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

by Sarah Schulman

thesis is that at many levels of human interaction there is the opportunity to conflate discomfort with threat, to mistake internal anxiety for exterior danger, and in turn to escalate rather than resolve.

Thesis

as unresolved, formerly subordinated or traumatized individuals can collude with or identify with bullies, so can unresolved, formerly subordinated or traumatized groups of people identify with the supremacy of the state.

Hm

completely out of control. For that reason, I am interested, in this book, in examining the phenomenon of overstating harm where it begins in its earlier stage as Conflict,

Conflict, after all, is rooted in difference and people are and always will be different. With the exception of those natural disasters that are not caused by human misdeed, most of the pain, destruction, waste, and neglect towards human life that we create on this planet and beyond, are consequences of our overreaction to difference. This is expressed through our resistance to facing and resolving problems, which is overwhelmingly a refusal to change how we see ourselves in order to be accountable. Therefore how we understand Conflict, how we respond to Conflict, and how we behave as bystanders in the face of other people’s Conflict determines whether or not we have collective justice and peace.

Without in any way minimizing the role of violence in our lives, I am looking, simultaneously, at how a heightened rhetoric of threat that confuses doing nothing, normative conflict, and resistance with actual abuse, has produced a wide practice of overstating harm. And that this overstatement of harm is often expressed in “shunning,” a literal refusal to speak in person with another human being, or group of people, an exclusion of their information, the active obstruction to a person being heard and the pretense that they do not exist. I am

refusing to be self-critical in order to solve conflicts enhances the power of the state.

This choice to punish rather than resolve is a product of distorted thinking, and relies on reinforcement of negative group relationships, when instead these ideologies should be actively challenged. Through this overstatement of harm, false accusations are used to justify cruelty, while shunning keeps information from entering into the process. Resistance to shunning, exclusion, and unilateral control, while necessary, are mischaracterized as harm and used to re-justify more escalation towards bullying, state intervention, and violence. Emphasizing communication and repair, instead of shunning and separation, is the key to transforming these paradigms.

If a person cannot solve a conflict with a friend, how can they possibly contribute to larger efforts for peace? If we refuse to speak to a friend because we project our anxieties onto an email they wrote, how are we going to welcome refugees, immigrants, and the homeless into our communities? The values required for social repair are the same values required for personal repair.

Experiencing anxiety does not mean that anyone is doing anything to us that is unjust.

This central role of anxiety in escalating Conflict is one of the reasons why, in our contemporary time, email and texts are so often the source for tragic separations of potentially enriching relationships.

One of these is “Believe women!” We have this slogan in circulation because so many women are not believed when they tell the truth. But what about when they are not telling the truth? Are we still supposed to believe them? The histories of racism and colonialism remind us regularly that white women lying have been used to justify all kinds of cruelty against people of color, especially Black and Brown men in the United States. When we insist that we must “believe women” no matter what, we do help people who are telling the truth about violations they have experienced. But there are all kinds of truth.

If the movies replicated these restrictive values, movies would be even worse than they are already. No surprises. First impulse, only impulse. But in reality, romance doesn’t always start off on the right foot, two people don’t always see the potential in one another at the same time, and thankfully, other people can change us with their hope, forgiveness, and optimism. We can make each other’s lives better, despite all our

I discovered that I was disturbed by the rapidity with which my colleagues drew conclusions, the viciousness of their suggestions, the unquestioned reliance on punitive authorities, and their own sense of themselves as superior to him at the root of these impulses. I was most disturbed by them drawing these conclusions without ever speaking to him. I realized that, in fact, I had two clearly different options of how to respond. I could solidify my relationship to the group by being outraged, violated, damaged, angry, and fearful and elevate them into rescuers, loyal protectors of my womanhood. Or I could find out what he thought he was doing, and perhaps discover that he had made an error in judgment that we had to address.

no idea of how and when so many of us have come to accept the state as the ultimate authority in our personal conflicts. I was also curious to explore how this benefits the state’s own power.

