Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair

by Sarah Schulman

The state’s protective machine becomes an additional t...

The National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs’ 2014 report on LGBTQI Intimate Partner Abuse noted that “in 2013 the police mis-arrested the survivor as the perpetrator of violence” in over half of all queer domestic abuse arrests. There are particular dangers in misidentifying the perpetrator in same-sex relationships. The one who is butch, of color, not a mother, not a citizen, is from another culture, or HIV-positive can be falsely construed as the assailant.

jesus

There is often the false assumption that the one calling the police is innocent and the one who doesn’t call the police is guilty.

The real violated party may refuse to engage with the legal system for ethical reasons, or fear of the police, or they may refuse to grandstand on that level of language, punishment, or intimidation.

And in cases of Conflict, where Abuse is not present, service providers from the New York LGBT Anti-Violence Project told me that false accusations and illegitimate claims to orders of protection were present among the client base, and that they understood these actions of overstating harm as consequences of “trauma.”

Or they may be so expectant of obedience and successful control of the other that that person’s resistance to being scapegoated, shunned, or bullied gets called Abuse.

that sounds like a hallmark of abuse: resistance becomes a justification for further abuse

If both people are contributing to the problem, then it is mutual and therefore Conflict, and the intervention of the court is unreasonable. And asking for that intervention is similarly unreasonable.

so I guess in the Schulman / grad student conflict, she would consider her contribution having been uncomfortable/experiencing discomfort? therefore turning to the abuse apparatus or seeking intervention would be an overstatement and an escalation rather than an attempt to resolve conflict? still not sure I agree, if that's really how she's theorizing it

“The current paradigm is encouraging all of us to think we are in abusive relationships,” Hodes explained. “And if you are not in an abusive relationship, you don’t deserve help. Being ‘abused’ is what makes you ‘eligible.’ But everyone deserves help when they reach out for it.”

which is an issue of policing, right? because it's fair of them to want/need to stay out of conflict and not escalate, but that still leaves people in a situation that requires assistance/intervention without anyone that can be called in

This is a strikingly humane idea: that the collapse of Conflict and Abuse is partly the result of a punitive standard in which people are made desperate, yet ineligible, for compassion.

Ultimately, the blurring of Conflict and Abuse, Hodes says, “is epidemic, and leads to everyone identifying as a victim, which is paralyzing the search for solutions.”

okay, okay, I think I'm really starting to see/understand the point.

If conflicted people were expected and encouraged to produce complex understandings of their relationships, then people could be expected to negotiate, instead of having to justify their pain through inflated charges of victimization.

There was no agreed upon social responsibility for third-party intervention. The separation of the home from the society, the isolation of the family, and male prerogative were the dominant factors in determining right from wrong. Men’s behavior towards women and children was practically untouchable by community, society, or the law.

And while an extensive legal infrastructure has developed to address these events, the analysis that produced it historically has differed enormously from the ideology that underlines it today. The implementation of this ideology has resulted in social confusions and messaging contradictions that can easily contribute to misplacing blame and overstating harm in some corners, while erasing responsibility and avoiding accountability as violence continues unabated in others.

These initial grassroots movements against violence emerged in the 1960s and were often related to other radical organizing toward transformations of power. As University of Florida professor Kim Emery reminds me, because of then contemporary social currents gesturing towards big picture structural critique, the movements were more focused on empowering women than on punishing men. Anti-poverty, anti-racist, and women’s liberation movements analyzed violence against women and children within the overlapping of those categories of oppression; patriarchy, poverty, and racism were often cited as roots of violence against women.

I know from my own experience as a CETA (Comprehensive Employment and Training Act) worker in a feminist health center that the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 quickly dismantled this twenty-year-old job-training program that had assisted many grassroots organizations. The search for new funding transformed politically motivated services into containment by municipal, state, and federal agencies.

this is really fascinating stuff and definitely worth its own book(s)--is Matthews going to be the primary source on most of this?

