Truth and Repair Quotes

“Rape could be considered the signal crime of male supremacy, a pure enactment of power for its own sake.”
― Judith Lewis Herman, Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice

“For those who are the most directly victimized, the complicity and silence of bystanders—friends, relatives, and neighbors, not to mention officials of the law—feel like a profound betrayal, for this is what isolates them and abandons them to their fates.”
― Judith Lewis Herman, Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice

“In our system of criminal law, the state, not the victim, is actually considered the injured party, and it is the state, not the victim, that has the exclusive right to take action against a criminal offender.”
― Judith Lewis Herman, Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice

“In the face of common prejudices that blame survivors for whatever happened to them, they want assurances from the community that they did not deserve to be abused.”
― Judith Lewis Herman, Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice

“Survivors do not want their injuries to be trivialized or ridiculed, and they do not want to be blamed for them. They do not want to be dismissed as overly emotional or told to “get over it.” They want their communities to recognize and respect their suffering and to acknowledge the seriousness of the harm they have endured.”
― Judith Lewis Herman, Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice

“The righteous anger of women and other subordinated groups, which violates dominant norms of compliant and willing submission, is always particularly threatening”
― Judith Lewis Herman, Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice

“Prior to any form of action, however, survivors wish for moral vindication. They want bystanders to take a stand, recognize that a wrong has been done, and unambiguously denounce the crime. In the face of common prejudices that blame survivors for whatever happened to them, they want assurances from the community that they did not deserve to be abused. They want the burden of shame lifted from their shoulders and placed on the shoulders of the perpetrators, where it belongs.”
― Judith Lewis Herman MD, Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice

“When men see themselves in power they think that they deserve everything,”
― Judith Lewis Herman MD, Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice

“If traumatic disorders are afflictions of the powerless, then empowerment must be a central principle of recovery. If trauma shames and isolates, then recovery must take place in community.”
― Judith Lewis Herman MD, Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice

“In criminal court, the defendant is presumed to be innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. These two cornerstones of criminal law, the presumption of innocence and the requirement of a very high standard of proof, are designed to tip the scales of justice in favor of criminal defendants, in recognition of the tremendous imbalance of power between individual citizens and the state. But no equivalent consideration is given to the safety and well-being of crime victims who bear witness in court, despite the very real imbalance of power that so often obtains between victim and perpetrator.”
― Judith Lewis Herman, Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice

“Violence does not need to be used very often; it merely needs to be convincing when it is used.”
― Judith Lewis Herman, Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice

“Some extraordinary survivors, recognizing that their suffering is part of a much larger social problem, are able to transform the meaning of their trauma by making their stories a gift to others and by joining with others to seek a better world.”
― Judith Lewis Herman, Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice

“the suffering of traumatized people is a matter not only of individual psychology but also, always, of social justice.”
― Judith Lewis Herman, Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice

“Justice, in this radical vision, means nothing less than an end to patriarchal and racist systems of dominance and subordination, revealing the violence at their heart and repairing their profound harms.”
― Judith Lewis Herman MD, Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice

“Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to Congress, was known to say, “If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.”
― Judith Lewis Herman MD, Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice

“Now, according to the US Department of Labor, white, non-Hispanic women earn on average 79 percent of what white, non-Hispanic men earn. Black women earn 63 percent, and Hispanic women earn 55 percent.6 That would be one metric of progress. At this rate, white women might achieve parity by 2070 or thereabouts, and Black women, fifty years later.”
― Judith Lewis Herman MD, Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice

“Title IX disciplinary actions almost as rare as criminal convictions for sexual assault. Rowan Frost, who directs the Sexual Health, Advocacy and Relationship Education program at Reed College, estimates that if the school has one hundred sexual assaults per year, twenty to forty will be reported, three to five will go through a disciplinary hearing, and one to two students will be disciplined.25 Paradoxically, however, while narrowing the official definition of what “counts” as sexual assault or harassment may have discouraged official Title IX investigations, it has opened the door for more informal and creative ways of responding to sexual misconduct that doesn’t fit within the narrowed guidelines.”
― Judith Lewis Herman MD, Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice

