Non-survivor privilege and silence
While it shouldn’t be a privilege to escape abuse in this life, there are trappings of privilege for those who have been so lucky. I know it’s an odd thing to say, and it’s a realization I’ve been slowly moving toward since childhood, but it works like this:
- Once you survive abuse or violation, you have a knowledge of the human capacity for nastiness that others around you don’t share.
- It is your duty to keep them blissfully ignorant at the expense of your own soul.
- When they chatter on about how disgraceful it is for a child not to be on speaking terms with his family, you are a rude asshole if you remind them that the abuse rate in the US and most countries is staggering, so maybe the child had good reason.
- When you’re the child they’re complaining about, no one will take your side if you try to explain to them six ways from Sunday why it’s much, much better for everyone that you have no contact with your parent/family/ex-husband, or eventually give up and tell the person to mind its own business.
- If you try to tell your friends that their latest crush shows signs of being violent or abusive, they’ll hate you. If you turn out to be right, they’ll hate you more.
And so on, and so forth. Honestly, if I go through every example, I’ll get too depressed to finish the article. Most of them come from personal experience.
And this – more than anything – is why I hate human beings. Because out of those of you who’ve had the good fortune not to be abused or violated in your lifetime, maybe 1 in 1,000 can be bothered to muster sympathy for those who have. Oh, if you see an abused child on Oprah you cry your heart out, sure. But I’m talking about putting the feelings of a survivor ahead of your own when they’re right there in your face.
When they’re someone you know; someone very much like you. When you get that crumpled feeling in the gut that it’s only random chance it was them and not you, and your first instinct is to explain away why it happened to them (and could therefore never happen to you). Or deny that it happened at all. Or have the awkward sympathetic moment you find yourself trapped in, but immediately pull back to superficiality with this person you once called friend.
When you make some ignorant comment about abuse and someone corrects you with a story from her own experience and your first instinct is to prove her wrong, maybe the “greenest” thing you could do for the environment is become part of it already. Yeah, I’m so gosh darn mean, but goddamnit, this needs to be said.
Those of us who’ve experienced abuse, rape and other violations don’t keep it quiet because we’re ashamed. Or because it’s intensely personal. The main reason we keep it quiet is because we know how you’ll treat us if we tell you. We know you have a culturally-granted privilege to remain ignorant. To not know, and therefore not to be responsible. Not to bother. Not to think about it.
And certainly not to do anything that might help stop or at least curtail it somewhat in the future.
But you are responsible. If you’re not aware that statistically a certain percentage of the people you know must have experienced physical, emotional or sexual abuse at some point in their lives, you are helping the perpetrators of those crimes keep working in the shadows. Because as long as you imagine the problem doesn’t really touch anyone you know, the problem stays hidden.
I saw on a forum the other day some people discrediting a study about rape statistics. “If this study is true,” one poster said, “then about a fourth of the women I know must have been raped at some point, and that’s just not true.” How can anyone think that because a fourth of the women he knows haven’t told him, “Oh, by the way, I’ve been raped before” they must not have been? The answer is: they can’t. They’re beating the knowledge to the punch. They’re shouting in every way they can, “You will not drag me kicking and screaming to the realization that life isn’t fair and I’m one lucky shit not to have suffered worse than I have!”
He might as well help round up victims for abusers. He’s perpetuating the unfairness by perpetuating the silence.
As long as you’re more concerned about your right to be in la-la land denial than someone else’s right not to go through hell, you are fighting on the abuser’s side.
The fact that this is a privilege you are granted through the culture which dictates that abuse victims should lie rather than tell Nice People an uncomfortable truth says something odious about the culture. We are a culture of abuse. We believe strongly in the rights of the best-funded 5% to rule over the less-funded and harder-working 95%. We convince ourselves it’s only natural if certain people, defined by such superficialities as gender and skin color rather than important traits like capability or good judgment, should rule. We convince ourselves that cleaning lady who works two jobs just to make ends meet couldn’t possibly have had the cure for cancer locked in her brain behind a lack of education, so no big loss of potential there!
It’s all part of the same thing. As soon as you decide it’s okay for some people to carry double and triple burdens so that others may carry nothing at all, you have decided abuse is pretty neat and you’re all for it. And if that’s the case, all I’m asking is that you shuck off your privilege and take responsibility for the decision you’ve made and the side you’ve taken.
