As you probably know, Chris Brown beat the crap out of Rihanna the other night. He also strangled her until she lost consciousness. Predictably, much of the media has already fallen into the passive voice to describe the event (as in, “Rihanna was beaten by Brown,” a phrasing that subtly places responsibility for the beating on her), and there are a whole lot of vague references to “the incident” appearing.

An “incident” doesn’t sound like anyone’s fault, does it?

There are also plenty of people popping up to minimize, deny, and justify Brown’s actions. He was abused. He was provoked. He’s really a nice guy. T.I. said of Brown’s actions, “We’re entertainers, but we’re still human—all of us. Don’t expect us not to make mistakes.”

Uh huh. Mistakes. I feel just terrible when I forget a friend’s birthday. Or, you know, try to kill them. Oops!

In addition to the usual reasons people let abusers off the hook, there is still money to be made off of Brown. You had better believe that there are a lot of people who want to downplay this incident so they can get paid. So at what is probably the biggest teachable moment regarding men’s violence against women that we’ve had in at least a decade, they’ll be spending their time and tremendous media connections trying to make partner violence seem like it’s not really that big a deal.

Regular readers of this blog know that I’m a huge believer in the potential of positive bystander behavior in response to violence, both to create more positive environments for survivors and to create a culture where such violence is not tolerated. Anti-violence educator Don McPherson always asks his audiences what would happen if every time a man beat his partner, all of his neighbors showed up at his door the next day and collectively said something to the effect of, “We don’t do that here.” He thinks that the world would be different. I agree. Personally, I get pretty psyched just imagining that scenario.

Brown’s beating of Rihanna is essentially a situation where the whole country heard that neighbor, and we have to decide how to respond. Will we ignore it, minimize it, forget it, and teach all the men in the “neighborhood” that this is behavior they can get away with? Will we use Brown’s race to marginalize him, so we can pretend that nice white people don’t do that sort of thing? Will we tell black women that they should protect black men, no matter what those men have done to them?

Millions of young people are watching to see what we, as a culture, believe about men’s violence against women. What will we tell them?