Video:
http://www.lionsroar.com/watch-compassion-not-pie-chart/
Communities can accomplish enormous changes by committing ourselves to supporting those who have been targetted for violence and abuse. Switch off the victim-blaming, the timid do-nothing-ism, the buck-passing. Switch on the light: start asking people what they need in the aftermath of abuse, and start providing it.
What does someone need in this aftermath, to continue to participate in their community? Different people will need different things from community. But here’s a few likely supports needed:
To be heard and believed.
To be safe from further violence.
To maintain their housing and their livelihood.
To keep their children safe and free of abuse.
To be able to participate in community activities without their assailant or abuser there.
A community with a crystal clear commitment to provide what its members need to recover from assaults and abuse would be a leader among communities. This would be an enormous change for most groups but one that is based on just a small psychological shift. Cutting through hesitation and fear toward valuing, caring and taking action. This is so logical and simple – it is only unexamined myths and stereotypes about families, men and women, and abuse and community, that prevent it, making it seem taboo, daunting or impossible.
In our habit-bound world it can be very scary to take an attitude and follow a course of action that does not centre primarily on perpetrators, but rather on the value, needs, and vision of the women, children and youth targetted for abuse. We have been socialized to feel off-base if our responses to abuse are not all about hiding, supporting, confronting, cajoling, healing and/or punishing perpetrators.
But it’s time to stop thinking about our response to abuse as a zero sum game where we’re diminishing perpetrators by focusing on helping targets. Instead we could think of community solutions to abuse as an organism’s immune response – by building our overall strength and resistance, and by having specialized responses when “cells” are attacked, we maintain vibrant health. When communities are giving out the message that abuse will result in enormous caring and support for the targets, abusers will have to think twice, and be less likely to enter and act out. In fact, if communities do everything we can to help targetted people recover, and to prevent abuse, this would be a huge reset of the habitual reference points that keep male violence a global problem. Such a shift will not only help the targets, but provide a light for those abusers who may want to change.
In the video link at the top, I speak about switching our focus to a bigger view of compassion and caring in these situations, one that is centred on community power and love, not on a zero-sum pie chart where support for targets is viewed as harming perpetrators. Instead we can take the view that our healing and supportive care towards the targets of abuse is creating a chain reaction of limitless compassion that will benefit the whole community.
– Pamela Rubin
With all best wishes for a peaceful, illuminating, joyous 2015!
Photo: “Cutting Through” by Khairul Nizam