Anti-violence politics, along with other revolutionary impulses, changed from a focus on working to transform patriarchy, racism, and poverty to cooperation and integration with the police.

The study shows that New York City “Battered Women’s” shelters alone reported an 80 percent denial rate due to lack of funding in 1982.

State legislatures began to fund shelters in 1994 as a result of the Violence Against Women Act, but these programs have faced opposition over the years such as when California’s then governor Arnold Schwarzenegger implemented a 100 percent cut to domestic violence shelters in 2009, requiring federal intervention.

what possible reason could he have for that

victim centered to perpetrator centered

This placement of the authority to “stop violence” into the hands of the police produces a crisis of meaning.

The police are often the source of violence, especially in the lives of women, people of color, trans women, sex workers, and the poor.

technically, they have a monopoly on it

The law is designed to protect the state, not the people who are victimized by the state.

this job of “stopping violence” has shifted from stopping the causes of violence to reacting punitively to the expressions

What was even more distracting and confusing was that the job of punishing the expressions of patriarchy, racism, and poverty was assigned to the police, who also cause violence.

for example, calling a police when someone might have been kicked out of a bar under racialized circumstances

the integration of the Religious Right into the Republican Party (see my book My American History: Lesbian and Gay Life During The Reagan/Bush Years) and renewed rhetoric of patriotism and authority, along with questions of how to address the origins of violence were dominated by an expanded apparatus of punishment.

Clearly the paradigm shifts in popular expectations and in access to resources, as well as increased education rates for women, no-fault divorce, and other social shifts including increased awareness by the courts and communities, has reduced incidents of real violence.

But is this reduction across the board or is it located in only some demographics? Barner and Carney note that with the shift from community-based feminist movement services to law enforcement-centered and criminally-oriented responses, “arrest and prosecution procedures would seem to fall in line with disproportionate racial demographics in the criminal justice system.”

It is very difficult to measure rates of partner or family violence. It is hard to know if rates of assault are actually rising or falling, or if it is reporting that is rising and falling. We don’t know how to understand fluctuations in the numbers of people who actually make complaints, how the police understand complaints, how complaints lead to arrests, and the relationship between arrests and actual convictions. We don’t have a clear sense of how the police or the courts differentiate between Abuse and Conflict.

Money, whiteness, and education help perpetrators and victims both to evade state intervention.

So I think it is fair to extrapolate that identification with the power hierarchy and state apparatus would make bourgeois and white people feel more entitled to make overstated accusations and have fewer concerns that their access might not be justified ethically.

I agree with the logic but that's still a fairly large claim to make and one that's almost fundamentally unsupportable (for reasons outlined by Schulman above)

In this way, uniting around the accusation allows a group bonded in negative ways to enhance its own status.

makes me think of the ways reddit MRAs dig deep into the victimization when things come up

Like the experience of most traumatized people who make alliances with bullies, she was only listened to when it served the white male agenda: the ideology of white male Supremacy.

as long as the system of domination and power remains intact, winning “rights” or realignment in the hierarchy simply means that the most normative elements of any community gain access to the state apparatus.

the least powerful elements remain the objects of their force.

The definition of “violence” has now expanded to include a new continuum of behaviors and feelings that are also generically used to ascribe a negative value to a person’s actions.

okay, I can tell already this is going to be an iffy section for me

In recent years, we see “violence” and “abuse” being ascribed to social criticism, efforts to understand phenomena, and social and psychological analysis.

okay, okay, I swear I'll give it a shot but it seems telling that she opens by taking issue with "violence" being used to describe anything other than physical assault but then immediately starts to conflate "violence" with "abuse"

For this reason I propose that as part of an evolved consciousness about not exploiting the rhetoric of victimization, the word “violence” should be used to describe physical violence.