We now understand that being on the receiving end of violence is an organic part of women’s, children’s, and some men’s daily realities and that it can be reported. These facts are the subjects of many, many books, movies, studies, conversations, and ideologies. And while an extensive legal infrastructure has developed to address these events, the analysis that produced it historically has differed enormously from the ideology that underlines it today. The implementation of this ideology has resulted in social confusions and messaging contradictions that can easily contribute to misplacing blame and overstating harm in some corners, while erasing responsibility and avoiding accountability as violence continues unabated in others.

because of then contemporary social currents gesturing towards big picture structural critique, the movements were more focused on empowering women than on punishing men. Anti-poverty, anti-racist, and women’s liberation movements analyzed violence against women and children within the overlapping of those categories of oppression; patriarchy, poverty, and racism were often cited as roots of violence against women.

As Nancy A. Matthews documents in her 1994 book Confronting Rape: The Feminist Anti-Rape Movement and the State, 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.

violence politics, along with other revolutionary impulses, changed from a focus on working to transform patriarchy, racism, and poverty to cooperation and integration with the police. This has proven to be a significant turn because the police are, ironically, the embodiment of patriarchy, racism, and the enforcement of the US class system. John R.

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.

This crisis in meaning produced a condition of absurdity around these issues. The terms of the debate become corrupted—so vague, elastic, and dishonest—that they ceased to have clear-cut meaning. Citizens too could manipulate the vocabulary of violence to cover up their own destructive and cruel injustices, just like their government did. The focus on the causes of both Conflict and Abuse—male Supremacy, poverty, racism, and an inability to problem-solve—require radical structural change in self-understanding and power. Instead, a simplistic and often destructive emphasis on who is right and who is wrong was replicated so that we, who surround the conflict, could know on whom to inflict punishment, thereby proving our own righteousness.

Similarly, there is no correlation between having the ability to punish and being right.

But let’s turn away from movie stars. In our own realms—families, cliques, communities, workplaces—we have all experienced the patriarch, the male supremacist, the nationalist, the racist, or just the local provincial big man who will not tolerate any opposition. He can never be wrong. He can never apologize. He explodes in rage whenever there is another experience being presented. He belittles others but can’t stand any criticism of himself. He may use sarcasm or cruelty to tear others apart, but his understanding of emotional life is shallow. He won’t allow people to talk to him about what is going on. He doesn’t seek resolution, which means to him that he would have to acknowledge having made a mistake, which is an impossibility. He is petty, the kind of person who sends an attacking email and then, when the recipient phones to discuss the conflict, won’t take the call. He denies complexity, and the people around him do not challenge him directly. His partner, his friends, the people who feel protected by, elevated by, or who benefit from his power, organize other people to not oppose him. They deflect criticism from him. They are careful around him, and are rewarded. He doesn’t ask other people, “What are you feeling?”; never says, “I don’t understand what is going on. How do you see it?” He acts as though others should follow his orders, and when they refuse he punishes, bullies, shuns, makes false accusations, organizes group exclusion, distorts narratives, and may t...

Obviously I am not a clinician, but I have lived, loved, listened, felt, expressed, and observed. I have looked within and without. So without authority beyond my own experiences and how I understand them, I have observed that people living in unrecovered trauma often behave in very similar ways to the people who traumatized them.

LIKE ANY GROUP, a family could be a positive example of a community designed to help its members treat others fairly, to avoid scapegoating and instead be self-critical. Yet in some ways the family is the prototype for the “bad” group. Often a family mythologizes itself as perfection, as the social ideal, in which outsiders are dangerous. And much of the family’s work is about maintaining a strange kind of anti-social version of “loyalty” in which we prove our love to family members by upholding any wrongdoing they commit on others. In some ways, racism, class oppression, nationalism, and religious Supremacy are all family-based systems.