Snapchat Mistakenly Promotes Domestic Violence2 min read

At the end of February Snapchat lost $1.3 bn of their worth after Kylie Jenner tweeted that she doesn’t use the app anymore. With more and more updates available on other apps, Snapchat is slowly disappearing.
This week, Snapchat’s value decreased as a result of backlash for an ad they displayed. The image, advertising a mobile game, read “Would you rather slap Rihanna or punch Chris Brown?” Twitter users criticised the ad as it was tone deaf. In 2009 Chris Brown, Rihanna’s then boyfriend, was arrested as he attacked and hurt her.
The app pulled the ad after the backlash from Twitter, issuing an apology explaining that the ad did not represent the morals of Snapchat and they did not know how it passed the checks.
Rihanna did not accept the apology and attacked the app. She is not motivated by personal reasons, although the ad very clearly draws a connection to the domestic violence she went through. Rather she is angry as the app let down all the people who have been victims of domestic violence, but also those who did not come out yet.
As the Office for National Statistics argued, it was estimated that 1.9 million adults aged between 19 and 59 were victims of domestic violence between March 2016 and March 2017. Only 1.1 million of these incidents were reported to the police, with most of them not declared as a crime.
These statistics show that domestic violence is still a hidden crime.
Although most of the victims of domestic homicide in the years between 2013 and 2016 were females (70%), domestic violence also affects the children in the household and in other instances the victims can be men.
Why is it hard to talk about it? The answer lies in the way we work as a society. We are led to believe that family comes first. We are told that a wife should not disagree with the husband. We are told that love can hurt sometimes, but that it is fine. And it’s not.
We have to create a safe space for victims of domestic violence and make sure that they can come forward without having to fear repercussions at home.
Every time we dismiss a domestic violence related incident or every time we make fun of it, we allow the aggressor to get away with it.