Abuse has been in the news lately.

You might assume I’m talking about the Rihanna and Chris Brown fiasco, but actually I’m not.

A few weeks ago in North Carolina, a teenage girl posted a rant about her parents on Facebook, thinking that they wouldn’t see it. She complained about the chores she had to do and about being told to get a job.

However, her father saw the post and responded by what can only be described as sinking beneath his daughter’s level – he recorded a video in which he ranted about how ungrateful his daughter is and shot her laptop eight times with a handgun.

And then he posted it to YouTube.

Responses to the video were mixed. Some people were disgusted by the incident; others gleefully celebrated that a child had been “taught a lesson” and “put in her place.”

I side with the former group for two reasons.

First of all, it’s bad parenting. The father could’ve reacted in many ways besides destroying a laptop with a gun.

He could’ve taken the laptop away from his daughter temporarily or permanently.

He could’ve forced her to deactivate her Facebook account until she proved that she could use it appropriately.

He could’ve sat her down to discuss the issues she raised in her Facebook post, teaching her that the healthy way to respond to family conflicts is to resolve them through discussion.

But he didn’t teach her that. Instead, he taught her that when things frustrate you, you should shoot them with a gun.

The more important reason the father was wrong, though, is that his actions constitute domestic abuse.

To those of us familiar with photos of battered women and neglected children, this may seem counterintuitive.

Destroying a laptop isn’t such a big deal compared to that, right?

Actually, damaging someone’s property to hurt or manipulate them is abusive.

In parent-child relationships, it’s reasonable to expect that parents will at times violate their children’s privacy or exert control over their possessions in order to keep them safe. For instance, whatever your views on drugs or pornography, a parent who finds a stash of either in a teenager’s room and destroys it is certainly not behaving in an abusive way.

However, this father’s actions were not intended to keep his daughter safe or to educate her. They were intended to humiliate and possibly even terrify her.

Although the line between discipline and abuse is much more vague in parent-child relationships than it is in other types of relationships, several aspects of this incident show that the father’s intentions weren’t benevolent.

He didn’t simply take away the laptop or throw it out. He shot it with a gun eight times.

If my father destroyed one of my possessions with a gun after getting angry at me, my reaction would be closer to terror than to penitent respect.

Second, the father then posted a video of it on the Internet.

Ironically, for all the talk these days about inappropriate Internet posts ruining people’s lives, this father has probably done more damage to his daughter’s reputation than she did with her ill-considered Facebook rant.

The tragedy here is that we almost expect teenagers to make themselves look bad online; we don’t expect their parents to do it for them.

Although this seems like an isolated incident, I think it gives us a lot to think about because of the way many people reacted to it. The delighted commenters praising the father as a “hero” may not realize that what he did was abusive.

In fact, neither did the police and the Child Protective Services workers who paid him a visit. Actually, they said, “Kudos, sir.”

If so many people are eager to see a girl humiliated online for the crime of being a bit bratty to her parents, our culture must not take children and teenagers very seriously.

Sure, teenagers can be annoying. They can especially be annoying when they complain about their parents on Facebook. But nothing that a person does – especially not if that person is a child – makes him or her deserving of abuse.

Miriam Mogilevsky is a Weinberg junior. She can be reached at [email protected]

All opinions expressed in this column are solely the opinions of the columnist and do not reflect the views of The Daily Northwestern. If you would like to respond to the column, you may comment below, email the columnist or submit a 300-word letter to the editor to [email protected].