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Survivors don’t go to communities either

I hate when people add “survivors don’t go to the police” as an argument that cops are bad, because survivors also don’t to go:

their friends

their family

their neighbors

their religious communities

their queer communities

their anything-communities

Sexual violence shatters a community. It shatters it precisely because predators are looking for the sorts of people who could shatter it. They become beloved members of their communities, close friends, and they pick the sort of person to hurt where believing the victim would cost the community everything.

I miss when I used to use the phrase ‘abuse culture’ and I don’t know why I stopped. The internet was rapidly changing in 2014, and gamergate happened, and I don’t actually know if even after all these years, we’ve really acknowledged what gamergate did to us all. We don’t even seem to know that gamergate was about rape culture/abuse culture. That it’s trigger point was a woman who dared to speak out, and an entire group of angry, rape apologist men leveraged a massive public attack.

After all, I first heard about it because I ran a survivor blog, so I got the anonymous ask one day when 4chan organized it: ‘how dare you support an abuser like Zoe Quinn’ it said, a name I’d never even heard of before.

And they won, is the thing. 4chan, gamergate, incels, neo-nazis, they won.

Because they’re here. In our leftist movements, in our queer communities, claiming the banner of a radical fight while bringing all the same rape and abuse culture with them. It’s why it’s easy to see so many people who do what I call “Count Privilege Calories”: you need to determine how much marginalization you got, and whose your oppressor, so you know who you’re allowed to hate, to talk shit about, to say gross and fucked up things.

It’s MRA logic. Not that these people are MRA’s, but that MRA logic was predicated on a belief that men are oppressed, *and* that the right of the oppressed was to be as cruel and misogynistic as possible. Are they wrong, because they’re not actually oppressed? Or are they wrong, because that’s not how someone should act even when they are? And I think people decided on the former.

I should have known the fault lines were here when the metoo movement started, but I didn’t. I saw so many feminists and leftist people saying “finally survivors have a voice” and I was confused, because we’ve always been here, talking. Because my feminism and my politics have been hearing survivors loud and clear all this time. But it’d been years since I’d seen someone talk about ‘rape culture’ and I wasn’t thinking that that meant that ‘social justice’ had long strayed away from focusing on survivors.

And then I watched as overnight, people’s cheers turned into the kind of ‘nuanced’ takes survivors always get. The rapist wasn’t that conservative white dude with all the power, now survivors were talking about *us* and *our communities* and everyone flinched. People don’t even seem to understand that victim blaming and rape apologism isn’t mainly about blatant ‘it’s your fault what were you wearing’ but rather the ‘gosh everything’s so hard and complex and nobody’s -really- innocent and how do we support both the victim and predator?’ That’s where it’s *always* been, and I watched these tired arguments rehashed by ‘my people’ as though they were fresh thinking, and not the dusty book of victim blaming, misogynistic, anti-feminist thinkers of yesterday and today.

I used to daydream about doing radical survivor acts, back when feminism and supporting survivors was the same thing. There were so many projects when I was in college trying to give survivors a voice. The woman who carried her mattress she was raped in around. Projects for gathering the clothes of what you were wearing when it happened.

Maybe I will. Maybe in the post pandemic, I’ll do my own projects. I envision an art display of survivors sharing the fucked up, victim-blaming things they’ve been told. HOW OUR COMMUNITIES FAIL US, it’ll be titled. I’ll let it all be eviscerated on the internet under claims that it’s bad politics. It’ll probably be called carceral feminism, because MRA’s think consequences are the same thing as violence.

Because people keep proposing these radical visions of community justice without seeming to understand that yeah, survivors don’t go to the cops and they don’t go to their community, for the exact same reason. Because our communities are just as much full of rapists and predators and rape-apologists as any cop we might meet.

And if ‘survivors don’t go to cops’ is proof that cops are corrupt to their core and need to be abolished, then what the fuck are we supposed to do with our communities?

Because sexual violence shatters a community *unless* the community makes the survivor quietly go away. Or builds a polite ‘justice’ that requires eventually the survivor to stop bringing it up and the predator to never lose his standing.

Survivors don’t go to cops.

Survivors don’t go to communities.

Abolish the police.

And I’m gonna do the work to make sure that when sexual violence shatters a community—

it fucking *shatters.*