I mean, that's fair for setting out a framework but I'm not sure the work done above quite justifies it rather than just describing a perspective/version of the situation in pretty simplistic terms without any actual, real consideration of other perspectives (i.e. frameworks for understanding violence as systemic, non-physical, etc)

Emotional cruelty, shunning, group bullying—these things can be worse than some violence, but they are not the same.

If this wide range of precise experiences is all collapsed into the generic word “violence,” then nothing has any differentiation, therefore all the variations lose meaning.

I think there should also be more consideration of to what extent those variations give/enable meaning and to what extent they are necessary v. getting in the way -- for example, a discussion of campus sexual assault is going to be different from a discussion of racial inequality/discrimination on campus but I think once you're at the point of talking about either specifically, you're already at a depth that nothing has been collapsed and there's no confusion about the type of violence under consideration (i.e. the variations don't simply derive meaning from their labels but from a whole host of other factors)

which they then would have the right to decline to read or view.

I think this second part is operative, because it's presumed but not always accurate -- Oberlin's policy only "strongly encouraged" professors to make potentially triggering content optional and most instructors I know of who use trigger warnings do it as a courtesy to help ensure that students who may be triggered are prepared and able to deal with the content appropriately on their own terms, which is, if we're being precise about experiences and not collapsing variations and their meaning, very much the opposite of giving students the freedom to pass over the content without engaging. UC Santa Barbara though I think did require professors not punish students for not attending class (though that doesn't say they aren't still responsible for engaging with the content, just that they don't physically need to attend the class to do so)

However, at the same time, any student who has criticism, insight, or objection to these elements has the equal right to express their views in detail.

that's kind of a bigger issue, though, and there are a lot of unstated assumptions tied up in this point -- for example, that critique/insight/objection can counter/remedy any potential harm in response, that the culture of such a classroom doesn't fundamentally perform a disservice to those in marginalized groups (which again is the point/value of trigger warnings -- creating an even playing field so that all are able to derive whatever from the material despite different obstacles, etc.)

The problem with shunning is that it keeps information that can be productive out of the realm of consideration. Healthy discourse means dealing with what exists and coming into some kind of relationship of understanding with reality. Defended discourse forbids or shuns certain perspectives or contexts to information.

could lead to students being exempted from materials

but that's a slippery slope argument, right?

actual sexual and physical abuse do not usually take place in a classroom.

right -- but then, in the context of an arts classroom where it's presumed that no small part of what's under discussion/examination is in some way a reflection of the real world (as Schulman put it just above: "dealing with what exists and coming to some kind of relationship of understanding with reality"), the argument that "actual...abuse [does] not usually take place in a classroom" kind of starts to lose impact. also, that claim in and of itself is an argument for trigger warnings: it seems like Schulman would not argue that someone who had been abused in a classroom need necessarily return to a classroom (or at least that she wouldn't blame them from opting out of attending the space they were traumatized in) but isn't that the same slippery slope where she claims that students might not ever have to deal with anything uncomfortable? my point being, student A was traumatized in classroom X and nobody is going to force them to go to classroom Y which isn't classroom X but is similar enough to cause issues: why then does that not apply to the depiction of the trauma/violence, etc, beyond arbitrarily deciding the setting is an acceptable/valid trigger?

So intellectual, educational settings are among the few places in life where these things can be analyzed and engaged with depth without threat of actual physical danger. Being reminded that one was once in danger has to be differentiated from whether or not one is currently in danger.

okay, scratch that last comment: she's making the argument that classrooms are safe spaces. but are they? and what is the responsibility to someone that doesn't feel that way?

Being conscious about one’s own traumatized past experiences, and how they manifest into current traumatized behavior, can be a force for awareness of one’s own reactions, not a means of justifying the repression of information.

He then phoned me, thereby automatically giving me his phone number, so that whole sub-struggle had been yet another unnecessary expression of pointless, circular control.

the conversation ends.

but to turn it around, isn't that also them victimizing their self by being so upset about being labeled XYZ?

“I’m going to call the police”

The same words and the same actions have dual use: to protect from harm, and to inflict harm.