Assignment #3: Newspaper Article

For this assignment, I read an article in the Newsday, dated Thursday 22nd September 2011, located on page 5. The title of the article is:

Woman attacked during curfew - Beaten to death

This article was about a domestic dispute between a mother of five and a male friend during curfew hours. It was stated that after this dispute, the male friend got so enraged that he took up a piece of wood and beat the woman to death. After doing this, he surrendered himself to the Chaguanas police station.

An autopsy revealed that the woman died from blunt force trauma to the head.

When the daughter was interviewed, she stated that even though she is in support of the state of emergency to decrease crime, it appears that it is now fueling a different sector of crime - domestic violence related crimes. This woman's death is the 5th domestic violence related death since the state of emergency started a month ago.

The daughter also suggested that her mother probably died as a result of her schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is a mental disorder which blurs the line between the real world and the imaginary world making it hard for the person to think logically. Because of this, she probably didn't know how to defend herself properly when she was being attacked.

This is a very sad article and it would suggest that our country is in a mess. It was also stated that this was the 277th murder since the year started. Keeping in mind that only 266 days in the year have passed, at least one person has died everyday this year. What is our country coming to? We are in deep trouble and if something is not done to properly educate the population and instill the correct morals and values, who knows the chaos that could take place in a few years from now?

This also raised a red flag in my mind when it came to the topic of communication. Just the fact that the male companion had to resort to beating and eventually killing the woman because of an argument that they had, would mean that there was ineffective communication. Because of his poor communication skills, the male companion saw that it was necessary to put his mental thoughts into a physical beating.

As a communicator, this influences me to sit down and LISTEN and try to UNDERSTAND my colleague's point of view and what they are trying to say when I am having conversations with them. By all means necessary, I would try to admit when I am wrong and not get enraged. I too, have an anger problem but I would never want it to get as far as killing another living, breathing human being.


Besides, we don't need anymore murders in this country.