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

by Sarah Schulman

I have to ask myself what the white police officers, the wealthy football player, and the militarized nation state think is happening that produces and justifies their brutal actions.

some factions within Gaza responded with rockets that were of such poor quality they had only symbolic impact.

they overreacted at a level that produced tragedy, pain, and division.

My thesis is that at many levels of human interaction there is the opportunity to conflate discomfort with threat, to mistake internal anxiety for exterior danger, and in turn to escalate rather than resolve.

Just as unresolved, formerly subordinated or traumatized individuals can collude with or identify with bullies, so can unresolved, formerly subordinated or traumatized groups of people identify with the supremacy of the state.

I now am able to ask you to read this book the way you would watch a play: not to emerge saying, “The play is right!” but rather to observe that the play reveals human nuance, contradiction, limitation, joy, connection, and the tragedy of separation.

With the exception of those natural disasters that are not caused by human misdeed, most of the pain, destruction, waste, and neglect towards human life that we create on this planet and beyond, are consequences of our overreaction to difference.

I am examining the inaccurate claiming of “abuse” as a substitute for problem-solving. I make plain how this deflection of responsibility produces unnecessary separation and perpetuates anxiety while producing cruelty, shunning, undeserved punishment, incarceration, and occupation.

when we are in the realm of Conflict, we can move from the Abuse-based construction of perpetrator and victim to the more accurate recognition of the parties as the conflicted, each with legitimate concerns and legitimate rights that must be considered in order to produce just resolution.

If the powers that be had invited people with HIV into their halls and said, “We have a conflict here. Therefore we need to sit down together and solve it,” people with HIV would not have had to do civil disobedience, for which they and their supporters were arrested by the police. It was the shunning that made them have to do this. It was the immoral shunning that criminalized people with HIV.

Is she flirting with me? I am the stranger here; the others are her workmates. I don’t know if she is always like this, if she is flirting with someone else at the table, or if this is for my benefit. Is this “inadvertent” or is it “intentional.” Is she innocent of being sexually suggestive or is she guilty?

If I attempt to follow up in order to discover if this was actually aimed at me, I too could be seen as a harasser; after all, this is a professional relationship. Human Resources could be called in to hurt me. Or, just as easily, my interest could be reciprocated. I have to be very, very careful.

We have been excluded, shunned, imprisoned, and murdered for knowing or believing that desire is reciprocated. Sex workers, especially trans women, often lose their lives expressly because they were desired. And certainly “homosexual panic defense” has been used successfully in courts to justify the murders of gay men, perhaps gay men who had absolutely zero sexual interest in their assailant; or cis women, trans women, or gay men who responded to another man’s wanting.

Just because you want me, doesn’t mean I have to hurt you. Especially if I also feel attractions that I don’t pursue for reasons of projections from my past. I don’t have to avoid you, ignore your call, refuse to return your email, or block you. We can actually talk to each other, and find the other ways and realms in which to connect. We can be people. We can deal with it.

Uneven desire is not a crime, it is not rude, it is not an assault or grounds for shunning or being hurtful. It’s just life and we can still be friends. For real. Even forever. But we have to talk.

Of course intrinsic to white Supremacy is the internal fantasy and external projection that Black people want what white people have. So while Black people are the ones who are endangered, they have been falsely positioned as dangerous and threatening to whites in order to justify white cruelty.

Refusing to communicate has always been one of the main causes of false accusation as it guarantees negative fantasy about the other,

Without conversation, it is the person with the most limitations who is in control. The desirable goal for all of us is not to restrict those who can, but to bring more communication skills to those who can’t.

your secret makes you feel as though you are being pressured … by me. Even though that is not what is happening, the actual source of the pressure is that we didn’t speak.

And, sadly, I have only made it all worse by now being in the arena of what I know is going to be simplistically called “too much” when in reality it is frankly and literally not enough. Five texts are culturally stigmatized as excessive, but they only cover a minute or two of conversation.

Just call! Emailing to ask for permission to speak privileges the rage, Supremacy, and Trauma of withholding over the human responsibility to communicate and understand.

The real question is: Why would a person rather have an enemy than a conversation? Why would they rather see themselves as harassed and transgressed instead of have a conversation that could reveal them as an equal participant in creating conflict?

