Okay, yes, that was a joke, but now I want to talk seriously about the way fat people are portrayed in the media. But first, let me say how sorry I am for the loss of this ten year old boy Dakota Stevens. He was just a child who already had a hard life, and he should not have lost his life in this manner.
This incident happened in Indiana, where 48 year old Jennifer Wilson was disciplining her foster child for running away to the neighbor’s house and asking them to call 911 because he was being abused. When he returned home, after Wilson went and got him, telling the neighbor to mind her business, the boy tried to leave again. Wilson claimed she layed on top of him for about ten minutes. She stated that she did this to calm him down and keep him still. When the boy quit struggling, she realized he had lost consciousness and she began to panic. Dakota was reportedly 90 pounds.
Now, we can all agree this was discipline gone wrong. I’m not sure what was going through this woman’s head and if she really thought she was calming him or if she did this with malice. I know I have had to restrain a child before but there are certainly ways to do that which don’t include crushing them to death. So you have to wonder what kind of pressure she was putting on this boy. My guess is she was putting her full weight on him and truly trying to hurt him enough to subdue him.
As you can see, this headline is simply click bait. She did not SIT on him. She put her full body weight on him and crushed him to death. The autopsy showed hemorrhaging in the liver and lungs, as well as other organ damage. That takes force! Force that could be caused by any adult that weighs over 150 pounds, I’m guessing. So it’s not just the fact that Wilson was fat. It’s that she put her entire weight on him in a forceful manner!
And personally I take issue with headlines like this, not only because they are clickbait and outright lies, but in this case it just perpetuates the fat phobia that is rampant in this society. How many times have we heard “oh don’t mess with her. Be careful, she might sit on you?” Because I’ve heard it a lot growing up as a fat child/teen/adult. So the fact that this reporter would choose to say that a woman sat on a child and killed him, when that’s not even what happened, really grinds my gears.
Fat people have enough problems in society, and the media does not do anything to alleviate that. They seize the opportunity anytime the person in the story is an overweight person. I know a few years back, there was an article about a man being 300 pounds who robbed someone at an ATM, and his weight didn’t have anything to do with the story, but they kept saying that and it was infuriating. They could have simply included his weight in the description like they do with any criminal on the loose, but instead they made his weight the forefront of the article. The way it was done and the jokes that followed in the comment section was really despicable.
I am not defending this woman in any way, shape, or form, so I don’t want it to come off that way. I am defending fat people because this kind of reporting is lazy and reckless, and I just don’t respect it. You will get just as many clicks if you tell the truth in your headlines. I promise.
I want to add that Jennifer Wilson pled guilty to reckless homicide and was sentenced to 6 years with one year suspended, to be served as probation.
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