Using Abuse

When People Choose Power and Punishment over Safety and Healing

The authors of this piece (Agata and Garden) are long-time participants in anarchist movements and a variety of projects for collective liberation. Both authors of this text are personally affected by the topic: we are not writing abstractly or from an external perspective. We also have major disagreements about several of these questions, but that's not a problem for us. Solidarity is stronger when it can overcome disagreement. Agata, among other related experiences, participated in an organization where several people used anonymous or invented accusations to harass or ostracize their political enemies, including anyone who criticized them. A lifelong anarcha-feminist, she experienced gender-based violence but didn’t have access to collective support or responses because of how our movement rhetoric and practices have been misused. Garden experienced these bad practices when they were being harassed by an online stalker who began spreading rumors about them. Several people who didn’t know Garden or the stalker began spreading the rumors too, and adding new ones. In the name of confronting abuse, they were actually participating in it. The common thread is something we’ve seen as a pattern in our movement: people not taking gendered abuse, sexual violence, or harm in intimate relationships seriously, and people claiming to represent anonymous accusations, using those accusations for their own status or power.

-- Content Warning --
This piece discusses abuse openly and intimately from first had experiance.
It is a hard read and you should proceed with caution if these topics are difficult for you.
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Garden: I still have nightmares. I still wake up terrified, because of how they went after me like that, for years. Because of all the friends and comrades who never got back in touch with me to apologize or even just see how I was doing.

Agata: I’ve been active in the movement for well over 20 years. I’m an anarcha-feminist, someone who, within this time frame, has seen several shifts in how the movement understands and implements gender politics, as well as in how it deals with accusations of interpersonal and gender-based harm. One thing is continuous:the anarchist movement has a problem with gender-based abuse and discrimination, and it is not my intention to challenge this statement: it is, sadly, a fact. It’s something I’ve been discussing with my gender-oppressed comrades for decades, with pretty much each one of us having a personal experience of it, and a bad experience with attempts to deal with it. I know of many people who left the movement over this, and I also know of many who were bullied out because they brought up a story of harm they experienced. This is a very serious problem that is stopping us from becoming a movement we self-describe as feminist, intersectional, and inclusive.

But on the other hand, so much of what I have experienced is that challenging and scrutinising practices around tackling abuse in the movement leads you to being labelled an “abuse apologist,” no matter your intention. And once you’re labelled an apologist, anyone in your vicinity will be labelled the same way: I am asking you to please not do this. It was scary enough to write this piece without that risk.

I’ve experienced first-hand what happens if you question the narratives and practices of the people who appoint themselves as the defenders of survivors and the slayers of abusers. I’ve seen what happens in the collectives dealing with it. Finally, my perspective is that of a woman, someone who faces gender oppression and is acutely interested in combating it in the movement and beyond.

Garden: This is a really personal topic for me. It’s something that has impacted me long before I was a part of the movement, and long before I got targeted by this rumor campaign. When I was a little kid, like really young, I was sexually abused. A few years after that, my dad became violent, extremely violent, against my mother and to a lesser extent against us kids.

For those reasons and more, questions of trauma and mental health are really important to me. I had had flashbacks before, but it was actually the anger and the sexual boundary crossing of this stalker that caused my flashbacks to become more frequent and much worse. Having this anonymous rumor campaign orchestrated against me while I was in the middle of dealing with the effects of actually being abused as a child… It was brutal. I think those of us who are dealing with trauma and with other mental health issues are especially vulnerable to that. We’re messy, it’s clear we don’t have our shit together, and people who feel more comfortable with “normality” as our society defines it, they’re often happy to exclude us from movement spaces.

The people who gain power from these manipulations, they’re not all middle class, but they definitely take advantage of middle class values. It’s this politics of comfort where anyone who makes you uncomfortable is bad and should be pushed out. People who approach the movement that way, like it’s some clique, it makes me wonder if they’ve ever had to worry about their own survival. Like, is this all a game to them? Do they not realize how serious all of this is? And nowadays, with social media, people learn if you don’t like someone, you can make them disappear with the tap of a button, so they feel entitled to treat people that way in their daily life.

What we learned in the course of these really horrible experiences was that it wasn’t just a few bullies. As often is the case with bullying, it required our entire movement, our whole communities, to participate in one way or another, either actively or by finding ways and excuses to avoid addressing the problem. Only a small handful of people actually invented rumors and false accusations. A few more people helped aggressively spread those rumors. Most took the easiest path, bowed down to the people who were threatening them, and agreed to follow their narratives and tolerate their actions without scrutiny.

