By Nate Sanchez

Senior Columnist

For the past few weeks, athletes have been under the white-hot spotlight of American awareness. Why? They won’t stop beating people, especially women.

The Ray Rice scandal is the tip of the tip of an iceberg that just won’t melt. Oh, and by the way, Ravens ownership knew about everything and tried to cover it all up.

Rice isn’t alone in the pantheon of abusers in the National Football League. According to authorities in May, Carolina Panthers defensive end Greg Hardy “choked his then-girlfriend, threw her around, dragged her by her hair and threatened to kill her.” The Panthers released him Sunday, four months after the incident and one game into the season. He’ll still receive his pay while he’s inactive.

Damian Trujillo of NBC Bay Area reported two weeks ago that San Jose Police Department confirmed the arrest of San Francisco defensive end for allegedly assaulting his pregnant girlfriend at his birthday party. He’s yet to sit out a game.

Adrian Peterson, one of the league’s most beloved players, was recently indicted for reckless and negligent injury to a child after disciplining his son with a thin tree branch to the point of bleeding and bruising.

But let’s take a step back from sports. It’s here that we can see an uncomforting truth. Domestic violence is not a sports issue. It’s a societal issue.

And it doesn’t stop at violence. There’s a lack of respect for women in general. Today, Jameis Winston (the reigning Heisman Trophy winner) will sit out his team’s game against Clemson. First for standing on a table and yelling an obscenity from a news blooper made famous by the internet, then lying about it to school authorities about what actually happened.

For every one Ray Rice, there are many more “boyfriends.” The National Coalition Against Domestic Violence says that one in every four women will experience domestic violence in her lifetime and that 1.3 million women are victims of assault by an intimate partner each year.

And it’s not just men in football. Even Hope Solo of the U.S. Women’s National Soccer team continues to play while investigations ensue concerning allegations that she injured her half-sister and 17-year-old nephew.

I love sports, but sometimes I can’t stand the people who play them. For reasons I can’t explain, we value their physical abilities to a point where we let them slide through a controversy that would’ve condemned any “normal person” socially and legally.

They fall from the height of our good graces, and then we pick them up and exalt them until they’re back where they were so we can forget about the whole thing. If we lived in a less socially-conscious or media-savvy era, nothing would get done.

But the evidence is piling up and money is being lost, which brings us to another issue. Why is it that while the NFL has athletes doing these horrible things, change comes after business sponsors begin to cut ties and pull away revenue?

Is the NFL’s financial bottom line more important than the people they call their fans? An estimated 50 percent of the league’s fanbase is female. Let’s forget morals for a second and look at this from a purely financial standpoint. To offend half of your customers, regardless of gender is bad for business, especially if your business brought in $9.5 billion last year.

I can’t see how this issue is going anywhere in the near future. The key to curing this ill needs to be applied preemptively. What we know to be common sense (“Don’t hurt other people”) apparently needs to be taught and reinforced from an early age. The NFL can’t do that.

Since we can’t monitor everyone’s home life to make sure they’re on the right track, we need to hold athletes accountable for their actions the same way anyone else would. No more slaps on the wrist.

It seems that the combination of excessive wealth, nonstop praise and sense of self-importance issued to athletes by their respective leagues gives some the aura of being above authority. This is the root of the problem and it must stop.