A-Infos (en) Aotearoa (New Zeland), Anarchist journal Imminent rebellion #9 - Why is it so Hard to Support Survivors? by Kim

This article offers my thoughts on why it's hard for many of us to get our heads 
around the idea of being "survivor" focused. The justice system puts more energy 
into people who break the law than people who are hurt. We might know the 
justice system is fucked, but our thinking can still be influenced by it. This 
means that we drift towards thinking about people who have hurt others, more 
than we support those they've hurt.

When this is combined with empathy and compassion, our efforts to take on abuse 
in our scenes can end up actually hurting the person who was abused more than if 
we'd stayed out of it. We need to remind ourselves: whenever there is a conflict 
between the wants or needs of the two people, our first priority is with the 
person who was hurt.
What we learn from our justice system

The relationship between our "justice" system and the religious system that it's 
come out of, is obvious in their focus on people who have done something we 
think is wrong, the sinner and their sin, the perpetrator and their crime. From 
the moment someone says they've been hurt, our justice system is completely 
focused on the person who hurt them — finding out who it was, what they did, was 
it illegal, and what to do with that person. Even a liberal response generally 
remains directed at an offender — looking at the factors leading to a person 
offending, trying to understand, reform and rehabilitate them, identifying 
issues that contributed, poverty, bad role models, lack of education and 
opportunity, etc.

As much as our justice system developed out of our culture, our culture is 
affected by the justice system. The way we think about problems often reflects 
the way the justice system works. Whatever we think of it, the law provides a 
clear set of rules and expectations that we can point to instead of having to 
think about our own morality: as long as you can't prove that my behaviour is 
illegal, then I am a perfectly good person. The legal system provides a way of 
dealing with conflict. We don't have to consider the most reasonable, 
appropriate or potentially successful response to someone hurting us or someone 
we care about; instead we can call in the law and it's out of our hands. Whether 
or not we would ever do this, that way of thinking is such a part of the pakeha 
culture most of us grew up in, that we often seem to mimic it. So much so that 
when one of our friends is hurt by someone, our question quickly becomes how 
should we respond to the person who hurt them.

What's missing is a deeper response for the person who was hurt. The justice 
system only includes them as much as they can help with the process of dealing 
with the person who hurt them. I believe that the first step of a radical 
response to abuse is to focus on the person who has been hurt. I know this isn't 
a new idea, but I think it needs to be constantly restated until there is a 
deeper understanding, or we come up with a better idea. It needs to be 
constantly restated because it feels so alien to think first of the person who 
was abused — we've been socialised or brain-washed to think of them as less 
relevant than the person who hurt them. If we hadn't been indoctrinated by our 
punitive culture that treats them as irrelevant when dealing with abusive 
behaviour, I think we'd know that the most appropriate and rational response 
would be to focus on them.
How we make it worse

There are many ways we can make people feel worse when they talk to us about 
being abused. We can tell them that it isn't such a big deal, we can do nothing 
about it and act like it isn't important, we can blame them for not doing 
something about it sooner, we can take over and tell them what needs to happen. 
All these responses are common to anarchist scenes and the wider community. I 
want to talk about the ways that anarchists, in particular, can make things worse.

As anarchists, most of us are opposed to punishment for its own sake, and we 
have ideals about supporting each other through our shit, our learning, and 
unlearning. We have ideals of compassion and empathy, and try to remember that 
we aren't perfect. When we hear about abuse, our first thought may be for our 
friend who was hurt, but most of us are also quick to empathise with the person 
who hurt our friend. Something along the lines of "I know I've fucked up heaps, 
I know what that feels like, that person must feel like shit too, they need 
support." Which is true, and that person may be a friend of ours as well. 
However, we don't have endless resources and energy, and our circles of support 
are usually small. Even if we're supporting people to stop abusing, we need to 
be careful that we don't end up putting so much energy and time into them, that 
we don't have enough for the person they hurt. If we do this, the person who was 
hurt may feel like their abuser is being rewarded with attention and resources 
to heal, while they have to heal and deal with shit on their own. I've 
participated in this and seen it happen over and again. It creates a system that 
is even harder on survivors than the justice system.