Ignorance is not “nice.” It’s not “good people.” It’s not “I was just trying to have a nice dinner party, why’d she go and bring up a thing like that when all we were doing was saying how gosh awful wonderful the person who abused her is and how much we’d all like to see him elected God.” Ignorance is the hammer in the hand of oppression.
Scarlett on 13 May 2008 at 6:32 am #
Becoming a survivor of abuse and addiction opened my eyes so wide to the culture of abuse. My ex was emotionally abusive (it’s more subtle than verbal abuse) and was the one who helped drive me to the addiction… yet mutual friends WHO HAD WITNESSED HIS ABUSE found it so easy to say ’she left him, she’s a bitch’.
It hurts when I hear blanket statements of ‘I have no sympathy for a woman who stays in an abusive relationship’. Dude, the beauty of an abusive relationship is that it’s creeping. You put up with more and more and excuse more and more. You can’t just say ‘if I was treated the way he treats her, I’d leave’.
The funny thing is, all the strong people I know are survivors of abuse and/or addiction. (Usually one causes the other.) I just wish people were more open to the idea that abuse can happen to anyone… that it’s not just something they must have done.
Jennifer Kesler on 13 May 2008 at 6:53 am #
And if you believe that “relationships are work” and only lazy people throw in the towel early, a lot of that abuse can masquerade as “compromises.” Women aren’t educated on where the line between compromise and taking crap should be drawn.
Anna on 13 May 2008 at 4:39 pm #
For myself, I know there seems to be this constant condemnation of “man-hating feminists” – because as we all know no woman in this world has a reason to hate men.
I read their stories of abuse and survive and it curls my hair six ways from Sunday. How can I pretend that there’s something “wrong” with so many women who hate men? There is reason, there is reason, there is reason. And there but for the grace of Whomever go I, because heaven knows I’ve narrowly avoided a few awful situations not on some magical skill or by “trying” hard enough, but because I am *lucky*.
For what it’s worth, I can never condemn anyone for not talking to their parents. I just wish that more of the people I know hadn’t been forced to grow up in abusive situations.
Scarlett on 13 May 2008 at 5:00 pm #
If by ‘relationships are work’ you mean ‘*I*’ do the work’, then that sounds about right. I went to bed last night thinking about how LUKCY I actually was because I have several friends with backgrounds in abuse and several mutual friends who knew from the way he acted in public that he treated me badly.
The thing that really frustrates me is that people often don’t get how creeping abuse can be. We had a great relationship for two years, but after we became engaged, he became more and more unreasonable until he was calling me selfish and not speaing to me for several days because I wouldn’t cancel plans with a mate just because he got a whim to see me. Duh, of COURSE I wouldn’t have gotten involved with someone had they behaved like that after a week. But when it creeps in over two and a half years, and you throw them being diagnossed with mental illness into it? Then it becomes a lot harder to recognise andwomen/people are not stupid for not recognising escalating behavior.
MaggieCat on 13 May 2008 at 9:12 pm #
For me it’s not my parents I had to cut off contact with, it was every other relative I have. At this point the grand total of people I’m related to that I speak to more than once a year? 2. My mother, and on occasion her sister. (Who’s not as screwed up as most of the family, but has given me the silent treatment for pointing out that her mother treats me the same way the Spanish Inquisition would a heretic.) There were 2 more, my father and my great aunt, but they passed away.
Not a speck of behavior that most people are referring to when they say abuse, just a systematic destruction of everyone’s self esteem and independence if they have the temerity to imply that my grandmother isn’t the grand high poobah of the universe. If anyone dares to criticize her however, there are immediate tears and you get attacked for being mean. I spent many years as a child trying to figure out why I didn’t really like her and feeling guilty about it– she told me she loved me all the time and bought me lots of things, which to a 5 year old is generally awesome– but never seemed genuinely interested in me and really disliked my dad, who I adored. You know on Everybody Loves Raymond, the way Marie treats Debra? It was almost exactly like that, except directed at a kindergartner who couldn’t defend herself. If you don’t want to be what she wants you to be, she has no use for you.
