heart just dropped," Hawkins says. "That was the worst day of my life and probably his life, because I just saw that he was a broken person."

This moment in the film is eerie, as Hawkins shares what is was like to look at her son after such a brutal incident.

Brown offers another reason as to why this moment may have been so deeply painful for Hawkins. "I seen my mom deal with that firsthand," he says. He then goes on to chronicle his mother's abusive partner, a man Brown hated as much as he feared. "He was a monster, an animal, pure evil," Brown says. "I'm terrified of this man."

Brown says that when he was six, his mother's partner shot himself in the head, but did not die. The gunshot blinded him, the physical impairment only adding to his rage. His mother's partner took his anger and frustration out on Hawkins.

"I had to hear my mom get beat up every night," Brown says. "I’d pee on myself, just scared to even walk out into the hallway, because I didn’t want to see nothing."

Brown then brings it back to his own actions. "It’s learned behavior," he continues, "so me, having to see my mom look at me through that light, I just saw him."

While Brown's description of his childhood and the abuse against women he witnessed does not absolve him of his terrible actions, it underlines the way male violence can be taught and passed down from generation to generation.

According to the Childhood Domestic Violence Association, "Children of domestic violence are three times more likely to repeat the cycle in adulthood, as growing up with domestic violence is the most significant predictor of whether or not someone will be engaged in domestic violence later in life."

According to the group, children who grow up in homes where domestic violence is present are also 74 percent more likely to commit a violent crime.

Speaking to this, Brown's violence has not been confined to just women. He shattered a window after an appearance on "Good Morning America" in 2011, after host Robin Roberts asked about the status of his domestic violence case. He got into a bar brawl with rapper Drake and his entourage in 2012, another verbal and physical incident with singer Frank Ocean in 2013, and Brown plead guilty to a felony assault charge in 2013 after he punched a fan for trying to take a photo with him. These are just a few examples in a long history of violent, oppositional behavior.

It has been this ongoing history of violence towards women (and towards anyone), that has long stopped me from enjoying Brown's music, even though, as Refinery29 writes, "Not even the harshest Chris Brown critic can deny his talent." 

Yes, "Welcome to My Life" provides a fuller picture of the specific circumstances Brown emerged from and how violence against women, in his words, can be "learned." Watching it also draws attention to the ways in which male violence started in the home frequently becomes public.

When the news came out that the Las Vegas mass shooter, identified by police as Stephen Paddock, verbally abused his girlfriend, feminist author Mona Eltahawy tweeted: "As long as women are not safe from male violence at home, why do you so arrogantly assume anyone else is safe from male violence publicly?"

A slew of mass murderers in the United States had well-documented histories of fine-tuning such terror in their homes, first. In turn, many of these killers were themselves victims of emotional or physical abuse at a developmental age. Everytown, an organization concerned with reducing gun violence, found that 54 percent of mass shootings between 2009-2016 were related to domestic or family violence in one way or another.

For this, and other reasons, researchers of domestic violence urge society and authorities to treat it as a global public health problem. Dr. Margaret Chan, director-general of World Health Organization told the Boston Globe that she considered it a crisis of "epidemic proportions," that, like the plague, is contagious.

It is important to see this as a viral problem, but until authorities and the criminal justice system evaluate domestic violence as a serious and dangerous crime, until we create stronger, more holistic approaches to identification, intervention, treatment and prevention, these rippling effects for women and the public at large will not stop. There is no magic cure for the greater phenomenon of domestic violence, but we must work to treat and contain it. Many, many lives are on the line.

Like him or not, "Welcome to My Life" makes it clear that Chris Brown was looped into this cycle of violence and infected since childhood. "I felt like a fucking monster," Brown says of himself, circling back to the same language he used to describe his abusive stepfather. "I was the one thing I was running from."

But when will this track that Brown found himself on — a course that is both known and predictable — be broken once and for all? Both those on the track and the system around it need to get serious about changing the direction men are running here, for all our sakes.


By Rachel Leah

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