We should be teaching boys that masculinity without emotional honesty is a danger. We should be teaching girls that love should never require fear. We should be teaching co-parents that unmanaged conflict can become generational trauma. And we should be teaching communities how to spot a person in crisis before we get in line at someone’s funeral.

We also need to be honest enough to say something else: Many men have never been taught how to handle rejection, shame, powerlessness, heartbreak, or fear. They’ve been taught, instead, how to posture, perform, possess, suppress, joke, deflect, drink, and disappear. And if all else fails, they’re taught to explode.

By Kenneth Braswell, CEO, Fathers Incorporated

There are headlines that sound strange until a convergence of events forces them to make sense. This is one of those headlines.

“Domestic violence,” “mental health,” and “lemon pepper wings” don’t belong together on paper. One sounds like a criminal justice conversation. One like a public health conversation. One like a late-night Atlanta punchline. And that’s the problem. 

We’re making connections too late, and so by the time we see the news — deadly domestic violence in Shreveport, the murder-suicide in Virginia involving a former Lieutenant Governor, online networks teaching men how to rape women, a collaboration between an NBA team and a business that objectifies women but makes great lemon pepper wings, and more — we act shocked. 

This reactive mindset means we don’t talk about violence until blood is on the floor. We don’t talk about mental health until somebody has snapped. We joke about the culture of objectification as entertainment until women are assaulted. 

But we shouldn’t be surprised when all three meet in the same room.

This blog post isn’t written to flatten every tragedy into a single explanation but to say that too many of these stories keep pulling back the same curtain. 

Acts of Violence Don’t Take Place in a Vacuum

We can’t treat the horror out of Shreveport — or any similar story — as just another headline pushed to the top of our feeds for 24 hours. These stories are not isolated events:

• In Louisiana, authorities say a man killed eight children, including seven of his own, in what police described as a domestic incident spanning two homes. The children were between three and 11 years old. It’s being described as the deadliest mass shooting in the United States since January 2024.
• In Virginia, AP reported that former Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax killed his estranged wife and then himself just weeks before a judge’s deadline for him to move out of the family home. Media coverage points to despondency, isolation, drinking, and suicidal thoughts in the period before the killings. 
• In North Carolina, the Christian Post reported on the killing of Pastor Tammy McCollum, whose husband was charged in her death. This story is made even more jarring by the public image of faith, devotion, and normalcy that had surrounded the marriage. 
• In Atlanta, Fox 5 reported that a father was charged in the stabbing death of his 4-year-old daughter during a domestic dispute. 
• Out west, reporting on the Utah mother who killed her 11-year-old daughter before taking her own life reveals a long and painful custody battle that had stretched for years. 

These are not identical stories, and they aren’t morally interchangeable. However, they are connected by the same unbearable truth: 

Relationships in distress — left to fester inside pressure, rage, despair, control, and isolation — can become deadly with terrifying speed.

Then there’s the story that should chill every husband, father, pastor, coach, employer, policymaker, and man who still thinks violence against women only lives in dark alleys or stranger danger. 

A CNN investigation into an online “rape academy” described disturbing online networks where men traded step-by-step advice on how to drug women (often their wives or girlfriends), avoid detection, film assaults, and even sell the incapacitating chemicals. One platform reportedly drew 62 million visits in February alone, while another livestreamed assaults and marketed so-called “sleeping liquids.” This isn’t fringe fantasy: It’s organized dehumanization. It’s an actual curriculum (hence the name “Rape Academy”).

Now, let’s talk about those lemon pepper wings. 

Atlanta’s Magic City is one of the most famous strip clubs in the world. It’s an Atlanta institution surrounded by decades of cultural lore tied to music, celebrity, and nightlife. Athletes, entertainers, and visitors to the city have long treated it as a rite of passage. And Magic City is also known for its lemon pepper wings. We wrote about the club here on Dads Pad blog when the NBA and Atlanta Hawks invited Magic City into a promotional partnership. 

That story from late winter is where our cultural shrugs come in. 

We shrug when powerful corporations turn the objectification of women into branding, jokes, vibes, nightlife nostalgia, and social media captions. We shrug when a city laughs at the symbol while refusing to reckon with the machinery behind it. I’m not talking about the food. I’m talking about what happens when the consumption of women gets dressed up as entertainment and local flavor. And I’m talking about what happens when exploitation becomes so familiar that we don’t feel the need to consider its impact.

