#interpersonal harm

[hungerpunch]

everybody causes harm

some images & words that i have magpie collected in recent years about transformative justice.

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there is no one who will go through life without hurting someone else, full stop. a lot of people, understandably, feel shame when they cause harm. the unfortunate truth is that shame only ever obstructs us from real growth and transformation. shame results in appeasement, not accountability.

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really take the time to study the difference. understanding that everybody harms and you're not a special villain for hurting others will cut the legs off of your shame a bit. and once you know that you do not want to just appease a person or situation, you can use the energy that you were feeding to shame to take steps toward real accountability instead.

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full article

in answer to a question posed by @metamatar, "what's the message for those of us who have done someone wrong and have to live with it?" i am hoping you find these messages herein: we have all been harmed and we all cause harm; causing harm is not exceptional. what is exceptional is taking true accountability. and thru it, repairing the harm you caused. every time you practice this, you will be less likely to cause harm in that way again and your relationships will become healthier as both you and the other party start to trust that you are someone who repairs harm when caused.

transformative justice is something i genuinely believe in. i'm not an expert but i am happy to point anyone to more resources.

[dorkichiban]

thinking about the phrase “the only way to prevent [harming others] is to be constantly checking ur own behavior“ and i think its important to understand that people can be harmed even when you’re doing you’re absolute best and that this isn’t always a result of some kind of horrific failure on your part. its not just that people can harm others but that sooner or later people (including you) almost certainly will harm others and having the ability to navigate those situations is just as important as developing the skills to try avoiding being the cause of harm for other people in the first place.

[tracingpatterns]

It’s Not An Excuse

In this post, Buddhini Samarisinghe writes about the way that abusers use a history of trauma to excuse harm and enable further abuse. She writes:

I know that the man who abused me used his baggage to entrap me. I know that I explained away a lot of his abusive behaviors because of his baggage. The man who abused me is a skilled manipulator. Gaslighting is second nature to him, and he would spin stories to fit his agenda without batting an eyelid.

As a survivor of his abuse, it’s hard for me to separate the truth from his lies. I spend a lot of my time trying to do this – alone, with friends, with my therapist. Sometimes, questioning the things he told me feels wrong because of the essence of the question. Think about it – “did he really experience childhood abuse or was he just saying that so I would feel sorry for him?” Now try to imagine how awful a childhood abuse survivor would feel to have their experiences questioned like this.

As a survivor of his abuse, I often notice that I am expected to take these extenuating circumstances into account when I consider his abuse. As if his baggage is somehow an excuse for what he did. As if I owe him empathy – as if I owe him the courtesy – to take these things into account when I take stock of my devastated sense of self. I hate how I am expected to be kind and empathetic and watch my language when I talk about this man who harmed me because he (allegedly) has a history of mental illness, substance abuse, childhood abuse. Accounting for his baggage and nuancing how I express my hurt and anger feels wrong. 

It’s wrong to expect the survivor of abuse to have empathy for their abuser.

[tracingpatterns]

No Repercussions

This harrowing long-read by Melissa Jeltsen and Dana Liebelson outlines the intersection of state violence and intimate partner abuse:

In 1991, a researcher at Arizona State University testified to a congressional committee about a survey she’d conducted of more than 700 police officers. Forty percent admitted that they had “behaved violently against their spouse and children” in the past six months (although the study didn’t define “violence”). In a 1992 survey of 385 male officers, 28 percent admitted to acts of physical aggression against a spouse in the last year—including pushing, kicking, hitting, strangling and using a knife or gun. Both studies cautioned that the real numbers could be even higher; there has been startlingly little research since.   Even counting arrests of officers for domestic crimes is no simple undertaking, because there are no government statistics. Jonathan Blanks, a Cato Institute researcher who publishes a daily roundup of police misconduct, said that in the thousands of news reports he has compiled, domestic violence is “the most common violent crime for which police officers are arrested.” And yet most of the arrested officers appear to keep their jobs. Philip Stinson, an associate professor of criminal justice at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, uses an elaborate set of Google news alerts to identify arrests of law enforcement personnel and then attempts to track the outcome through news reports and court records. Between 2005 and 2012, he found 1,143 cases in which an officer was arrested for a crime of domestic violence. While he emphasized that his data is incomplete, he discovered convictions in only 30 percent of the cases. In 38 percent, officers either resigned or were fired and in 17 percent, he found no evidence of adverse consequences at all. Stinson noted that it wasn’t uncommon for police to be extended a “professional courtesy” in the form of a lesser charge that might help them avoid the Lautenberg Amendment [a federal law that prohibits anyone convicted of misdemeanor domestic abuse from owning a gun]. Officers could be booked for disorderly conduct instead of domestic assault. If they were charged with domestic violence, the prosecutor might allow them to plead to a different offense. Stinson has identified dozens of officers who are still working even after being convicted. Through public records requests, we also obtained hundreds of internal domestic abuse complaints made about police officers between 2014 and 2016 in 8 of the 10 largest cities in the country. Officers can be penalized internally whether or not criminal charges are filed —although the penalties may be minor and many complaints are not substantiated. An ABC 7 investigation this February found that nine of every 10 domestic violence allegations made against Chicago police officers by spouses or children resulted in no disciplinary action.

