Day 72: The Fine Line; Part One

In The Fine Line I'm going to talk about sexual assault and domestic abuse.  If you've been a victim, and you cannot tolerate the discussion, I completely understand and I send you on your way with a hug.  No hard feelings.

Let's start with some definitions.  Sexual assault is sexual contact or behavior that is unwelcome.  This ranges from someone being raped behind a dumpster to someone having unsolicited dick pics sent to them.  Sometimes we like to call this by less intense names.  "Harassment," maybe, or in far too many cases "just some over the top flirting."  But I'm not going to beat around the bush.  If it's sexual in nature, and the recipient didn't want it, that's sexual assault.

Abuse is a much broader umbrella term than sexual assault, but for today I'm interested in the types of abuse that occur within a relationship.  These include: physical, sexual, social, and psychological abuse, as well as neglect and intimidation.  They can manifest in a lot of different ways, from hitting your partner, to controlling their life, to ignoring them, to bullying them.  We call this a lot of different things in a lot of different scenarios, but many times we shy away from naming it as abuse outright.

Now that the definitions are laid out, I want to say a few words about why I think we are so hesitant to acknowledge the sexual assault and abuse we see going on around us, or even as it's happening to us.  Basically, it all boils down to the following:

The perpetrator is someone we know, and we think they're a good person.

Here's the thing--you don't have to be a bad person to abuse someone.  Not all abuse is intentional.  Some of it is a cycle of behavior you never even reflected on, and so it just continues.

Not all sexual assault is intentional.  People misread signals, and humans in general seem to really suck at clear cut sexual communication.  More over, we've done a really bad job of appropriately labeling sexual assault in particular, which means sometimes people who are committing it literally do not know that what they're doing isn't just aggressive flirting.   

And I get it.  It's easy to make excuses.  Especially when we see what someone else is doing and know that even if we haven't done the exact same thing, we've done something very similar ourselves.  And none of us would ever sexually assault someone, would we?  None of us are abusers, right?

Right?

Maybe the key to ending abuse and sexual assault is to stop pretending that the perpetrators are somehow different than the rest of us.  Sure, not all of us would break into someone's house and rape them.  Not all of us would go after our partner with our fists.  But assault and abuse, like most things, aren't a binary.  They're a continuum, and at one time or another we've probably all crossed the fine line.  That time I meant to joke, but instead was cruel.  The time you wanted to flatter, and instead were creepy.

I think the measure of each of us is not in whether or not we've ever crossed the line by accident.  It's what we did after that line got crossed.  Did we apologize sincerely and try to avoid it ever again?  Or did we bluster and hold our ground, insisting that, since we didn't mean any harm, we couldn't possibly have caused any harm?

The more willing we are to see the times we came too close to the line, the easier it is to admit when other good, decent, totally human people--people just like us--do the same thing.  We don't have to defend them in their error, because we're not trying to defend ourselves by proxy.

Everyone good and uncomfortable?  Great, go ahead and move on to Part Two