This week sees the start of the Rihanna / Chris Brown trial.  Sure to be a media circus, and if the coverage of the incident so far is anything to go by, the court battle is set to become headline news.  The focus on Rihanna and Chris Brown has no doubt been fuelled by their popularity within media circles prior to their well-publicized fight.  But, is it really helping matters?

It seems that the media have, in many ways, made this experience worse for the R&B singers with back-and-forth claims and allegations being made by 'friends' and 'insiders' while the leaking of certain pictures to the press may have also served to undermine the trial itself.  There can't be many people who they can call to the jury who have not already had a media-fuelled opinion on what went down that night.

The truth of the matter, however, is that the only people who can know for sure what happened were Chris Brown and Rihanna themselves.  While popular opinion was that Chris Brown was 100% in the wrong for what he did in striking Rihanna how would we feel if some of the parameters of the case were changed?  Would people be so up in arms if it was Chris Brown who had his bruised face shown on the Internet - and indeed would there be such a great deal of interest had it not been Rihanna herself in the car?  Remember that just around the same time Suge Knight was arrested for beating his girlfriend in somewhat similar circumstances - and yet there was nothing of the same fuss made over her apparent plight.

Of course, we are told it is wrong to hit women - and this is something which I wholeheartedly agree with.  But then again it is also wrong for women to take advantage of this position and hit men.  As children we are generally dissuaded from being violent to each other - whether boys or girls.  Indeed at a young age girls are normally slightly larger physically than boys.  So what is right in this?