Garden: Several of my friends ghosted me. Thanks to a couple people who rejected the bullying, I eventually got to see some of the emails and messages that were being sent. Some of them said I abused several people, some of them said I had abused one person, some of the messages called me a rapist. None of them offered any details. The accusers got to be completely anonymous. They claimed to be representing someone who was hurt, and I understand not including someone’s name in an email that’s being sent out, but they wouldn’t give anything – as in, no mention of what city or country, what year this happened in, what the context was. In my case it turned out that’s because these people didn’t exist. No one was saying, “this person abused me, this happened to me.”

The only thing in common between the messages was that all of them demanded that the accusations be kept completely secret, that no one tell me about the accusations, that no one was allowed to communicate or work with me anymore, and if anyone didn’t comply with these demands, they would also be considered to be complicit in the abuse/rape. And these were being sent to people in multiple cities and even in different countries, mostly to people who didn’t know me.

It was over a month before I learned these messages were being sent out. In that time, friends or comrades just stopped responding to me. I was working with some people on an event at the time, and they suddenly said it had to be cancelled without giving any explanation, without responding to my questions. I was already in a really depressing place in my life. When this started happening, the ghosting, I felt so much fear and paranoia. What was happening? Was I imagining it all? Was it just a coincidence? Then the discovery that these strangers had started this campaign against me, it was one of the worst times of my life. I thought about suicide every week.

Agata: I saw anonymity being used to escape accountability, so that accusations could be used as a weapon against other groups. In one case, accusations were made against an entire group, without any individuals identified in any way. In other words, the person who was harmed—if they existed—was completely anonymous. The type of harm or the context it happened in was not disclosed. No details. And the person (s) who were being accused of abuse were also anonymous. All we were told is that an anonymous member of this group was guilty of some form of abuse. There was no possibility for dialogue or asking any questions, and if you challenged it, you were also accused of supporting the abuse. Basically, one group was demanding the cancellation of another group, in its entirety, and also demanding the cancellation of anyone who resisted or anyone who continued to associate with that group. From what I was able to assess, the entire accusation was false, and they were trying to get rid of a rival group over political disagreements.

There is one pretty telling detail in these kinds of false accusations; the survivor is absent. They are some kind of mythical, agenda-less creature who is serving only as a rhetorical figure giving an unquestionable legitimacy to anyone wielding the accusations, claiming they are only executing the survivor’s wishes. I’ve seen situations where there was no survivor at all; for example someone was named as a survivor, but then that person says it’s a lie, that they weren’t abused, and they never asked anyone to make any accusation on their behalf.

When everything is completely anonymous, and any questions or challenges will be met with the accusation that you’re “not believing the survivor” or “supporting abuse,” it becomes virtually impossible to take any kind of informed action. Instead, the only choice on the table is to obey what [person unknown] demands based on [accusation withdrawn] that was given to [person unknown] by [survivor unknown]. I can't imagine a setup more damaging to gender rights and to the development of practices to tackle gender-based violence than that..

Another aspect of this kind of accusation is that, if any details are given at all, they are changing continuously, with drastically different versions of what happened given to different people. The versions of events presented often appear to be crafted to match what the accuser thinks specific individuals or groups will find credible, or worse, what might trigger them based on their past experiences. And so, over the space of the last few years, I have seen accusations becoming something fluid and devoid of any detail and instead tailored to whoever was the audience. What's more, in one such case I have seen minutes from a meeting held by a bunch of accusers, from which it was fragrantly clear the attendees don't believe that the accusations they were bringing up had any basis in reality. Instead the discussion of that meeting focused on developing various ways of making the accusations believable, the ways tailored to what the attendees thought would be the best narrative for various groups and individuals they were planning to approach.

The main effect of these fluctuating accusations is that it becomes impossible to assess them in any meaningful way, and, to be honest, I can’t see any other aim for this behaviour other than just that: making it a weapon without any chance for accountability.

When a situation like this starts, it’s almost impossible to know how to respond.

Garden: I tried to respond ethically, in a way that wouldn’t support any backlash against the need to take abuse seriously. To me, that meant not going on the internet, not naming the people who were spreading false accusations against me, not publicly naming the person who had been stalking me, and not encouraging people to cancel them like they were trying to do to me. If I used tactics like that, it would only become a question of social status: who had more power in the scene? It certainly wouldn’t generate any meaningful support for anyone. And all these problems are important to me because I grew up in an abusive family and because people I care about have been abused. And also, because I have needed to receive supportive feedback at various times in my life to fix my own harmful behaviors.

One of the shittiest things about this whole situation is that before the cancellation campaign started, I started getting intense flashbacks much more frequently. A sequence of events, a certain image or phrase, and all of the sudden I would get a huge wave of nausea and panic, terror actually, I would have to stop whatever I was doing, and I’d just be useless for like fifteen minutes. They often came with nightmares.

