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

by Sarah Schulman

Instead of encouraging people to label themselves either as victim or as abuser when that may or may not be the case, the role of the friend, caseworker, family member, or witness here was not to reinforce distorted thinking or justifications of punishment and victimology, but rather to elicit a truthful and complex telling, at the base of which is something that novelists, like myself, know very well: Truths can be multiple and are revealed by the order of events. As I teach in my creative writing classes, each moment is a consequence of the previous moment. So truths can be complex, and complexity is articulated by its details. Anyone who refuses to hear the details is making a deliberate decision not to understand. “She yelled at me; she’s abusive.” Is that an originating action? Or is that a response? Were you sitting innocently eating your breakfast and she yelled at you because there was no milk, and you are responsible for serving her at every turn, which would be Abuse? Or did she yell at you because you stole her milk money in order to buy drugs? Which would mean that you created the originating action and the yelling was a consequence of that action. So there is Conflict about your addiction, and the Abuse accusation is a smokescreen to avoid facing it. Or were you so traumatized from being demeaned constantly as a child that as an adult you can’t tolerate difference, and any normative challenge is perceived of as an assault or threat? Is it that, in fact, nothin...