(no subject)
For me, one of the hardest things about being a survivor of childhood violence, and late-teens date rape and domestic abuse, is that it will never truly leave me. It's been fourteen years since I started the journey towards healing, and I've made so much progress... but it's still there.
It's there every time a content creator uses abuse as a characterisation shortcut, to make the protagonist more ~interesting. It's there when I look at my friends being wonderful parents, and I know I never had that. It's there in a hundred small ways, because society is full of microagressions. But it's also there in the big things, like when someone I think I can trust tries to tell me that we could "solve" violence against women if only the victims chose not to "put up with it".
Did I have that choice when I was six? Did I have that choice when I was nineteen and it happened out of the blue? No. Because the truth is, in order to say "no" to violence... that violence has to exist in the first place. And it's incredibly damaging in so many subtle and not-so-subtle ways. It takes years to recover; most often I don't think I'll ever completely recover. That's the biggest shame about victim-blaming: you're kicking someone who's already down. Who's fighting so hard to get up. Who fights every day, whether it's to have the courage to get out of bed or to have the self-love to allow themselves to sleep.
You cannot know what you'd do when it happens, until it happens. And for me, it was such a shock that I spent a long time rationalising it away. That can't really have happened the way I remember, can it? That can't really have happened to me *again* can it? This can't be real; this can't be my life.
It's absolutely crucial NOT to feed into victims' self-doubt. And when they have the courage to leave it's essential not to shove them back into a doom spiral of "but what if I'd done everything differently, and fixed it with the wave of a magic wand?"
It is never the victim's fault. It's NEVER their sole responsibility to end violence against themselves. It's not okay to look at someone who's trying to rebuild their life, who might have the luxury of making their own choices for the first time EVER, and say they should've done more - they should've done what you suggest. It's not okay to pull their choices out from under them.
Once more with feeling: it is never okay to blame the victim.
Crossposted from http://ariadne83.dreamwidth.org/110918.html, where it has
comments
It's there every time a content creator uses abuse as a characterisation shortcut, to make the protagonist more ~interesting. It's there when I look at my friends being wonderful parents, and I know I never had that. It's there in a hundred small ways, because society is full of microagressions. But it's also there in the big things, like when someone I think I can trust tries to tell me that we could "solve" violence against women if only the victims chose not to "put up with it".
Did I have that choice when I was six? Did I have that choice when I was nineteen and it happened out of the blue? No. Because the truth is, in order to say "no" to violence... that violence has to exist in the first place. And it's incredibly damaging in so many subtle and not-so-subtle ways. It takes years to recover; most often I don't think I'll ever completely recover. That's the biggest shame about victim-blaming: you're kicking someone who's already down. Who's fighting so hard to get up. Who fights every day, whether it's to have the courage to get out of bed or to have the self-love to allow themselves to sleep.
You cannot know what you'd do when it happens, until it happens. And for me, it was such a shock that I spent a long time rationalising it away. That can't really have happened the way I remember, can it? That can't really have happened to me *again* can it? This can't be real; this can't be my life.
It's absolutely crucial NOT to feed into victims' self-doubt. And when they have the courage to leave it's essential not to shove them back into a doom spiral of "but what if I'd done everything differently, and fixed it with the wave of a magic wand?"
It is never the victim's fault. It's NEVER their sole responsibility to end violence against themselves. It's not okay to look at someone who's trying to rebuild their life, who might have the luxury of making their own choices for the first time EVER, and say they should've done more - they should've done what you suggest. It's not okay to pull their choices out from under them.
Once more with feeling: it is never okay to blame the victim.
Crossposted from http://ariadne83.dreamwidth.org/110918.html, where it has
comments