One reason we end up neglecting the needs of people who have been abused is that 
we allow ourselves to be rushed. Our compassion for our friend who hurt someone 
means we want to try to fix things quickly. We start thinking of it as a problem 
that needs to be solved, we forget about the pain of the person they hurt. We 
forget to honour and respect their experiences of abuse and what they need to 
heal. Their pain has become abstract. When this happens, I think we will only 
make things worse.

When we are first struggling to stay focused on the needs of the person who has 
been hurt, sometimes we will unintentionally end up asking them for "solutions." 
When we do this, it has nothing to do with supporting the person: we are asking 
them to make it easier for us, for our lives to go back to normal. We may become 
frustrated with them because they don't have solutions, or they don't know what 
they need, or what they need seems to keep changing. There probably aren't any 
simple solutions, and it isn't the responsibility of the person who experienced 
the abuse to come up with them. At some point, what they need will become clear 
to them; rushing them isn't going to help them get there. If we're feeling 
frustrated at them, then we're thinking about things wrong, and we will make 
things worse for them.
How we make things better

I believe that the person who was hurt should always be given priority. What 
this means is that whenever there is a conflict between the wants or needs of 
the two people, the appropriate response is always to try to do what the person 
who was hurt wants. For example, if the person who was abused feels like they 
can't go somewhere in case they see the person that hurt them, then we can try 
to make sure that person isn't there. This doesn't mean we should ignore the 
needs of the person responsible for the abuse. I believe they should be offered 
support to heal and change their behaviour. It doesn't mean ostracising or 
judging them; it has nothing to do with punishment, restorative justice, 
rehabilitation, or anything focused on that person, nor does it mean those 
things can't happen. It just means that whatever else we do, first we try to 
give the survivor all the support they want.

When they don't know what they want, we might need to take responsibility for 
some decisions. For example, the person who was hurt might seem to go back and 
forth on whether they can see the person who hurt them. Rather than making them 
come up with a single solution to this "problem," or asking them every time they 
might both be somewhere, we could say that the person who hurt them is only 
welcome when invited by the person they hurt. That gives power to the person who 
was hurt, without putting pressure on them.

We need to do all we can to let that person control their healing process. That 
means not taking over, or telling them what they need to do, or making it about 
us in any way. It means not pressuring them to let us do what we want regardless 
of what they want: eg. if they don't want us to confront the person who abused 
them about their behaviour, then we need to respect that as much as we can, 
while making sure other people are safe.

The pain probably isn't going to go away quickly for the person who was hurt. We 
need to honour that pain, and let things take as long as they take, instead of 
trying to fix things as quickly as possible.

Even thinking about abuse is really hard for lots of us, trying to work out how 
to respond to it is fucking stressful. Most of us don't have a lot of experience 
with dealing with abuse in our own communities. We need to take our time, focus 
on supporting the person who was hurt as much as they need, try not to make 
things worse for them, and try to put them first whenever there is conflict 
between them and the person who hurt them. We need to remember how real this is. 
Someone was hurt. They are hurting, and it isn't their fault.
Notes

1. I don't offer a model for dealing with abuse in relationships, or abuse we 
hear about in our scene, or a model for survivor support.
2. I'm no expert, these are just my thoughts, based largely on my struggles to 
get my head around this, and ways I've screwed up. If you think I've got it 
wrong, or what I've written is shit or dangerous, please talk to me about it, 
and maybe write something for Imminent Rebellion. We all want to get better at 
dealing with abuse.
3. It's really hard to write about abuse without using loaded language or making 
sentences complicated and unintelligible. I've tried to use terms that readers 
can understand and that remind readers of what I'm talking about. "Survivor" 
feels too abstract when I'm talking about someone who was hurt. "Abuser" can 
feel damning and judgmental when I mean someone who has hurt someone else. 
Hopefully the compromises I made trying to write this mean it's still readable.
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