Being Powerless To Stop You Doesn’t Mean It’s Not Abuse

There’s nothing more offensive than insisting a victim didn’t fight hard enough.

Not all abusers come at you with snarling faces and their hands clenched in anger. Some of them smile and saunter up bearing gifts.

Manipulating people is just as much an act of abuse as assaulting them, and can sometimes be even more devastating.

There’s a lot of talk about power gaps between people in relationships, but little acknowledgment that any form of power gap makes abuse almost inevitable. The power gap between parents and children is what bankrolls the whole industry of professional therapy.

Powerlessness is traumatic, and it’s something we’ve all experienced.

When you’re powerless, you can’t fight back and it’s futile to even try.

People will laugh at observations like this and pretend that they are irrelevant. But this is a conversation everyone needs to have. Sooner or later, with enough examples, you’ll discover one that you can relate to.

The language of abuse

It’s rare that a powerless person can express dissatisfaction and find that their opinion is respected. There’s a certain dismissive smile that abusers wear when they recognize there’s no immediate leverage to back up a complaint.

“I know you’re saying that you don’t like this, but isn’t the real truth that you do?”

Abusers give you the opportunity to retract your objection as if it were a joke. If you persist with objecting, they engage in a form of unwanted theater. They laugh. They smile. They dismiss you. All the while they continue with their insistence that you will comply with their demands.

“You keep saying you don’t like that. Don’t you mean that you do like it?”

They can afford to wait because they know the cavalry isn’t coming. They have power and you don’t. They can persist and wait and apply pressure until you finally relent.

“I’m not the one causing a problem, you are causing the problem. You need to be more honest. You need to change. Quit persisting in this lie about what you like and what you don’t like. It’s obvious!”

This pressure is not shouted.

It’s whispered.

The powerful abuser keeps his voice calm and neutral. It’s as if they’re a character on a stage declaring, “Look at me, I’m reasonable! I’m so soft-spoken and I never raise my voice!”

Our society dismisses people who raise their voices. It’s a natural response to scream and yell and cry for help when you’re in danger.

“Calm down, calm down, I won’t listen to you until you calm down!”

Unacceptable.

To scream is to resist powerful abusers. Our society conditions us to dismiss that behavior. Our society conditions us to be blind to abuse.

The student

I read a meme that featured a child’s admonishment to her teacher. The child wrote that she didn’t think collective punishment was fair because it punished children who had done nothing wrong.

The comments celebrated the child, but they didn’t go nearly far enough.

Consider children sitting in classes waiting to be punished due to the actions of unruly kids they cannot control. Maybe those children go home to parents who see negative behavior reports and whip them.

“Whip them” is the phrase that was used when I was growing up. It was the phrase used for discipline.

It didn’t necessarily mean an actual whip, but the phrase must have started somewhere. It meant you were going to get hit. I was one of the lucky ones, my dad hit me with an open hand. My cousins got hit with a leather belt.

“You’re lucky I’m not using a belt.”

“Thank you.”

“This is going to hurt me more than it hurts you.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

I can still see the smirk on the faces of various teachers while reading a comment about how something in a classroom was “unfair.” What motivation did they have to listen? The child wasn’t capable of doing anything. The parent wasn’t going to do anything.

Why should they care?

The only motivation to change the class policy was out of an appeal to fairness.

Fairness rarely wins.

Capitulation is not consent

What happens in relationships between the abusive powerful and the accommodating vulnerable is that eventually you are made to relent.

You do what the abuser wants.

You accept the unjust punishments handed out to the whole class for the misbehavior of a few. You go home and take another round of punishments from your parents who don’t care that you did nothing wrong.

In romantic relationships, you give in to pressure.

The abuser then smiles and says, “See, wasn’t I right, wasn’t that what you really wanted?”

Now you move forward as if you’ve agreed to this unstable harmony.

When you relent, they stop pestering you and you can have some time to yourself. At least until they decide they want something from you again.

People sometimes blame victims for “not fighting hard enough.” It’s hard to imagine a more offensive argument. It’s wrong to blame the victim.

“Well, if you didn’t want it you should have said so.”

“I DID SAY SO! YOU WOULDN’T LISTEN! YOU WOULDN’T TAKE NO FOR AN ANSWER!”

“Well then, you should have fought back!”

“If I’d fought back you would have killed me because I WAS POWERLESS!”

What an absurd cruelty it is to suggest a victim must fight to the death in order for society to recognize that she was being forced to do something against her will.

Doing something to survive doesn’t erase the assault on your autonomy.

The worst thing you can do is make the abuser face his evil while he has the advantage of power. When that happens, his only escape is to murder his victim. Above all things, abusers wish to avoid consequences for their abuse.

Some people chose to live and fight another day. They create their own cavalry. Those people are brave.

What do I tell my daughters?

Once you become an adult, you’ve become numb to dealing with the abusive powerful. Very few of us are all-powerful. On a daily basis, we have to do hundreds or thousands of things we don’t want to do.

You become desensitized to what you’re giving up.

But your children still feel it.

Our objective as parents is to hand our children a better world. Part of that is making the conscious effort to stop and recognize our own pain. You can’t go through adulthood living in that numb space where you send your mind when the powerful decide they want something from you.

My survival tactic has often been to pretend I wasn’t being abused. I went along with the behavior. It was over faster that way. I wasn’t beaten afterwards.

But I’m not going to teach that to my daughters.

I’m powerful now. We have to dismantle the structures of abuse that spring up everywhere. The sooner my children have power, the better the world will be. Teach your children strength, not capitulation.

I guess that’s the secret. If you recognize you have power, relinquish it. Give your power to the vulnerable. Let them judge you.

If you haven’t abused the powerless, you should have nothing to fear.