Consequently, making an accusation does not make us right, being angry does not make us right, refusing to communicate does not make us right. In fact, all those things could make us very, very wrong.

They may live within groups, relationships or families that do not tolerate the admission of mistakes, and that reinforce Supremacy ideologies about each other in order to maintain illusions of righteousness.

This strategic evolution reveals a newly articulated goal to stop organizing the conversation in a way designed to automatically produce the pre-determined revelation that the person is being abused.

Which kind of safety are we endorsing here? Is it the safety from psychological “power over” and actual harm? Or is it the safety from being made uncomfortable by accurate information that challenges one’s self-perception?

In fact, helping each other negotiate is the bedrock of a healthy and active community, clique, family, country.

I discussed the phenomena of mixed, interactive, dynamic neighborhoods being characterized as “dangerous.” I address how homogenizing those neighborhoods through displacement and cultural flattening was falsely characterized as “getting better.”

Asking, “What exactly are you afraid of?” can produce answers that reveal either Conflict or Abuse.

It is unethical to hurt someone because we have been told to do so. We are required by decency to ask both the complainant and the accused how they understand the situation.

Anyone who refuses to hear the details is making a deliberate decision not to understand.

if shunning in the context of Conflict is detrimental to the other person and has no terms, it is purely employed as an act of cruelty/punishment or avoidance/denial of responsibility, and is not justified.

At all times, Hodes says, there needs to be articulation of “context, objective, impact.”

Refusing to be shunned for unjust, nonexistent, or absurd reasons is not “stalking.” Resisting unjustified punishment is not Abuse. And people who are being asked to stand by and passively allow shunning to take place certainly should know exactly what the accuser is claiming and exactly what the shunned party is experiencing.

Simply wanting to exclude, silence, or dehumanize someone through forced absence is not an inherent right.

As always, the people who determine whether or not unjust shunning take place are the surrounding community—they can refuse to participate, or they can blindly endorse it.

Members have to actively take responsibility for the ethics and moral values that their small or large group claims to represent and actually enact this responsibility. And nothing reveals this more clearly than how difference is treated.

We were discussing the cruelty to the former partner and to the child, the vindictiveness, the destruction of the community, the endless longing and irresolution that it produces, and I asked Kendell how these women justified these actions. “It’s the cadre of friends,” she said.

Once he saw that I was establishing a new parameter for the relationship by resigning as his advisor, but that at the same time I was neither punishing him, invoking authority, shunning him, nor withholding, we transitioned positively into the next phase.

These people found both the material and emotional consequences overwhelming, but even more so they were hurt by the amorphous nature of the problem. Not being able to know exactly what they were charged with, not being able to talk through the accusations, never knowing where they would face these hostile expressions drove many people to extreme suffering. Even later when classic McCarthyism was dismantled and delegitimized, these unnecessarily broken relationships could not be healed.

The legal apparatus that has been put in place ostensibly to assist a victim can and often is used to extend the cruelty as well as to keep the perpetrator from facing their own issues. The system by which we help people step out of conflict is so flawed, and the general understanding in the population so over-simplified that, for example, when the police answer a distress call to a private home, “Survivors may be arrested at the scene,” Hodes said. “Or cross complaints may be issued.”

Perpetrators increasingly are the ones to call the police, threaten legal action, send lawyer letters, or threaten or seek restraining orders as part and parcel of their agenda of blame and unilateral control.

The state’s protective machine becomes an additional tool of harassment.

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.

Despite the assertions of Supremacy ideology, projecting onto another person or blaming them for things they have not caused, punishing them for things that never happened, organizing group shunning against them, or any other manifestation of mislabeling Conflict as Abuse are not “rights.”

“Abusers externalize,” she says. “It’s always somebody else’s fault.” So if the parties are able to spell out and honestly discuss their own roles, then they are more able to create solutions, which is what the abuser fears.

One of Hodes’ many valuable suggestions is to lower the bar for what must happen in a person’s life for their suffering to be acknowledged. “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.”

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.

So they fall back on the accusation of Abuse to guarantee that they will not be questioned in a way that confirms these fears. Especially vulnerable to this are those who experienced profound disapproval and criticism early on as children, who are later locked into self-righteous families or Supremacy communities with negative bonds.