I eventually figured it out around 12 or so, and why I didn’t much like my other relatives while they were around her; they’d been indoctrinated years ago and had lost any will they may have had to fight back because it was easier just to indulge her. (I once overheard a psychiatrist who I saw for several weeks telling my parents that I was the most stubborn person she had met in her entire career. Just going along wasn’t really a viable option for me.) The only person who ever successfully stood up for me against her was my father, my mom tried but she’d grown up with that woman and just from what I’ve gathered her entire childhood was my unpleasant weekends turned up to 1100. Everyone else wanted to know why I antagonized her. By being myself.
And it’s got to be a cycle that’s only partially been broken: the reason my GM left home and joined the army was to get away from her mother and 2 out of 3 of her sisters are waaaay worse. Now that my great aunt has passed away, I’ve only seen my GM when my grampa’s brother and his wife are in town because she’s the nicest person on the face of the Earth so my GM has to be on her best behavior. (The most startling thing in the world: to walk into that house and get a compliment that was genuine and unaccompanied by a resounding backhand. I stood there blinking for some time with no idea what to say since my reflexive defensive response wasn’t needed.) When other people talk about nice and ‘grandmotherly’, after the instinctive recoil I have to carefully switch my association to my late great aunt, one of my GM’s younger sisters and the only vague concept of the idea I can even imagine.
And I can’t convince a single person who hasn’t seen it in action repeatedly that it’s true. Because if you aren’t related to her, she’s actually kind of impressive. This is a small town Midwestern Catholic girl who joined the army as a teenager in the early 50s, who was a feminist before it went mainstream, supported civil rights, has worked for the fire dept, owned a business, and held elected office. And in all fairness was one of the people who backed me up when everyone was pushing me to have an extremely invasive surgery that I cancelled because I’d gotten a very bad vibe about it due to a series of prep screw-ups. (The other was my dad. First time they’d agreed on anything in over 20 years, I think.)
I’m aware that from a lot of people’s perspectives I got off fairly easily. And that there are far, far worse things out there. But if I hear one more person who’s seen her repeatedly rip me to shreds in public for not fitting in with the rest of the family or slightly disagreeing with her tell me that I’m “too sensitive” and need to try harder, I’m going to snap.
When someone mocks you for crying after they’re the one who made you cry, there’s something not right about that. Late last year I was upset about something and my mother mentioned that she almost never sees me cry, short of a funeral. That’s because I learned not to.
Jennifer Kesler on 13 May 2008 at 9:36 pm #
@Anna, that’s an interesting point. I sometimes think it was strangely fortunate that I saw early on how my dad’s mother abused him, and he in turn abused me. That made it clear to me that it’s not a flaw in one gender or the other. But if you grew up only seeing abuse from men, and saw that the world prizes men and puts them on top, it would be frighteningly logical to hate men.
@Scarlett, it often is one person doing all the work. I think relationships are supposed to involve both parties working? *sigh* And you’re right about how it creeps up. Sometimes it’s an overnight Jeckyll and Hyde switch, too. Some men maintain a facade of niceness until you move in/marry them/invest yourself in some way that makes it not so easy to break up and leave, and then BOOM you meet the abuser.
@Maggie, that IS my definition of emotional abuse. You’re probably right that it’s not most people’s, but I think psychiatrists would back me up on that. Hell, systematic undermining at work can be considered a form of harassment. For all we know, your grandmother was heroically well-adjusted given what circumstances she came from. But her treatment of people – and their response to her (gah! drives me crazy, because if just a few people would stand up, people like that might actually back down) – was all wrong (except in the isolated incidents you mention).
MaggieCat on 13 May 2008 at 10:18 pm #
Oh in this case she would, but she’d then go all passive aggressive and make everyone else’s life completely miserable. I got to see it first hand when I turned 21.
In early February of that year I had completely smashed my ankle and the surgeon put me on strict bed rest for 3 months. In mid-March my father died. 2 weeks later she was visiting, gave me a check for my birthday, and then did the same manipulative bullshit she always does and “jokingly” commented about cancelling it when I disagreed with her over something unbelievably trivial. I snapped. Maybe it was the large doses of narcotics, maybe it was the fact that the only person who’d been as horrified by her treatment of me as they should have been* had just died and left me to fend for myself, I don’t know. I’m not very proud of it but I did. Went off on the rude snitty comments she’d made about the state of the house, told her that you’re supposed to give someone a gift because you love them not so you can control their behavior and, since I wasn’t allowed up the stairs, locked myself in the bathroom until they left.
