What do you make of this statement, "A father wouldn't do that to his son."?

There are members here whose fathers did do that to their sons.

Judging by the reaction you described I think that the description of sexual abuse may have triggered memories in those jury members of being abused themselves.

Sexual abuse (all forms of abuse, really) of children is distressingly common and most often committed by a family member such as a parent or older sibling.

Without knowing anything more about the defendants than what you’ve written in your question, I’m inclined to believe that they were abused. It seems very unlikely that they would kill their parents for no good reason.

I know that. So what’s your take on that male mentality from the late 80’s and early 90’s, when the trial was held?

As @AnonymousAccount8 says, I don’t know enough about the circumstances of the case being discussed to say anything profound.

Nor am I a student of abnormal psychology. Having said that, I think that a blanket statement like “a father wouldn’t do that to his son” is escapist bullshit.

I think that are no limits to the depth of depravity that some people will sink to. You can look at hundreds of examples over the last 50 years where people, both men and women, have done heinous things to their children.

So the mens’ responses are no doubt denial mechanisms.

Yes, they have. But the tone of of that part of the documentary was the_males_ refused to believe it, but the females were certainly willing to consider it. Why is that?

It also disturbs me, as I said, that the comment was “No father would ever do that to his son.” What about a father doing this to his daughters? Could they have, maybe, imagined then?

I think the omission (of female children from consideration) may not have been deliberate. The trial did after all concern two sons.

I think also, this being the late 80s/early 90s, there may have also been an element of homophobic revulsion in their reaction. Incest is taboo and homosexuality was (and to a degree still is) taboo, so it makes sense that homoerotic incest would be considered even more heinous than non-homoerotic incest to a typical person back then.

Of course this is all just speculation and I have no real idea what I’m talking about.

Right @AnonymousAccount8.
As a woman, my first thought was any child though. I wish I could ask the female juror who made that statement if that was their thoughts too. The women, from what it sounds like, were very open the the possibility, whereas, from the sound of it, the men shut it down completely and instantly, quite possibly for the reasons you listed in your second paragraph, as heinous as the implications are. It’s more acceptable, as a man, and from their point of view, to mutilate little girl gentiles than little boys

Most adults end up with fixed ideas that they aren’t willing to let go of. Usually it’s because there is unhealed emotional injury that those ideas were created to cover over and prevent access to, and then were treated as unconfrontable truth. Molestation taboos tend to be one of those taboos… and also one of those unhealed emotional injuries, whether first-hand or not. One unhealed molestation situation tends to spread several people out in its impacts, and shows up as other abuses and traumas. Our culture really doesn’t want to look at how much child molestation goes on, especially not by the respected men in our families and communities. Even some of the strongest and most open people I know, still keep secrets when it comes to molestation and sexual abuse, even when children, even their children, are suffering abuse (if perhaps not molestation) as a result, because of the taboos, stigmas, and fear of the chaos and impact of the truth getting out. People I know who work with such cases say that even the highest estimates of how common molestation is, have it too low, and given the extremes of secrecy and denial I’ve seen, I think they’re right.

So “a father wouldn’t do that to his son” is incorrect. I’d say we need to face that it does happen, that all the other forms of child abuse, and rape, happen quite frequently, and that we should work hard to greatly improve how we deal with all of that at every level. Until we do, it’s going to continue, as will all the awful side effects of not detecting, preventing and treating it.

I think child molestation and child abuse and the covering up and lack of healing of same are the core pattern that make our culture so nasty and dissociated at so many levels. Internet forums full of nasty “jokes” about anal rape… a coincidence? Nasty apathetic CEO’s and politicians who can’t access their compassion and just want to beat as much out of the world as they can? Same root cause, I think.

I agree.

But, from the tone of that section of the documentary, it was only the men who were denying it. Why were the women more open to the possibility?

That’s a good question.

I can make guesses. Possibly it could partly be about the tendency to different coping strategies. In the cases I know of personally, it seems like often the women know what’s going on but don’t say anything except in confidence, while some of the men tend to be in deeper denial or obliviousness. Subjectively I have the impression that men also tend to be the ones to prefer to not know or forget about or at least vigorously deny the worst stuff especially if they might get in trouble (“men manage for staying out of trouble” was how one teacher described a common male strategy), and men also tend to be less likely to share stuff, especially emasculating stories, and keep the deep shit super-secret, so they tend to both know fewer stories of that type, and to deny it harder even if they have heard. I wonder if they might even tend to drop their pads when they see other men doing it, especially after several did. Some could be thinking, “oh crap I don’t want to be the only, or even last, guy to drop his pad and risk people wondering what that means about me”. Maybe. I don’t know.

The public at large knew a lot less about what exists in their neighborhoods then, than now.
I recall not so long ago when the world was shocked by videos going public of teen girls beating the hell out of a single victim. It was considered new behavior, but I had been aware of such behavior fot decades already.
I believe these men simply did not know such things do actually happen.
Social media has opened the eyes of people who just would not know otherwise.
You find a great many tgings on the internet, and twenty years ago, people just did not know.

That was a very GA, @Zaku. Something to really think about. (But what does “drop their pad” mean?)

But why would the women, of the same generation and time, be more believing than the men, @Patty_Melt?

Because women gossip. We had internet before men made it electronic.

@Dutchess_III I was referring to (my imagination of) your account of the male jurors discarding their notepads. I don’t know how they actually behaved, but I was imagining it as if some of the male jurors decided to react by incredulously dropping their pads, and others may have followed suit. Maybe it wasn’t literally that.

