Rights are like kindness, but safety isn’t always …

As a former human rights lawyer, I stand by the guiding principle that giving one group of people rights doesn’t diminish or take away from the rights of others. Rights are like kindness or happiness or love: there’s no upper limit and you can keep creating more without taking away from what has already been given to others. Making one group of people in our community safer (religious minorities, refugees, trans people for e.g.) does not make other people less safe as it does not expose us to additional harm.

But here’s a slightly different take on this concept: making the world safer for abuse victims necessarily means making it less “safe” for abusers (and vice versa). Few of us actively challenge the harmful attitudes and behaviours of abusers, even though we may pick up on them and feel dismayed. Worse still, many of us (and I absolutely once included myself in this number) further victimise victims, even if unwittingly, with our own harmful attitudes and assumptions. Assumptions like ‘it can’t have been that bad if she stayed so long’ or ‘it was just a toxic relationship, they were as bad as each other’ effectively excuse abusers. Whether it's through positive reinforcement of abusive behaviour or simply turning a blind eye to it, we tacitly reinforce abuse dynamics even if that’s the last thing we consciously mean to do.

Of course, making the world ‘less safe’ for domestic abusers doesn’t mean we don’t respect their basic human rights or that we intend to cast them out of society. We don’t need to do either of those things in order to make our world safer. We simply need to stop ignoring the attitudes and assumptions that harm victims and excuse abusers.

We also need to separate the reasons why someone may adopt abusive behaviours from the abuse itself. That is, even if we know abusers are more likely to have been abused themselves, or may have had traumatic childhoods, it's key we send the message that it's still never acceptable to abuser other people.

Let's also not look the other way and tell ourselves it's just a matter for those involved in the abusive relationship as that is rarely the case. Abuse impacts not only victims but children or the relationship and, often, wider family members. We will all know victims of abuse even if they haven't disclosed this fact to us. So for something that may seem like someone else’s problem, you’d be surprised how quickly it might come around to being the problem of someone you love, or even yours.

How can we help? For one thing, we can make better choices in the language we use every day. Let’s stop saying things like ‘she chooses bad men’ and instead, be clear that ‘he was abusive’. Let’s not say ‘he was just stressed’ or ‘he’s going through a rough time’ and say, ‘even though he was suffering, it doesn’t excuse the harm he caused to others.’ Making abusers accountable for their actions through appropriate language isn’t diminishing their rights. It’s calling them out for the serious harm they cause to the rights of others. It’s shifting the blame back onto their shoulders from the shoulders of their victims.