She spent nearly a year treating me the same way you would a dog you’re not entirely sure isn’t rabid, which was great. But she made my aunt and grampa positively miserable, and my mother when she could get a hold of her. (Which is when my aunt gave me the silent treatment. Oddly my grampa didn’t and I think in fact became more chatty.) Since then I see her either at Christmas or Thanksgiving, never both, and then mainly because even though my mom knows it’s healthier for me to stay away there’s still a part of her that doesn’t want her kid to be alone on holidays. She doesn’t mention it and in fact assumes I’m not going, but I can deal with it now that my GM can mostly hold the evil in for one day a year.
I still have the check, uncashed of course. For the record the cost of my freedom was $75. Not sure you can put a price on the first hand proof that the scariest of bullies from my childhood could be a coward.
*(Dad had declared at Christmas that he was never going to her house again after one of her tirades directed at me. Turns out he was totally telling the truth. Heh.)
Scarlett on 14 May 2008 at 3:47 am #
Maggie, a constant issue I have is people don’t get emotional abuse. My ex routinely put down things I liked doing and was working towards, and it was usually wrapped up in a pretty bow of ‘you can do better than that’. (My bright red dyed hair looked skanky, and I had more class than that. Journalists were all crooks, and I had the intellect to aim higher than that. My friends were users, and I deserved better than them.) I didn’t realise how subtle and insidious it was until I started dating a close friend who knew what he had put me through and made a massive effort to be supportive and understanding to help me undo some of the damage my exes abuse had done to the way I viewed relationships.
I don’t know exactly how to define emotional abuse – I think it’s different to verbal abuse because in my case at least, he never yelled at me or called me names. I think emotional abuse, like all abuse really, is about undermining someone’s independance and faith in themselves.
With my ex, a close mutual friend of ours – who was far closer to me than she was him – talked a lot about how he was so upset about me leaving him and what a difficult position she was in, caught between us. Did it occour to her that if he had any speck of maturity or responsibility for his actions HE wouldn’t be putting her in the middle like that? So what if he was upset – was I supposed to stay with him forever more just because he *needed* me? Was I meant to sacrifice my happiness and sanity so he he could have things *his* way? I wonder now how much of it was *her* not wanting to think that maybe this great guy who’s a close friend of her husbands was an emotional abuser… nope, far easier to think of me as the bitch who left him
Anna on 14 May 2008 at 10:27 am #
It’s actually one of the things that bothers me about the cult-of-motherhood. Some people did not have good mothers – but if you’re estranged from your mother, you’re a bad person, becasue a mother’s love is endless and all mothers everywhere are perfect and wonderful.
And, frankly, my mom totally is that. But so very many people I know did not have that, and the cult of motherhood makes it even more difficult for people to talk about their abuse at their mother’s hand. Whenever I talk about Don’s mom’s latest attempt to weasle back into his life and treat him so shabbily again, someone always comes along and says “But, she’s his mom, and she obviously loves him!” Cuz, you know, people over the internet who have never even talked to *me* about it, let alone Don, can totally tell that by the few comments I make here and there on the subject.
Cuz, you know, moms are ever perfect.
Jennifer Kesler on 14 May 2008 at 1:39 pm #
My mother is made of awesome, but both my grandmothers were abusive people. It’s really sad that we’re in denial about this because it ensures that at least some sons of abusive women will grow up to be abusers themselves – that’s how the cycle works (or at least that’s certainly how it worked in my family).
Re: Scarlett’s comments about insidious abuse that sounds so nice when you try to explain it. That’s one of the most frustrating kinds of emotional abuse to deal with because it’s so hard to explain. People say, “I’m sure he meant well” and “you’re reading too much into it”, but that type of abuser is a master of disguising digs as faux compliments. When you try to retell it, it sounds like you’re a spoiled fool who expects too much from the poor guy. That’s what my dad was so good at – any single one of his tricks sounded innocent enough. And I could never get anyone to listen to ALL of them at once so they could see just how hopeless the pattern was.
Scarlett on 15 May 2008 at 5:14 pm #
A friend of mine commented recently that my ex must have really loved me if he can’t stand having me or my current boyfriend around EIGHTEEN MONTHS after we broke up. But I don’t see that as love – or at least, it’s a child’s love for their parent – the kid still expects the parent’s world to evolve around them and screams and cries when it doesn’t. It’s not the love of a grown person.