I can also imagine that even a single male juror may have led the others to decide to follow his example, even if what he did was unconscious and relatively subtle. I hesitate to mention the idea, since I would certainly hope everyone was doing their best to be impartial and objective, but fratricide and fathers molesting sons are some of our highest taboos, and the public attention of that tribe probably had them feeling rather on the spot. Although it’s me being a busybody and I clearly can’t speak to the actual situation, I can imagine that that combination could lead to one man choosing the comfort of the “no father would ever do that to their son” as certain truth, giving a taboo-denial-supported excuse to stop taking notes. I imagine he might not have needed to do much to have others notice, recognize, and want the same probably-visible shift in comfort they saw. But again, it’s my imagined choreography of a theoretical jury, as I know almost nothing about the actual jury.

My imagination of it also reminds me of social conditioning experiments such as the one in this TV video .

Had the kids been girls, I might agree. But the Menendez boys were in FACT sons.

You may be reading more into this than it actually deserves. It was a specific case so saying ‘no father would do this to their son’ referred to that specific case, father and sons. Also remember that the prosecution had already put on their case by that time. The sons staged the murders to look like a breakin, they did it to get the inheritance, they killed their mother as well, by that time maybe the men simply felt the kids were making it up and they didn’t believe them.

It’s hard to tell what may have been in their minds if you weren’t following the entire case. Hell it’s hard to tell even if you were but the prosecution had already painted a pretty dark picture of those boys.

@stanleybmanly, I don’t understand. You might agree that a father would never do that to his daughter?

I know @Jaxk I’m just reiterating what someone of the people on the documentary were saying. You’re free to interpret it any way you want.

@Zaku Oh, note pads. I was thinking Kotex or something! The lady said over the course of that testimony the men’s notepads and notes gradually ended up on the floor, discarded. They didn’t all BANG drop them at once.

@Patty_Melt what does “women gossiping” have to do with why they were more open to it? (My husband gossips. Drives me nuts. I have to shut him down sometimes. And he’s learned not to share my personal health with his whole damn family.)

@Dutchess_III I’m not certain that I understand your alarm at the statement from the juror. Is it that the male jurors were so pig headed as to believe the father incapable of abusing his sons, or do you suppose the same men would have accepted the story had the victims been daughters? I don’t read the answer “no father would do that to his son” to imply “but a daughter I might believe.” I fail to see what conclusion arises from the use of “son” as opposed to “child”, when the individual being referenced IS the son.

Thank you for clarifying @stanleybmanly.
The statement is very broad, but it is what the female jurist said. It was NOT “I don’t believe Mendendez would do that to his son.” That’s speaking directly about that father. The statement was “No father would do that to his son.” That implies every man in the world, not just that father. How can they even believe that?

There is no way to tell what their take would be if it was a daughter, because it wasn’t. I would hope it would be just as supposedly unbelievable to them. If it wasn’t then I’d be really pissed.

Frankly, it sounds like the women are more inclined to believe that if something horrible like this happens it must be because the father was a rotten SOB. Which also sounds like the point your trying to make here, that men are rotten SOBs.

Not all men are @Jaxk. But that one for sure. Testimony from his coworkers showed that.

But it still leaves the question, if all the jurists saw that he was a rotten SOB why would the men discount the possibility of sexual abuse against his sons?

@Jaxk I would say that women seem to know more about the molestation and abuse in families, through some combination of perceptiveness, talkativeness, openness, willingness to talk about such things, etc. Women of course also can be abusers and/or enable/deny abuse – in fact I think there are probably very few families with abuse going on without women enabling it (at least at the level of not investigating when they sense something is going on), because women are very perceptive about interpersonal issues and behavior.

@Dutchess_III Such men are much more comfortable surface-believing the idea that no man would ever do that, and have controlling behavior patterns strong enough to get them to assert such in a court of law where other people’s fates are at stake, rather than admit that possibility. There’s also a good chance that practically everyone has at least one person in their family or friends who was abused, and we don’t like to even entertain the possibility that that’s true and that our children aren’t safe and/or that we might have been able to help but didn’t.

@GA @Zaku.

I would also suggest that many of the women on the jury have seen the darker side of men, sexually. Not necessarily that they were abused but we’ve all seen the darker side.

I think it was like @Jaxk said, because the trial was about sons, the juror was referring to sons.

I also think that maybe the juror was nervous and flustered before the camera, especially since it was a big trial with lots of media and attention from the public because of its heinous nature. I work with politicians (who are used to being diplomatic and eloquent before the camera) and it’s not unsual for one who is normally very eloquent to get caught off guard and not use the best words for the circumstances, especially when he’s got a microphone and camera in his face. For someone like a juror, who is very likely an average citizen (unused to cameras, microphones, interviews and public attention), and also probably had been sequestered for the duration of the trial, I’m betting she or he was flustered and emotional at the time.

I think it’s wrapped up in identity. The men on the jury would never do anything so horrific, and never hear about such horrible things on the gossip chain with their peers, so they didn’t believe, or wantto believe such abuse could happen.

Or, some men on the jury are abusers and don’t want to admit it to themselves and don’t want to be punished for it themselves.

Or, men know how men will lie, and just think the Menendez boys are liars.

Men are less forgiving for excuses. My father wouldn’t care as much as me that the boys were abused, he would feel abuse is no excuse to kill your father. My dad in general doesn’t allow for understanding or excuses for criminal behavior. He puts the responsibility with the individual. He also has no concept of how much power men reign over women and children. Zero. He doesn’t understand how trapped women and children can feel.

I wouldn’t read too much about the juror using the word “son” instead of child or children, since the trial was about a father and his sons.

@Dutchess_III: These were “jurors” not “jurists.”