“Nevertheless, as in other situations where impunity is threatened, advocates for the perpetrators mobilized politically to expand the rights of the accused under what I have named the narrative of the Fine Young Man. This is another version of the familiar tactic of DARVO (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender): What happened was sex, not rape. She asked for it. She is a slut. She is crazy. Or maybe she’s just out for revenge because he dropped her, and everyone knows that hell hath no fury, and so forth. The true victim is the Fine Young Man, whose life is about to be ruined by this “witch hunt.” Of course, in this instance the witches are supposedly doing the hunting, which would be a historic first, but never mind.”
― Judith Lewis Herman MD, Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice

“these men were actually afraid of her. “They are so afraid of women’s justified anger, the names they’re going to be called. They’re so ashamed. They can’t face it,”
― Judith Lewis Herman MD, Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice

“One might consider perpetrators of gender-based violence for the most part as opportunistic offenders; that is, they would be much less likely to commit these crimes if they didn’t have very good reason to believe that they would never be held accountable.”
― Judith Lewis Herman MD, Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice

“Too often, Black men are tried, convicted, and sentenced to long prison terms for the same crimes that white men commit with no legal consequences whatsoever. The pernicious racist and patriarchal fantasy of Black assault on “pure white womanhood,” a fantasy that incited lynch mobs in the past, still animates the public today. In those rare instances when a Black stranger attacks a white woman, the state spares no energy in hunting down and punishing the offender. But in reality most rapists are not strangers to their victims; they are acquaintances, bosses, dates, boyfriends, or husbands. Most men who rape white women in the United States are white. As we saw in Chapter 3, their odds of being caught or punished are close to nil.”
― Judith Lewis Herman MD, Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice

“It’s so painful to listen to the suffering; people would rather ignore it.”
― Judith Lewis Herman MD, Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice

“The betrayal by bystanders can take many forms and can be especially painful in movements for social justice, where participants aspire to solidarity and “beloved community” but where patriarchal customs run deep. For this reason many feminists have expressed reservations about adapting RJ processes for crimes of violence against women. When community norms and beliefs are as divided and contentious as they are at present on matters of gender and power, it is hard to trust that community-based justice alternatives will be any more effective than the conventional justice system in addressing gender-based violence.”
― Judith Lewis Herman MD, Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice

“If no one’s punishment leads to My salvation, then accountability is what waits. —Jericho Brown, “Inaugural”
― Judith Lewis Herman MD, Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice

“This kind of letting go cannot be achieved simply by an act of will, however. Emotionally, it is quite different from the immediate, spontaneous, and liberating feeling of forgiveness that many people experience in response to a genuine expression of remorse. To arrive at this unilateral type of forgiveness requires a period of active grieving for everything that has been lost and all the harms that cannot be repaired. Survivors sometimes describe this process as letting go of all their own self-blame and finally forgiving themselves, besides letting go of their anger at the perpetrator. As Mary Walsh, a survivor of domestic violence, put it, “Forgiveness is giving up all hope of a better past.”
― Judith Lewis Herman MD, Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice

“Like so many survivors, she has made meaning of her story by making it a gift to others, hoping to heal not only herself but also other survivors and even, perhaps, to bend a complicit institution toward justice.”
― Judith Lewis Herman MD, Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice

“the lessons of male entitlement: the timeless rules of patriarchy. Though she equaled her “brothers” in courage and shared their dangers, her body was still to be at their disposal.”
― Judith Lewis Herman MD, Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice

“What survivors need from their communities is a commitment to listen to their stories with an open mind and with care and compassion rather than skepticism and scorn.”
― Judith Lewis Herman MD, Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice

“Prosecutors also tend to decline cases of date rape or acquaintance rape, which comprise the majority of cases, when victims do not fit the stereotypical image of “innocence”—that is, they are not young, white, blond, demure, and virginal. They will rationalize this choice on the grounds that juries will be prejudiced against all but the most “perfect” victims.”
― Judith Lewis Herman MD, Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice

“Many are determined that the “cycle of abuse” will stop with them. For many, this will be the only kind of justice within their power to achieve. Any form of accountability for their abusers will remain out of reach.”
― Judith Lewis Herman MD, Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice