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

by Sarah Schulman

Shunning, therefore, is designed to maintain a unilateral position of unmovable superiority by asserting one’s status as Abused and the implied consequential right to punish without terms.

The cultural status quo of behavior for apartment building living at that time was that if a neighbor was heard “beating his wife,” it was “their” business. Sometimes the police would take the guy for a walk around the block to cool him down, but there was no broad social convention that violence in the home was wrong, or that other people had a responsibility to stop it.

Men’s behavior towards women and children was practically untouchable by community, society, or the law.

increased consciousness of the right to live without violence, the subsequent enormous demand for feminist services like activist-run hotlines and rape crisis centers, and the expansion of service provision created a need for funding in the late 1970s that went beyond grassroots resources. This led to government funding, professionalization, and a bureaucratization of anti-rape collectives and community-based services.

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.

So while police intervention can importantly separate violent adults from their victims or each other after violence has begun, this job of “stopping violence” has shifted from stopping the causes of violence to reacting punitively to the expressions of those unaddressed causes.

While radical anti-violence movements declined, the police got primary control of the official discourse of “ending violence,” at the same time that they were causing violence.

people are either victims or predators, and therefore the answer is always the police, who are also not self-critical. If some of these people were understood as Conflicted instead of only as victim/perpetrator, then the solution to conflict would be mutual accountability and negotiation, rather than escalation, which would locate authority and responsibility far from the hands of the police.

This reductive, dichotomous, bad/good message has been reinforced daily for decades, through corporate entertainment, media, and the arts in a way that justifies the power of the police and falsely presents it as neutral, objective, and value-free.

There is no solid, longitudinal research on the relationship between specialized new laws, legal procedures, or mandatory protocols and changes in rates of violence against women in more disadvantaged communities.

For some women, there may be more punishment, but there may not be more prevention. Calling the police may interrupt real violence, but it is not designed to address the causes of actual violence or actual Abuse, nor does it address the confusion between Conflict and Abuse.

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.

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

Or in terms of casual encounters, quasi-unpleasant to negative sexual experiences are devastating to some, and just the way things go to others.

How previous experiences of trauma contribute to an individual’s understanding of whether or not an experience is Abuse is a factor that we do not have a process of integrating into our understanding of objective crime or objective justice.

Richie reports that Black women are killed by a spouse at a rate that is twice that for white women, in part because Black women cannot afford to leave. Poverty, of course, creates vulnerability both to other people and to the state.

Therefore, the exploitation, watering down, and casual overuse of these arenas of experience are detrimental to Black women, along with women, men, and children of all races who are truly victimized.

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.

So even with complicating those categories, accusations taken at face value without nuance are those most likely to reinforce existing power dynamics.

explaining that she had lied. Yet, because she had no inherent value as a poor woman, her recantation was ignored by the prosecution. 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.

The word “violence” has expanded far beyond the field of physical assault to also mean emotional abuse and, unfortunately, emotional conflict where there is no abuse.

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

the word “violence” should be used to describe physical violence. 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.

The focus of these trigger warnings was usually on sexual violence, but the constraints, by implication, could lead to students being exempted from materials describing colonialism, racial Supremacy, Occupation, or anything that they might find upsetting, even from a Supremacy position.

Certainly, we have seen the rhetoric of Abuse used by Zionists on college campuses to restrain open discussion of the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, for example.

I asked him sincerely why he thought I would be cruel to the people with whom I was engaging. In other words, what would be my motive for being cruel? He said he didn’t know and that’s why he didn’t understand. In other words, there were emotional vulnerabilities, projections, and assumptions at play that kept us from exchanging meaningful ideas.

at the same time that pervasive abuse and violence remain unaddressed, in casual practice, once someone is established as a victim, and the other described as “abusive,” “stalking,” “violent,” “policing,” or “shaming,” the conversation ends.

Once the Abuse charge is organized and launched, it becomes possible for large groups of people to dislike and even punish some targeted person without even knowing what it is, specifically, they have to say or how they understand what is happening, or even exactly what they are accused of having done.