[tracingpatterns]

Confronting Abuse in Polyamorous Relationships – P.S. I Love You

The underlying cause of abuse is an attitude of superiority, entitlement, and control rooted in cultural and social messaging. Within the…

In polyamorous relationships, where we often explore romantic territory without a map of cultural reference points, it can be especially difficult to discern all the nuances. The subtle, shifting dynamics and complex problems of multiple partners can be part of the thrill of nonmonogamy, but it can also lead us to overlook the particularly challenging and painful presence of abusive behavior. This guide by Rebecca G. Power explores various ways that emotional abuse can play out within non-monogamous relationships.

[tracingpatterns]

This Isn’t Romance

In response to the much publicized stunt of a man who vowed to play his piano until the woman who rejected him relented and took him back, Tauriq Moosa writes an impassioned critique of our society’s twisted ideas -- and portrayals -- of romance: 

Rejection is painful, but that pain doesn’t give anyone license to disregard another individual’s assertion of boundaries – which is what rejection is: a drawing of lines excluding us. People are allowed to draw up whatever boundaries they like in terms of who they wish to spend time with or date. As adults we should learn to accept this and move on. But men have long been taught to disregard boundaries, as any glance at statistics of street harassment demonstrates.

People learn behaviours as they grow up in many ways, and it’s not just parents but society and pop culture that teach us what’s acceptable. And these things teach us that such entitled behaviour is not only welcome, but a normal part of relationships. One of the highest rated sitcoms of all time, The Big Bang Theory, has a lead female character outline the basis of her romantic relationship with the male lead by saying: “He started to slowly wear me down.” Cue laughter. On another occasion: “He didn’t trick me, he just wore me down.” More laughs.

Instead of being welcomed willingly into her life, he had to “wear” down her boundaries until she felt forced to let him in. That’s not a love story, that’s a home invasion. Films like Love Actually, The Notebook, and many others tell us that men’s persistence in the face of rejection is admirable. It’s a “struggle” that a heterosexual man must go through to “get the girl.”

Showing this boundary crossing behaviour as acceptable, instead of a problem, tells men it is OK in real life. As the academic Julia Lippman noted, “depictions of these romanticized pursuit behaviors can in fact have a clear and negative impact, in that they can lead people to see stalking as a less serious crime than they otherwise would.”

[tracingpatterns]

Many people are often not immediately aware of the harm that something (or someone) is doing to them. That’s because we’re taught to ignore our own feelings and treat them as invalid until 'proven' by the 'evidence.' Sometimes all we really get – if anything – is a vague sense of unease that we’re tempted to immediately dismiss as 'not a big deal.' No, don’t dismiss it. Listen to that unease. Act on it. Set the boundary. You can always unset it later if you decide it really isn’t a big deal. It’s much easier to walk back a boundary than it is to set one after years of putting up with something that’s hurting you. You don’t need to be triggered by something, or experience strong negative reactions to it, in order to have the right to set boundaries around it. If we set thresholds for 'acceptable' boundaries, then we’ll be effectively forcing people to out themselves as abuse survivors or mental illness sufferers or whatever in order to be able to set their boundaries.

Miri, Brute Reason

[tracingpatterns]

This Is Not An Apology

In brilliant column at Elle magazine, Sandy Doyle challenges the idea that women apologize too much, writing:

Research confirms that women do, in fact, apologize more often than men. But there's reason to be suspicious of the tendency to blame it all on women, or their low self-confidence. For one thing: The research points to the idea that the disparity arises not from the fact that women are socialized to apologize "too often," but from the fact that men are not socialized to apologize at all.

Doyle goes on to list some characteristics of a bad apology:

The explanation-for-accountability swap. This is a deflection technique that dismisses the injury and forces the injured party to consider and empathize with the offending party -- something the latter is not willing to do in the slightest if they can’t even offer a simple apology that acknowledges harm.

The false-target maneuver. The offending party "apologizes," but not for the thing they did wrong. Having failed to grasp their original wrongness, but aware that an apology has been requested, they begin casting about for the apology they feel most comfortable giving. 

The unearned appeal to empathy. The offending party expresses hurt though it is plainly clear the two parties are not equally wounded and cannot be assumed to be in equal amounts of pain. This maneuver places them on a level playing field, and thereby denies the severity of the original offense. Really, says the appeal to empathy, you should be apologizing to me, if you think about it.

Doyle goes on to highlight the toxic issue at the root of the “apology gap”:

Here is where the research on the gender apology gap comes in, and here's where it gets interesting. It's not just that men are socialized to apologize less—they're socialized not to believe the apologies are necessary. There are plenty of theories for why men don't apologize—maybe they're afraid to be vulnerable! Maybe they're asserting dominance!—but, according to the 2010 study that confirmed the presence of the apology gap, the answer is a lot simpler than that. After "[analyzing] the number of self-reported offenses and apologies made by 66 subjects over a 12-day period," scientists found that women apologized more, but also that "women report more offenses than men." It wasn't that women over-apologized, and it wasn't that men under-apologized; both genders gave apologies whenever they believed they had done something wrong. Men were less likely to believe they could be wrong.

Image by Thomas Hawk (Flickr, CC BY-NC)