Leftist orgs and communities have with handling sexual assault is that we just kind of believe we all automatically have the expertise to deal with those situations because we hold certain ideals. Like no, there’s a traumatized person who can respond in all sorts of ways including not wanting to talk about it or have anyone know about it (and not even because they feel unsafe disclosing, but like sometimes you just don’t want to think about it ever again) and balancing the needs of survivors with people’s safety and shit is hard and sometimes situations are complicated like when two people got blackout drunk and neither remembers what happened and yet we’re just like “we know how to deal with this situation because we’re morally good and oppose rape culture” and it’s like… you can really have those ideals but that doesn’t mean you’ll have a fucking clue how to help or what to do if something like that happens?
Like we believe because we hold certain beliefs we automatically know what we need to do to help survivors of rape and abuse but like no, even if your heart is in exactly the right place most people don’t have the knowledge and experience to know how best to proceed.
Like our DIY ethic ain’t really doing us a lot of favors here. This is a skill we need to get training on. I’m a survivor myself and I don’t have a fucking clue most of the time. I feel like a lot of leftists believe that ideals can replace expertise… like because we want to eliminate scarcity or whatever we automatically know the best way to do it, or like because we take the hardest line anti rape stance we know how to prevent it or handle the fallout when it happens
Thoughts From The Peacock Angel 