With regard to the word abuse in particular, there is consensus that it has to do with behavior that does harm and that it can manifest in different forms; as sexual abuse, or physical abuse, or emotional abuse. Nevertheless, there are aspects of the definition that remain contested. Is it abuse, for example, if the person doesn’t intend to do harm? What if someone feels abused? Does that mean that someone is abusing them? Sometimes controlling another may be considered abuse. But in other settings the failure to exercise control can be considered neglect.
Of the controversies around meanings for the word abuse, none is greater than the question of whether abuse is only when one “goes too far.” When one “uses the power that one has over another to meet one’s own needs at the expense of another,” even very subtle behavior can be considered abuse. “What if I tell someone that I don’t want to talk about it? Is that abuse?”
Some professionals in the field of family violence intervention are very firm that to define abuse as “something that everyone does” so dilutes the understanding of what constitutes abuse that it lets “abusers” off the hook. It permits “abusers” to say, “Well if everybody does it, why is everyone making such a big deal about what I did?” Further they will insist that the minor slights that they themselves may do in their relationships with others don’t rise to the level of “abuse.” This perspective is both valid and problematic.
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Everything that grows does so through stages of development. This is true for insects. This is true for ideas. Even the idea that abuse affects families goes through stages.
We might define Stage One as the level at which abuse in families remains invisible. Prior to the rise in feminist awareness in the 1970’s our society was mostly unaware of the prevalence of wife battering. In the early 70’s it was assumed that the incidence of sexual abuse of a child by a parent or care giver was something under 1%.
Now we know that half of all women will experience physical violence at the hands of an intimate male partner at some point in her life and a quarter of all women and only slightly fewer men will experience some form of childhood sexual abuse. So we might define Stage Two as the level at which it becomes clear that abuse is not rare and that it has devastating effects on the people and the families that it infects.
But as we pay closer and closer attention to the ways that abuse is manifest in people’s lives, we discover that some very small hurts can have a huge impact. Let us consider the circumstances of an eight year old boy who is playing his first season of baseball. In his excitement, he stands too close to a teammate warming up and gets hit by a bat. With a broken collar-bone he is out for the season. His dad, trying to cheer him up, promises to take him fishing. But Dad forgets and goes fishing with his buddy instead. The boy is devastated. It takes him a week to screw up his courage to talk to Dad about it. When he does, Dad says, “Oh, I’m sorry, Sport. I can’t take you this weekend, but maybe the weekend after next.” When that Saturday comes the boy awakens to a silent house. Dad has already left to go fishing with his buddy. The kid is crushed. He can’t figure out what is going on. “Why won’t Dad take me fishing? What did I do to make him not want to take me along?”
Dad’s inattention to his son’s needs may do long term harm to the kid’s development and to his sense that he belongs in the world of men. But Dad isn’t going to get a visit from Child Protective Services the way he would had he been the one to break his son’s collarbone. He isn’t an “abuser.”
Nevertheless, if we want to be really scrupulous about not doing things that are harmful to others, then we are going to want to identify those abuses that are below the line, that don’t rise to the level of criminal abuse. We want to be sensitive to even what may seem to be minor slights. We even want to identify and respond to the things that we do that are abusive to others and to identify and change the ways that the systems that are designed to intervene with family violence may themselves be committing abuse. We can call this a Stage Three understanding of abuse.
The problem with Stage Three is that it looks a lot like Stage One. At Stage Two we have a clear understanding that there are those bad people who do bad things and if we can just “hold them accountable” then we will be making things safer for “victims.” But both Stages One and Three seem to normalize the very behavior that we want to try to stop. “How can we confront him if we let him claim that he is also abused?” “How are we out there making the world safer for victims if we are looking at our own behavior as being abusive?”
The problem with a Stage Two understanding of abuse is that, while it does great things for people’s indignation, it doesn’t support effective intervention, especially intervention with offenders. As long as abuse is something only some people do, the offender’s goal becomes proving that he is not “one of those abusers.” When we simply acknowledge that everyone makes choices from time to time that are abuse and that whenever we do so it is harmful so we want to do all we can to identify those choices and seek to alter our behavior and repair the damage we have done; we take a huge roadblock out of the path to effective intervention.
Family violence intervention is not the only field that suffers from this tension. Consider anti-racism work. If the only people who are racists are those who publish white supremacy tracts, then all the rest of us are off the hook. Those whites who give the job to whites because “they just seem better qualified” or who charge higher rates to blacks because “they don’t have a good work history,” aren’t considered racist because they smile and are cordial and say that they aren’t racist. Their racism remains below the line.
Chemical dependency intervention suffers from this tension as well. We may be able to acknowledge that others are addicted, but are able to minimize our own problems because, “I only drink beer,” or “I only drink on the weekends,” or “I never blackout.” Once people acknowledge their own addictive processes they can realize that perhaps they are drinking too much caffeine or even that they have become addicted to work or to exercise. They become sensitive to the subtleties of addiction.
As we move more and more into a Stage Three understanding, be it of abuse or racism or addiction, we see and thus can respond to these subtleties. It no longer becomes necessary to label someone an abuser, a racist, or an addict before we can begin to intervene to support healthy transformation.
But the center of gravity in many communities remains at Stage Two and efforts to move the conversation to a higher level are confused with a return to a time and an understanding that denies the existence of the problem. The “trans” position of Stage Three gets confused with the “pre” position of Stage One. Anyone who suggests moving the conversation to a Stage Three perspective is accused of “not getting it” with respect to the realities of the problem. They are seen as being in denial or, worse, colluding with offenders.
We need the passionate indignation of a Stage Two analysis of the abuse of family members to fuel the hard work of doing intervention. But we also need the more nuanced understanding of abuse that comes from a Stage Three analysis to be able to do effective intervention with offenders.