We shrug off the repercussions of what it does to the human value of women and girls, and what it does to men and boys. We don’t even look at what it does to relationships, how it creates expectation and entitlement, or why those things are dangerous. 

The Power of Replacing Shock and Blame With Maturity

Before we continue, we want to be sure to level this conversation correctly.

Making these connections isn’t about assuming that every man is violent, and it’s not about denying that women can also do harm. It is not about turning painful national conversations into gender wars or scorecards. 

It’s about refusing to look away. We have a culture problem. We have a human problem. A violence problem. An emotional regulation problem. We have a relational maturity problem. And yes, we have a mental health problem.

To be clear, mental health struggles don’t automatically produce violence. Most people battling depression, anxiety, trauma, or despair do not become dangerous to others. However, untreated distress, humiliation, obsession, suicidal ideation, unresolved trauma, addiction, emotional isolation, and collapsing relationships can create danger zones. And when those danger zones exist inside homes already marked by control, resentment, access to weapons, or fear of abandonment, everybody who lives there is at risk. (For example, this tragic terrain seemed to exist in the case of Justin Fairfax, with reporting on the deaths referencing hopelessness, isolation, and pleas from people around him to seek help.)

This is why, in my role at Fathers Incorporated, I keep coming back to a phrase that I believe deserves far more public attention: co-parenting maturity.

Can two adults regulate themselves enough to keep the child from becoming collateral damage? Can they disagree without weaponizing access? Can they manage hurt without escalating to humiliation, threats, retaliation, stalking, violence, or manipulation? 

And can the systems around them identify these conditions in time to save lives?

Early Warning Signs and Violence Prevention

Too often, we wait until the consequences of emotional instability are catastrophic. We should be asking critical questions much earlier:

• What does emotional danger look like in a father, mother, husband, wife, or co-parent? 
• What are the warning signs that heartbreak is becoming fixation, that anger is becoming control, or that despair presents a threat? 
• Who in the circle knows how to intervene? 
• Where can men go before their shame hardens into silence and silence becomes a precursor to violence?

Those conversations should be happening in barbershops, break rooms, churches, clinics, schools, reentry programs, fatherhood classes, court-mandated services, premarital counseling, police trainings, living rooms, and locker rooms. They should happen on college campuses and podcasts. 

We should be teaching boys that masculinity without emotional honesty is a danger. We should be teaching girls that love should never require fear. We should be teaching co-parents that unmanaged conflict can become generational trauma. And we should be teaching communities how to spot a person in crisis before we get in line at someone’s funeral.

We also need to be honest enough to say something else: Many men have never been taught how to handle rejection, shame, powerlessness, heartbreak, or fear. They’ve been taught, instead, how to posture, perform, possess, suppress, joke, deflect, drink, and disappear. And if all else fails, they’re taught to explode. 

That’s not manhood. It’s emotional illiteracy with real consequences, and it’s why this work is urgent:

• We need stronger domestic violence prevention, better access to mental health care, more effective screening around custody disputes and family instability, and meaningful interventions that don’t wait for a police report. 
• We need culturally competent services for men who’ll never walk into traditional clinical settings.
• We need places for fathers and mothers to go when the emotional temperature in the home starts rising. 
• We need men to interrupt other men before harm becomes action. 
• We need women and children to have safety that does not depend on somebody else finally deciding to calm down.

And we need to stop feeding ourselves the lie that these are separate conversations.

The Big Picture

Domestic violence isn’t “only” a criminal justice issue. Mental health isn’t “only” a clinical issue. Objectification isn’t “only” a cultural issue. All three are braided together in the lives we’re living right now.

That’s why this title makes sense to me: “Domestic Violence, Mental Health, and Lemon Pepper Wings.” A nation that jokes casually about the consumption of women, ignores the emotional collapse of men, and allows children to die violently is a nation that is so practiced at shrugging off spectacles that it never reaches for solutions.

We cannot keep meeting each new headline with candles, hashtags, outrage, and then silence. The next obituary is already waiting on somebody’s untreated pain, unchallenged entitlement, access to a gun, refusal to seek help, inability to accept no, need to control, public image veiling private danger, and a culture too comfortable laughing while the house is on fire.