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

by Sarah Schulman

Escalation can take many forms: • Escalation can be a smokescreen, a way to deflect attention from the real problem at hand because the person acting out doesn’t know how to approach the conflict and doesn’t have support to do the work to make that possible. The only support they have is to blame and assume the role of the “Abused.” • Escalation can be an expression of distorted thinking or mental illness, and can be rooted in earlier experience, some of which may have a biological consequence. These projections from the past onto the present can be expressions of anxiety. They can also be a compulsion, a hyper-vigilant automatic action with no room for thought or consideration of motive, justification, or consequence. • Escalation is almost always exacerbated when parties are members of shallow communities like dysfunctional families and bad friends. Religious/racial/national Supremacy concepts are at the basis of destructive groups, bound together by negative values. • Escalation can be a tactic of the state. In the case of this book’s subject, overreaction to conflict, the patterns are often familiar. Someone says or does or is something that the reacting individual or group doesn’t like. Perhaps the offending person objects to a negative situation, they respond to an unjust structure, or by just being themselves they illustrate difference. In other words, they say or do or are something that requires an individual or a community to examine i...