The vast majority of abusers, I am willing to bet, do not abuse from a place of power, but powerlessness. If we assume that it is natural and basic for human beings a) To desire happiness for themselves and B) To desire happiness for those around them, we can likely also see that given a choice to be happy, and to treat others in such a way as to create happiness in them, abusers would choose the happier path.
When abusers operate from a place of weakness, what is often going on is a pattern that arises from a childhood decision that they made, as an emotional survival tactic. The form of this decision could be something like, âIt is my fault that [X]; therefore, if I can just [X], then [X] wonât happen.â These were effective in early childhood because they contained within them, implicit knowledge about how their volatile or non-nurturing environment worked. They understood implicit the triggers for their environment, and took it upon themselves to act in such a way as to minimize hitting those triggers. But as a result, this effort also created in them a sense that they were the only ones responsible for creating a safe environment for themselves, and if the environment was harmful or hurtful, it was their fault.
Given all of this, the one least useful tactic against abusers is to blame or shame them. Shame, for an abuser, simply re-activates the old logic that their pain is their fault -- and increases the massive pain that they sought relief from in the first place. Shame equals, most of the time, more abuse -- as well as more pain for both abuser and abused.Â
The prevalence in todayâs media of violent, vindictive or vitriolic language against figures like Brock Turner has determined that blind vengeance will win out against a long-term strategy to lessen overall suffering and overall prevalence of abuse. âJusticeâ in air-quotes has won out, again, over not only compassion, but sanity.
Those who attack abusers for their actions, usually in the cruelest terms imaginable, often come from situations themselves in which they have felt abuse. They feel powerless as a result of their experience, and wish to create a platform from which they can get relief from their own self-victimization and pain. Instead, what needs to be done is to create sites and spaces inside of our cities and towns to facilitate the healing of abused people in locations which are separated from their abusers, as well as other abusers. Their anger is a kerosene which could blanket the entire world.
The rise of the Internet at the end of the 20th and the 21st Century has one unintended side-effect in the case of this discourse, and that is to allow the abused to congregate in anger, volatility and blame. Most of the time, the format of the internet -- its lack of human tactility, its emphasis on libertarian attention and its anti-commitment stance -- does not create the loving environment which is necessary for the healing of those who have been abused. Instead, those who feel the story of trauma to be familiar, often use the kernel of their hurt as the seed-pattern for their identity, and cling to it as a way to garner further power through small bouts of relief, i.e. anger, violence and blame.Â
Final proposition: We take away the terms âabusedâ and âabuserâ and settle on something which is polyvalent: âThose who have been affected by abuse.â To level the hierarchy between who does what, in what time, and how, is to remove our consideration from the congealed and mechanistic court of law, and heal our communities on the level of how they feel, who they are, and how they can be better outfitted to promote the happiness, vitality, and belonging that they both long for, and deserve.Â
P.S. It seems interesting to me how, in the 21st Century, the legal system âdisappearsâ certain figures similar to the way that data can seemingly be eradicated with one or two clicks. The disconnected hyperconnectivity of our world can have one effect of strengthening the by-now egregious practice of locking up criminals as a method of âcleaning up our streetsâ -- by emphasizing a fragmented reality in which what we do has very little, if any, to do with each other. There is no longer a universal fabric of life -- stunned, as we are, by the jilted and demoralizing representation of one which is our network society.Â
If we were to move forward I would say: Build for more responsibility.
