One of the things abusers do is reveal to us how little control we have when others are acting in bad faith. I remember when my brother first realized that he could be as violent and cruel as he wanted. When my mother would try and tell him no, or discipline him, or punish him, his response was always with a sneering smile, “Who’s gonna stop me?”
I think this is the reason why much of the discussion I see about abuse tries to frame abusers’ redemption as something we can do for them. We want to redeem abusers without ever imagining the possibility that they could, or should, experience grief, remorse, terror at what they’ve done, or how they could make up for it.
There’s a real anxiety around abuse, in that it strips away the artificiality of our control. It reveals that how we treat others isn’t tied to any authority. If you want to hurt someone, you can, and who’s gonna stop you? If we assume that we can redeem abusers ourselves then we can pretend that we still have control and authority even as an abuser refuses to comply.
But when we do that, when we decide that an abusers redemption is our responsibility to do for them, something has to give. I know parallels between stealing and abuse can get hairy quickly, but it’s the only example I can think of to explain this: if someone steals something and absolutely refuses to give it back, then the only way for us to convince ourselves that the thief is allowed to be redeemed without any effort on their part requires that the victim lose something.
I was often the one who had to sacrifice in conflict with my brothers. My mother just accepted that my brothers would do whatever they want, and the easiest way to deal with them was to just make up for it with me. I was not allowed to be angry with them, because it was easier to resolve conflict by making me give up my anger, my calls for something to be made right, then it was to expect them to make it right.
Violent people, (and let’s be real here, mainly violent white men) know that if they don’t care anymore, if they don’t believe in the rules for treating others well, the more freedom they get to do the violent things that they want. We’ll give it to them, and we’ll give it to them every time. Because it’s easier. Because we don’t know how to answer the question, “Who’s gonna stop me?”
So now I want to ask a new question:
Who’s gonna stop us?
It was a cold realization, knowing that at long as I was vocal about my brother raping me, I could never be good, but no matter what he did, he could never be bad. This hit hardest during the time when I was no longer allowed to be home when my brother was visiting. I had set boundaries and my mother called me cruel for them, a word so familiar because of all the times she’d thrown it at me. A word that had never once been applied to my brother.
The day that hurt the most was the day I had permission to be home. His permission. I was stressed and exhausted from school and work, so she told me, “oh I already asked your brother and he said it’s okay if you’re here and stay in your room while he’s here.” What I wanted didn’t matter. It had never mattered. His comfort, his wants, they always came before mine.
So in a fit of rage, I said: fuck it. Fuck it, I’m bad now, I’m evil, I don’t care anymore. I’ll be horrible, I’ll not care what other people want or think and whether I hurt them because that’s actually how you become good, right? Be evil? If it doesn’t matter, if I will always be bad anyway, then why care anymore? Why not do whatever I want?
What this actually translated into was me moving out. I cannot express to you how the social rules I’d grown up with meant that doing that was an evil act, and I understood it as an evil act. I left genuinely believing I was doing something cruel, and I still said fuck it.
We survivors were made to feel powerless, made to be powerless, and often that powerlessness is exploited in us all the time. People use the fact that we want to be good to punish us if we speak out, if we set boundaries, if we call attention to what happened to us.
Because if you want social cohesion more than you want people’s safety, well, my mother’s strategy worked quite well: kick out the voice. Kick out the person who makes the family look bad. The reason she kicked me out was mostly so that she could tell my brother and our family that I was just out for the day. I had plans. I was busy. Much easier to say than “Tor doesn’t want to see their brother because he raped them”, right?
The dangerous ones don’t care that they hurt others. They don’t care if some group of people finds them evil, they’ll find sympathy with others. They don’t listen to anyone who tells them to stop. If you redeem them yourself, all the better. They’ll take your goodwill, your olive branch, and enjoy the freedom and power it gives them to continue to hurt others.
The reason I think the kindness of a lot of survivors is so easily exploited is because we don’t want to be like them, but we’ve been given a dichotomy: Give ourselves up, take up as little space as possible, or you will ravage the world. Don’t be angry, because anger is your abusers, don’t stop accommodating everyone, because the second you do, you’ll be the same kind of person who sneeringly grins, “Who’s gonna stop me?”
But what could we do if we understood that the moral pressure is artificial? If we recognized that we are allowed to be full, autonomous human beings, that we are allowed to not carry the weight of everyone on our shoulders? What would happen if we spoke out, loud and true, and didn’t care that someone called us evil? What kind of power could we have if we stopped playing the game?
I’ve always hated how we treat survivors as though, if left to our own devices, we will default into being abusers. It’s not that I don’t think we don’t have things we have to unlearn. It’s more like this: when I imagined myself with the freedom to be as evil as I wanted, I just wanted to leave.
Sometimes all the conversations about how we now have a greater predilection toward abuse is a way to keep us skittish, worried about making mistakes, afraid to take up space or to speak out.
But the morality of our world rewards power first and foremost. Even in our social justice communities, even in the spaces that claim to care and support survivors. So you know what: it’s okay that we put that morality down. It’s okay to say that we’re not going to play this game anymore.
It’s okay to say: fuck it. I’ll be evil by your standards, but not by mine. Fuck it, I will take care of myself, I will stand up for myself, I will be outspoken, I will draw my boundaries and refuse to give, I will take my life as mine and nobody else’s, and if you ask me to give even an inch of myself up, I will say no, and no again, and I will not give your justifications space in my head.
Who’s gonna stop them? I don’t know. I certainly can’t. But who’s going to stop me? No one. I won’t let them anymore, I won’t let them stop me from saying no, stop me from refusing to be the sacrifice. I refuse to do my abusers work for them. I refuse to hate myself, I refuse to see myself through their eyes anymore. I refuse to be small, I refuse to be accommodating. Refuse to forgive them for their abuse you’ve labeled a mistake, and refuse to hate myself for my mistakes you’ve called cruel. And the trick of it all is knowing that I can do that. I don’t have to play their game. And no one can stop me.
Speaking When the World Sleeps 