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

by Sarah Schulman

“When a provider is trained, they are told what domestic violence is,” Hodes said in her presentation. “But I was never told what it is not. And based on what I was taught, I could have looked at every relationship I know and called it abusive.” She suggested that social workers change their methodology, and instead of simply asking, “Are you abused?” ask clients questions that would elicit more information. She encouraged the workshop’s new professionals to create interactive conversation with clients, rather than narrow experience down into easy categories. 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. Instead, the conversation should be redirected to elicit a deeper and more multifaceted factual understanding of what is actually happening, in order to reveal more nuance and dimension that could lead to real solutions. Knowing what really happened is more important than deciding who to punish. One suggestion was to ask the client: “Are you unsafe, or are you instead uncomfortable, angry, or hurt?” People who describe themselves as “Abused” when they are actually in Conflict are not lying; they usually don’t know the difference. We’re not talking here about the tired false cliché of the vindictive woman who “cries rape” or diabolically constructs the other as an abuser while knowing full well that the charge is false. Wh...