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

by Sarah Schulman

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. Expressions of this confusion appeared on network television. There is the zeitgeist and then there is the corporate zeitgeist. Television shows like Law and Order: Special Victims Unit surfaced with a focus on sex crimes and family violence. In a typical episode, a purely innocent victim, who does not participate in creating conflict and is inherently good, is stalked/abused/attacked by a purely and inherently evil predator. The answer to the conundrum is the police. Popular mass entertainment, a corporate entity that is not self-critical, makes the message clear: 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. Unfortunately, the necessary social conversation that could help us to understand how people participate in the escalation of conflict became conflated with the real crisis of blaming victims, even though they are two entirely separate things. As I will discuss later, the issue of how people operating with Supremacy ideology escalate conflict was ign...