It is a disingenuous lie to claim all survivors are a monolith who don’t want harm to come to the people who abused them. Firstly, it is incredibly NORMAL, *healthy* even, to want someone who made you suffer to suffer as well.

It means you have functioning self-defense instincts and that you value yourself enough to be angry at your own mistreatment.

I have felt those feelings, and nearly every single one of my friends when I was in “survivor community” expressed something to the effect that they wish they could destroy their abuser, some even said things like they wish people would have done vigilante justice on their behalf, even feeling betrayed that no one did. And you know what? They weren’t bad people for feeling that way. They didn’t lose their right to support for having those feelings or wanting those things. Eradicating abuse isn’t a fucking PR game.

Lying about the perfectly normal feelings that traumatized people have does not help anyone to assess the reality of interpersonal violence and effectively respond to it.

Sometimes survivor led, survivor centered would mean a survivor wants the person who hurt them dead or seriously injured.

And instead of acknowledging how vulnerable this approach is to being coopted and twisted AGAINST SURVIVORS EVEN, people treat it like a fucking surivor PR campaign. Do you want to eradicate abuse?

Do you want to create foundations for communities that collaborate and invest in the safety of every one of its members? A community should have the foundations it needs to assess and respond to violence effectively.

Expecting someone in crisis or in the throes of trauma to be able to make the call that is, in the long run, going to keep them safe and keep their own integrity intact is the height of ignorance.

And it misses the most important goal of community based intervention which is the integrity of the community.

Not integrity as in everyone needs to stay in it and no one can be pushed out (if they are truly that dangerous), integrity as in upholding shared values and having the resilience and shared investment to get through such serious issues together.

I had no faith in my survivor community to do that because I watched our unaddressed trauma and this attitude of believe every claim and do whatever the survivor wants reinforce toxic enmeshment until everyone with a grudge declared people unsafe and no one had friendships that lasted more than 1-5 years. I’ve lived it. This isn’t what ifs. I’m speaking from experience and the experience of hoards of others who have experienced similar.

And honestly I don’t trust the people trying to assert this isn’t the case because I know they’re full of shit, they know they’re full of shit, and they’re too weighed down by their own dogma and desire to be right and win a stupid argument that is only hurting survivors and any chance we have to do real abuse intervention with long term visions to eradicate abuse.