We Are Failing at the Conversation About Abuse

How do we meaningfully address abuse in a culture that’s built upon abusive power dynamics?

Is it just me, or have you noticed that we don’t really understand how to talk about abuse? Since 2017, the news has been filled with people’s painful conflicts. We’re watching court cases unfold and testimonies being recorded.

Everywhere we turn, we hear women speaking up about their experiences, drawing lines, and for the first time in a few thousand years, expecting accountability.

It’s a beautiful, awe-inspiring transition into a whole new world.

Unfortunately, though not surprisingly, things aren’t going smoothly.

In fact, sometimes it seems as though nothing has changed at all, except that now we let women tell their stories. But that’s it. Then we continue not believing them, bullying them, silencing them with louder counter-narratives, and punishing them for speaking up in the first place.

Maybe we haven’t made much progress, after all.

Let’s face it: we don’t know how to handle abuse in this culture. We don’t know how to talk about it. How to analyze it. We often don’t even know how to define it.

We don’t understand how it plays out in the world, or why it tends to unfold in somewhat predictable ways. We don’t realize that it affects people differently based on where they stand in the intersections of power.

It is hard to address abuse head-on in a culture that is built upon hierarchical systems of oppression that were created to abuse the people within it.

So how do we improve our approach to this subject in a responsible manner and address it in a way that makes room for accountability and restorative justice?

I don’t have all the answers, of course, nor am I an expert on the matter. But you don’t have to be an expert to take note of a few points that we should be thinking about every time we open the abuse dialogue.

The Power Dynamic Matters

We can’t have a fair discussion about abuse if we fail to acknowledge the power dynamics at play.

What has power? Male. White. Cisgender. Heterosexual. Age (for men). Money (also, typically, as it pertains to men). Distinguished career status (again, for men).

The more boxes that one can tick, the more power someone has — in society, and in a relationship. The fewer boxes one can tick, the less power someone has — in society, and in a relationship.

When we look at abuse cases playing out, these dynamics must be considered. Look at the Amber Heard-Johnny Depp case. In one corner, we had Depp, a white, cisgender, heterosexual man in his fifties at the height of his career, with a net worth that has been estimated by various sources to be between $150 and $210 million dollars. And of course, a legion of devoted fans that far outpaced his ex-wife’s supporters.

In the other corner stood Heard, who ticked substantially fewer boxes: she is white and cisgender. However, she is also a woman, is not heterosexual, and has the further disadvantage of being younger than Depp, less established in her career, and with a significantly smaller net worth.

Does this mean that only her side of the story matters? No, of course not.

But we cannot reduce these two people down to equal human beings and judge them accordingly. They aren’t treated like equals in any other part of their lives. Heard has had to navigate and endure all the inequities of her demographic her entire life. How is it fair to suddenly wipe that all away in the courtroom and fail to acknowledge that those very real inequities have influenced what went down during her relationship with Depp?

That doesn’t mean Depp’s experience is cancelled out. In a situation like this, we must make room for both parties to be victims and perpetrators, and to look at those roles within the context of the power dynamics at play that were born from our culture’s social structures.

Cultural Context Matters

Just because #MeToo made it acceptable for women to finally speak up about their experiences with abuse and sexual assault doesn’t mean that women are now being treated as equals, nor does it magically erase thousands of years of female subordination.

We cannot pretend that we are starting with a clean slate. We must remember the patriarchal standards that have defined how we see women who ask for accountability, and how we treat women in the first place. That didn’t simply disappear in 2017. We are still working under the indoctrination of these standards that still fail to support women who are speaking out.

We still do not believe women. We still shame them and blame them when they dare to speak out about abuse they have endured.

In other words, it still costs women to come forward when it shouldn’t.

This is only one example of cultural context that we must keep our eye on when we’re talking about abuse. It’s an obnoxious miscarriage of justice to ignore the fact that Heard had to face the inevitability of being dragged by the public, enduring blaming and shaming, and even threats of bodily harm.

