Ok so I didn’t want to make this a political post, because domestic violence is both a liberal and conservative issue. Let’s examine the domestic violence Johnny Depp faced during his marriage to Amber Heard from right in the middle.

Recordings were leaked earlier today with Amber Heard admitting to abusing Johnny Depp, by hitting him and throwing pots and pans at him. The question is: why didn’t anybody take him seriously when he made these claims? I think it’s because we don’t ever consider men to be victims of domestic violence. They can only be perpetrators.

According to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NCADV), 1 in 4 women have experienced physical violence from their partner, vs. 1 in 9 men. That’s a significant difference in terms of numbers, but not in terms of severity. Let’s face it: if the roles were reversed, Johnny would not stand a chance of winning is lawsuit and would be facing jail time. His career would be destroyed. The whole of the United States, and possibly other countries would come to a stand still and feminist groups would be protesting. And in that case, this would be the right course of action. Unfortunately, despite the #JusticeForJohnnyDepp that has gone viral, I’m not sure much more will be done. It’s not because Johnny is not deeply loved by all his fans, but because we don’t know how to react when men are physically abused. We haven’t been taught how to do so.

Let’s say hypothetically, for the sake of argument, that there was alcohol involved. If the woman was the victim as a result of her male partner being drunk, he would have to take full responsibility. If the roles were reversed, he would still have to take responsibility because we would likely assume that she drank heavily due to the abuse. There is that double standard, and it’s not fair to victims of any gender.

If anything, Johnny and Amber’s situation has proven the stereotypes of domestic violence only happening in lower to middle class families, wrong. So did Chris Brown and Rihanna, and other similar celebrity cases. We as a society need to start taking domestic violence seriously, regardless of which community those involved are from, or what their socio-economic status is.

If you would like to know more, you can visit https://ncadv.org/statistics for more information. #JusticeForJohnnyDepp.