So I’m Going To Talk About Something Kind of Uncomfortable

I feel like social justice culture doesn’t really have a good solution for the fact that abusers often do claim victim status.  My abuser accused me of being the abusive one, to maintain control over me, used the fact that I sometimes fought back when he hurt me as evidence of my abuse.  I was battered, and isolated and he was sociable and popular.  

How do you think that would have gone had we been involved in political organization?  Even without that I was expelled from what remained of my social group, people believed I was what he said I was.

I’m not saying that believing survivors is not paramount, or that we as a society do not have a huge problem with brushing aside true accusations as malicious or false.  I’m saying that maybe the vigilante guilt on accusation model focuses more on punishing the guilty than protecting the victim sometimes.  That sometimes it is more interested in wielding its flaming sword and feeling righteous than assuring that its flaming sword is used in the cause of righteousness.

There have been cases of positionality protecting abusers in political organization.  There have been cases where mutual accusation lead to the political organization shrugging its shoulders and expelling both parties.  And I have seen first hand cases of survivors shouted down as rape apologists for criticizing the witch hunt way organizations went about handling things AND seen abusers and rapists unscathed by accusations because their victims were afraid to come forward because of how well they’d seen those vigilante systems work to their abusers advantage.  As well there are numerous people who would benefit from being able to go through an accountability process who are afraid to use them because they don’t want to see the person who harmed them unintentionally painted as a monster and marked as such for the rest of their life