All of this pushed me to really deal with that trauma, to plunge into it, to understand how it affected me, to try to heal. I was in the middle of this healing process when the cancellation campaign started and it just totally unhinged me. It’s taken me years to be able to feel stable and safe thinking about either thing, because of the ways they overlapped.

I think the people who spread the rumors did it for status, for power, because they like the feeling of punishing someone. But the person who was stalking me, who was the origin of these rumors? I’m almost certain that person had been abused and was displacing it onto others, just spiraling from this untreated trauma. It would have been so easy for me to post all the screenshots, all the boundary crossing, the harassment, the demanding sexual comments, then the rage, the insults, the apologies, and then all over again. But this person didn’t deserve that, they didn’t deserve humiliation and ostracism. They needed some kind of support – from other people, not from the person they were stalking (me).

My response to the cancellation campaign was to tell friends. And honestly, most friends didn’t have time for it. I’m really grateful to the few who did, but most did not. One person who I thought was a friend even started spreading the rumor himself and embellishing it. A little while before this, I had shared a criticism with him. He’s someone who gains a lot of status and scene power as an ally, whether it’s as an expert in solidarity work for the Kurds or as the person who teaches the class on how to be a good anti-patriarchal man. The thing was, in multiple situations where he had a fair amount of power, someone was acting really abusively, multiple people were getting hurt, and he didn’t intervene unless he got to be the protagonist, got to lead the workshop. There were situations where friends were being excluded or even physically attacked naming the abuse so it wouldn’t just disappear, and he didn’t support them or include them. And I never saw him do anything to support the people who were being harmed.

I was really hurt by that. I tried to share the criticism with him in a sincere way, I kept the door open to keep talking about it, I didn’t impose any ultimatum. I expected him to hear and try and do better. But I guess his ego was the more important part of the equation, because when he heard some people were trying to cancel me, he jumped on the bandwagon.

Here’s something telling: this is what makes it hardest for me to believe he might be acting in good faith. When he spoke with people who actually knew me, he used really vague, ambiguous language, like I was problematic, I was hurtful, I hadn’t treated certain people well. But when he spoke with people who didn’t know me, he would say I was a rapist and an abuser. Keep in mind, no one has ever told him I abused them or abused a friend of theirs. He made it up because the accusation gave him power. The ability to take down someone he felt insulted by gave him power. He was spreading this for over a year, and almost no one questioned it. Not a single person got in touch with my partner, only one person got in touch with my ex.

What messed up kind of movement is this? People will believe a rumor that I’m a rapist, enough to ghost me, to cancel me, to try to ruin my life, but they won’t check in with my partner or any of my exes to make sure they’re okay? That’s beyond hypocrisy. That’s fucking sadistic.

Agata: To my mind, it is not that it’s impossible to know how to respond. It’s that this response should be collective, it should come from the whole movement, and I just can't see this happening in the current framework, where, as I mentioned above, we keep developing various ways of avoiding a response, instead focusing on walking around these issues and doing our best to maintain what we see as business as usual. Doing so exposes the few individuals and collectives who do try to deal with it to harm, abuse and potentially being pushed away from the movement.

I think it is important to note here that these tactics of avoidance the movement displays in the context of false accusations are, basically, the same we frequently deploy in cases of actual abuse. This fact is a gift to those who forward false accusations: it enables them to appear more believable.

Another thing that is important to say is that there is one particular demographic responsible for the vast majority of efforts to “enforce” the practices of avoidance in both these cases: it’s cis-gendered men. They do it to protect their projects, because they don’t have a habit or inclination to get involved in issues they see as “women’s problems”, because they have a general dislike of what they call gender politics, identity politics, or whatever term they use to describe the parts of the movement they consider a threat to what they call Big A Anarchism. Or, in some cases, they do it to protect their mates, fellow cis-gendered men. They too need to take a big hard look at themselves, to see how their actions contribute to the expansion of the issue that can, if left unchecked, eventually destroy the entire movement.

From my experience, facing all of the above has extremely dire consequences for anyone who does try to respond.

Aside from all the harm experienced by survivors of abuse who are abandoned, in this culture of punishment over support, and the trauma experienced by those who are targeted by campaigns of harassment or ostracism, what are other ways this method harms our movement?

Agata: Our movement has a big problem because society has a big problem: we fail to deal with conflict, gender-based abuse, and accusations of abuse. Not having any effective response to this dismisses us as a realistic alternative to the current system. Also, the problem of gender-based abuse is so bad it can destroy our collectives, it can destroy entire movements. Those who take advantage of real abuse or accusations of abuse for their own personal power only make the problem of abuse worse. People lose hope, their trust is damaged, they don’t want to think about the problem anymore.

