One is a soft-spoken teenager who never sought fame, but was thrust into the national spotlight at the most delicate moment of her young life. The other is a glamorous pop star, a fixture in celebrity magazines and on countless iPods.
Bristol Palin and Rihanna have absolutely nothing in common — except that they are two young women whose private turmoil is currently playing out in the harsh glare of the public sphere.
Each has also, unwittingly, become the face of a pressing social issue — teen pregnancy for Palin, domestic abuse for Rihanna. And each, despite all the public fascination, is having an experience that experts in those fields say mirrors that of thousands of ordinary young women across America.
Palin was already five months pregnant when she emerged into public view last year as her mother, Sarah Palin, introduced herself to the world as John McCain’s new running mate.
The pregnancy story soon broke, and campaign handlers rushed her boyfriend, Levi Johnston, to Minnesota. They appeared together on the Republican convention stage, and Sarah Palin said the two would soon be married.
In December, their son Tripp was born, and in a recent interview on Fox News, Bristol called Johnston a “real hands-on Dad.” But last week, Johnston confirmed the couple had split “a while ago,” and then things got ugly, with Bristol implying that her former fiance and his sister had been speaking to the tabloids for financial gain.
“The notion that what has happened to Bristol Palin and Levi Johnston is unique is just not supported by the data,” says Bill Albert, spokesman for the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy. “Marriage among teens is extremely rare.”
While half of teen mothers say they expect to marry the father of their child, Albert says, in fact fewer than 8 percent of them do within a year. And if teens do marry, that union is twice as likely to fail as that of a couple aged 20 to 25.
In the blogosphere, there was the I-told-you-so response. “Did anyone think these two were going to get married? I saw this coming a mile away,” was a post on urbanbaby.com, a Web site for mothers.
But there was also evident sympathy for Bristol Palin, who some assumed had been forced to get engaged in the first place.
And of course there was discussion of how to prevent teen pregnancy. Although Palin had said in the Fox interview that, though happy, she wished the baby had come 10 years later — and that abstinence was “not realistic at all” — she’d avoided discussion of her views on contraception. Bloggers were less reticent this week.
“If she weren’t the progeny of abstinence-only education supporters, she might have been on the pill or using a diaphragm,” wrote Bonnie Erbe on USNews.com. On usatoday.com, another wrote: “If ‘abstinence only’ didn’t work in the Palin home, where is it going to work?”
For both conservatives and liberals, the issue is a pressing one because national statistics released in December 2007 showed the teen birth rate on the rise for the first time in 15 years.
Some have blamed a popular culture that has recently glorified teen moms, as in the popular film comedy “Juno” and the real-life story of “Zooey 101” star Jamie Lynn Spears — Britney’s sister.
But Albert, the teen pregnancy expert, senses that teens today are simply less concerned about sexually transmitted diseases, and thus are being less careful.
And so, he says, Palin can serve as a sort of learning tool. “This is just a great time for parents to sit down at the kitchen table and say to their kids, ‘Hey, did you hear about Bristol Palin?”
Advocates for battered women hope similar discussions will arise from the Rihanna case. In the weeks since what appeared to be a police photo emerged, showing the pop star shockingly bruised and swollen from an alleged beating by boyfriend Chris Brown, the air waves and the Internet have been buzzing with the question: “Why doesn’t she leave?”
But many victims of domestic violence remain with their abusers, says Toni Troop, communications director for Jane Doe Inc., the Massachusetts coalition against sexual assault and domestic violence.
“It can take as many as seven attempts before a victim of domestic violence leaves a battering relationship,” says Troop. Besides, she adds, it’s fundamentally the wrong question, because it puts responsibility on the victim.
No one knows, of course, exactly what is happening now between Rihanna, 21, and Brown, 19, who’s been charged with two felonies for the alleged assault on Feb. 8.
Sheryl Cates, CEO of the National Domestic Violence Hotline says that whether Rihanna likes it or not, she’s becoming a sort of poster child for the cause of battered women.
“She is unfortunately becoming a spokesperson for the problems of domestic violence and dating violence, even though it’s a job she never signed up for,” she said.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