She testified that she has, indeed, received thousands of death threats. That is the kind of abuse women face from society on a regular basis that we never consider when seeking justice and accountability in abuse cases. Is that not problematic? A woman must pay for the abuse she perpetrates on a partner, but the public can abuse her in any way they see fit?

We will never know exactly what happened in that relationship, though it seems apparent that both were abusers. But in a courtroom determined to ignore the cultural context of the situation, who ultimately paid the price?

Nuance Matters

When it comes to abuse in heterosexual relationships or among men and women who work together, it’s tempting for people to want to quickly organize everything into binaries.

Women are painfully aware of the power dynamics and what inequities, abuse, and assault many of us have endured at the hands of men, and as such, it is easy for us to lean into the belief that the woman was probably the victim. Statistics related to domestic abuse and sexual violence make this a reasonable assumption.

And despite the obvious inequities in our culture, many men are eager to embrace misogynistic propaganda and come to the opposite conclusion: that the woman is the perpetrator. They pull out all the old sexist gems like:

• Women are crazy.
• Women are inherently abusive.
• Women are liars who can’t be trusted.
• When a woman feels slighted, she will do anything to destroy the man who made her feel that way.

In fact, even many women blame other women for the abuse they endured. (Just look at what happened to Rihanna or Kesha.)

During the Heard-Depp trial, we saw countless efforts to make the situation into an easy binary — primarily promoting a narrative that made everything her fault and that he was nothing but an innocent victim. Perhaps it was easier than ever in that situation, as it was obvious that she had behaved abusively, as well.

But to pretend that her own abusive behavior canceled out his is absurdly simplistic.

We have to get better at examining these stories. We have to look more closely at all the shades of gray and stop trying to make everything fit into the categories of black and white. We have to recognize that “right” and “wrong” might be too divergent, too limiting.

Perhaps we’ve come to the point where we need to dive deeper and stop expecting to be able to define everything.

And we must ask ourselves a critical question: Do we want restorative justice or do we want to maintain our culture’s oppressive power structures?

Representation Matters

Men’s stories matter, too. The problem is, men’s stories cannot co-exist with women’s stories in a patriarchal society. If a man and woman are attempting to tell their story, the laws of the oppressor dictate that a man’s story must be not only prioritized, but must be the only story allowed to be told or the only story that’s allowed to be true.

As I’ve written before, our culture doesn’t like women to have the mic unless she’s using it to tell a man’s story.

How can we make room for men’s stories without edging women’s stories out of the picture or silencing them altogether? How can we give everyone equal representation?

Perhaps striving for a more egalitarian society might help correct this issue and assure every victim the space they deserve in order to tell their story and begin their healing process.

Despite the fact that I leaned on the Heard-Depp trial as an example here, due to the fact that it involved two abusers — which means they were both victims — there are countless other examples that we could turn to in order to illustrate this important cultural blind spot.

How about the way the public and media are still psychoanalyzing Britney Spears, calling out her public rants as evidence of mental illness and suggesting counseling and medication in response to posting nude photos of herself on Instagram. Clearly she’s crazy if she can’t get over thirteen years of abusive oppression at the hands of her family as quickly and tidily as possible, and obviously, sharing nude photos is evidence of a mental health crisis. Right?

Or how about last summer’s report from Bot Sentinel, a nonpartisan platform that tracks trollbots and untrustworthy Twitter accounts, that outlined the unprecedented amount of Twitter hate accounts that had been created just to troll Heard and that were cropping up in response to Marilyn Manson’s announcement of suing Evan Rachel Wood for defamation — a strategic move, I might add, enabled by the verdict of the Heard-Depp trial. Clearly, it was important to get a jump on the situation and position Wood as a liar or abuser before things even got started.

As you can see, in the wake of #MeToo, we are failing. Perhaps it was inevitable — justice cannot be achieved in a society committed to injustice.

But we have to do better — and for everyone’s sake, including men. Every story matters. We just have to be willing to take both a broader and deeper look and keep our eye on what really matters: accountability, justice, and equality.

© Yael Wolfe 2022

Yael Wolfe is a writer, photographer, and creator of Howl. You can find more of her work at yaelwolfe.com.

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