The antidote to violence at home was now officially the violence of the state. Words like Abuse took on double meaning. It retained the initial understanding of one person suffering from “Power Over” by another, but then added a second layer of meaning where the same words became excuses for the state to victimize individuals.

Involved in this process is a fantasy that the police are going to take responsibility for problem-solving out of the hands of the caller. But time and time again, Americans are reminded of the fact that the people who become police officers in the United States are often absolutely incapable of problem solving.

Most gay people my age, in that era, would never ever have considered calling the police about an incident of this nature. You called the police to prevent a crime, like if someone was breaking into your apartment. But no gay person that I knew would have called the police to solve a problem with another gay person by inflicting punishment after the fact. It was almost inconceivable. There was no expectation that the police would care or be helpful.

I do remember once when my girlfriend’s apartment was robbed—this was probably around 1992—and we called the police. When they saw that we were lesbians, they were rude and cocky and insinuating. Their presence in the house was as bad as the robbery.

What I want from her is this: some recognition that she also acted in a way that was unnecessary and did not help. But the system isn’t set up for mutual acts of self-recognition. Unfortunately, because we are locked into a victim/perpetrator dichotomy, it becomes “blaming the victim” to say that the person who got hurt participated in the escalation without actually causing it, even though there is no true relationship between that acknowledgment and blame.

When I think about both of these situations, I think about these women living with lifelong fantasies of how much better their lives would have been if someone had called the police when they were children.

because the communities around them—the friends, the extended family—were, like the mothers, unwilling to intervene and help them to redirect their rage, they were condemned to being angry with the wrong person, thereby depriving themselves of healing, love, and resolution that can only come from facing and dealing with Conflict.

So while the US was punitive, Canada provided a kind of moralistic, controlling, and judgmental freedom based on an early prescriptive articulation of gay “normalcy” rooted in the couple.

Partially due to the small population, partially due to a culture of overlap between government and society, and partially due to their structure of campaign financing, Canadians have easier access to their government than Americans have to theirs.

Since a Supreme Court of Canada decision in 2012, it has been illegal for some HIV positive Canadians to have sex without disclosing their status, in some cases even if they use a condom and no one gets infected.

So a positive person on medication who is virally suppressed is actually a safer sexual partner for someone wanting to remain negative than a person who does not know their status, and therefore could be positive and virally infectious.

In this way, communication between sexual partners has been the mainstay strategy of HIV prevention. With criminalization, the responsibility of negatives is ignored, with all emphasis on either disclosing or calling the police.

this state of being HIV-negative has been recast by the Canadian courts as one of potential victimhood. Once the responsibility to protect one’s self is removed, the negative can re-conceptualize their experience as that of being “criminally wronged,” even if they were never at risk for being infected, simply because their condom-using positive sex partner did not disclose.

the solution of this formally normal, now newly criminalized definition of Abuse? To denounce the sexual partner to the police, even though infection did not take place.

course, thinking this impulse through to its logical conclusion, prison is the worst place for a person who is HIV-positive; appropriate treatments are not accessible, stress is high, and condoms and clean needles are not as available as needed.

Black gay men are three times more accountable, aware, and proactive around safe sex than white gay men. So why the high rates? Because Black men are much more likely to have HIV-positive partners than white men. If they want to have sex with other Black men, their partner pools are more limited and their risk of exposure is overwhelmingly higher.

Lesson: never, ever decide that you know who someone is, what they did, their objective, context or goal, how they feel or what they know, until you ask them. And not asking means a direct investment in not understanding the truth.

risk of being labeled a criminal is now biologically marked—we are infected with criminal potential.

Today, in order to prevent intervention from the criminal justice system and public health officials it could technically be in your best interest not to know your HIV status.

Canadians often complain, rightfully, about US cultural domination, but are very thin-skinned about the kind of self-criticism that US leftists learn to integrate.

In this way, gay marriage is unconsciously understood as an antidote to AIDS, thereby separating “gay” and “AIDS” in the public imagination.

Time allows perpetrators to forget the pain they have imposed. As Bertolt Brecht said, “As crimes pile up, they become invisible.” And so I don’t believe in an ideology of non-response. Therefore, this is no argument for silence.