I’ve been thinking a lot about why people tend to automatically side with abusers when faced with their victims, even when they don’t know anything about the abuser, just the fact that they are one
There’s an abuse culture but it has to come from somewhere
I think people are reluctant to believe in evil, reluctant to confront things that may make them anxious or feel bad, and the easiest thing in the world to do is to shut down the person who’s “making” them feel that way because that person has already been weakened and discredited by their abuser to begin with.
A lot of knee-jerk human reactions tend to be like this, where the point isn’t necessarily “I want to side with abusers” but other desires and anxieties that play right along with contributing to someone’s victimization
Would this be an application of the just world fallacy? We would prefer not to think that someone can be manipulated in such a fashion, because it lets us believe we could not be manipulated in the same fashion?
Why does there have to be an abuse culture coming from somewhere? It’s not coming from anywhere. Nobody had to make it this way. People find it inherently emotionally rewarding to side with abusers against their victims, and this is true, and it was always true, and it will always be true, in every culture that has ever existed and will ever exist. If being an abuser did not give you power and allow you to commit more abuse, abuse wouldn’t be a problem that anyone had to think about.
[deep breath]
If there’s one single solitary thing that humans are good at doing –
– if there’s one thing for which our brains have evolved to prepare us, since the days when we were Homo erectus –
– that thing is “managing conflicts and tensions within small tightly-knit social groups.”
Like, seriously, people have really amazingly good instincts for handling social drama. If you look at the right kinds of traditionally-structured communities, you can see it in action, it’s like fucking magic. And even in “normal society,” amongst close groups of friends and suchlike, similar principles hold sway.
(Some restrictions apply. There are individuals who are not neurotypical and who have abnormally-formed social-management modules in their minds. Also, communities start to work very differently when, e.g., it’s easy for people to leave…or when it’s plausible to call in social artillery support from outside the sphere of a Dunbar’s-number-sized society…which means that most of the social drama we actually see these days involves people flailing around with misguided instincts. Etc. etc. Even so.)
The mechanisms by which this drama-management gets handled tend to involve lots of quiet talks, lots of shuffling people away from places/situations where they’re likely to cause problems, lots of soft pressure to keep things from spiraling out of control. These mechanisms are often not fair. They’re certainly not principle-driven. They on focus avoiding and containing conflict by the most expedient means possible, and that’s it, damn all other considerations.
In some ways, this is pretty OK, at least in the abstract. “We’re going to make sure that the issues between Alice and Bob don’t expand to swamp the lives of Carol and Dwayne and Eve; we’re going to help keep things behind closed doors so that the damage to others gets minimized.”
In some ways it’s just awful. “Alice is a powerful and aggressive person who can make life miserable for lots of people if she’s upset, and Bob is basically a nonentity with no power to cause trouble, so we’re going to appease Alice regardless of the merits of the situation.”
ANYWAY
By the social logic of the tribe, the conflict-minimization logic, the “correct” solution to an abusive situation probably won’t be even remotely acceptable by modern moral standards. (Classical liberal standards, social justice standards, whatever.) In the worst cases, the logic devolves to “the victim’s just got to suck it up and deal, the abuse is all happening in private and from a community perspective it therefore doesn’t exist, but any attempt to interfere with it would be messy and conflict-heavy.” Sometimes you can do better than that. Sometimes you can quietly get the victim out from under the abuser, and quietly create distance and barriers, and quietly let the whole thing fall into the memory hole. But however you slice it, it’s going to involve minimizing the conflict, because that’s the whole point. Labeling someone a Bad Wrong Norm-Violator, and casting him out / making him undergo severe punishment, is a huge and costly step from a community-health perspective – it creates divisions and ill-will, it sucks up lots of attention and energy, etc. – and so that kind of thing gets reserved for people who are genuinely posing a danger to the health of the whole tribe. Which abusers, generally, are not. As the common wisdom has it, they are dangerous only to their victims, and often pretty damn charming and helpful to everyone else.
The tribal logic isn’t dispositive these days. A abuser’s victim, once he starts standing up for himself as such, isn’t going to accede to whatever conflict-minimizing thing the tribe would want to do; he’s going to yell and scream about how he’s been mistreated and about the restitution / retribution demanded by justice. Often he’ll get his way, because pretty much everyone buys into those modern moral standards, including a number of Big Powerful Social Institutions that he can call for support. But whether he wins or loses, along the way there will be a big huge honking fight, with divisions and ill-will and lots of lost attention and energy, just the thing that the tribal logic was trying to avoid.
And people will notice, and resent that. They’ll resent it even if they don’t fully understand why. They’ll have a sense that everyone is angry and everything hurts, and that the fabric of the community is being damaged, and that it wasn’t supposed to be that way. Instinctively, they’ll expect the abuse to have been quietly managed and swept under the rug, and when things are messier than that they’re going to get mad at the person who seems to be making it messier. That person, of course, is the victim.