And people become afraid. There is this fear of writing or speaking about this issue. I’ve been meaning to do it for years, but I always gave up because it is so scary to see what happens to anybody who tries to have this discussion. Speaking for myself, I have no idea what to do if I experience gender-based violence or abuse from someone in the movement. I don’t know what the response will be if I bring it up. This is not a purely theoretical dilemma for me.

I had an experience with someone who used to be in the anarchist movement before choosing to walk away from it all. I’m not going to share any private details. I’ve learned from navigating this problem over the past few years that sharing personal information can and will be weaponised against you or against other people. These are the bare bones: this person subjected me to sexual violence, and it continues to have severe effects on my mental and physical wellbeing. And yet, none of the people who read this and know me personally have ever heard that before. The reason for it is directly related to the problems I described earlier in this essay: what else should I expect from a movement that can get this so drastically wrong, repeatedly?? And then, a movement that just keeps writing books about how it should have actually worked? A movement that, instead of trying to tackle the wrongness, these huge problems, just comes up with ways around it and carries on as if nothing happened?

I know several other people who chose never to share their own stories of harm with their groups and collectives because of the same fear I have: that it will not be dealt with, that all it would do is create gossip, that, given the tolerance afforded to false accusations, people will respond in a jaded way, they won’t believe it. There is a widespread feeling that the general approach to addressing interpersonal harm in the movement has already been so debilitating that it is pointless to ask for help.

On the minority of occasions when an accusation is made and there is some kind of response or “process,” the process all too often turns into a competition to see who enjoys greater social status in the movement, with people “taking sides” based on things such as general movement clout, who’s got more friends, who is more outspoken—with points for being aggressive—and, if the process was contained within one group only, who is more “useful” as a group member.

Garden: Sometimes, the same small group of people have insisted on fully ostracizing a person who acknowledged how they were abusive and were working to change. At the same time, they protect a friend of theirs who had abused multiple people, preventing any accusations from being made public so that friend could retain all their social power.

I think another damaging side effect of this method is the way it hides any realistic expectations of what healing and transformation look like. It gives us an easy framework of good and evil that looks a lot like Christianity, a lot like the prison system. In the end, this method only works as an easy way to declare who the bad guys are. We don’t have to worry about social transformation, about challenging the institutions that create these oppressive power imbalances, about changing our own culture and behaviors. We just have to go along with these performances of justice every now and then, sacrifice a friendship or two, and move on with our lives.

And if we don’t, we’re threatened with being labelled as “abuse apologists.” But you know what? This method doesn’t do anything to help people who have actually been abused, who are dealing with the trauma, and as I know from my experience, it can be used just as easily by stalkers, by harassers, by others who feel entitled to act abusively.

On top of that, unaccountable systems of rumor-spreading are a major vulnerability for the police to exploit. In the ‘60s and ‘70s, it was unfounded accusations of snitching that turned the movement against itself. Nowadays, we already know cases of police infiltrators using fake stories of abuse to cover up holes in their background stories. I also know of two people who vouched for “new comrades” who turned out to be cops, in other words highly suspect people, who also participate in this method of spreading false accusations to create conflicts.

The solution to this vulnerability isn’t actually such a mystery. These situations are messy. They never have easy answers. They require care and patience and persistence and love and support. If someone who is repeatedly and unapologetically abusive does need to get beating, so be it. But that’s such a small part of everything that needs to happen. People dealing with the trauma of abuse need friends to check in on them, make them meals, help them get therapy or other medical care, sleep over when they’re having nightmares, help them move out of an abusive living situation and find a new place to live, help with childcare if that’s a factor, go on walks with them; they need folks to act as go-betweens, knowing what to share with whom, making sure they don’t have to share space with certain people in the earlier stages of the healing process, take care of communication with the person who hurt them (if that person is willing to understand they have caused harm). People need to step forward to work with the person who was abusive, spending months having hard, uncomfortable conversations and encouraging them to find the kind of resources or therapy that don’t affirm and excuse them, but that push them to reflect, self-criticize, and heal the roots of their harmful behavior. And still other people need to step forward to encourage the broader circles—a friend circle, a social center, a radical group, a citywide movement—to reflect on and identify parts of their shared culture that enabled the harm to take place. All of that is work that police infiltrators, snitches, patriarchal radicals who don’t actually care about abuse, and power-hungry authoritarians almost never participate in. It’s work that takes heart, it’s work that doesn’t give us individualized power, and it’s work that makes our movements stronger. Someone who is actually and truly an abuse apologist isn’t going to spend months or years doing this work.

Like I said, it isn’t a mystery what we need to be doing, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. I might be more optimistic, I might have seen some collective efforts that helped the people involved, but I also agree with Agata: our movement has a firm commitment to avoidance, and until we acknowledge that, break with it, and commit to the work of healing, we’re going to be vulnerable to gendered violence, to power hungry people who manipulate our collective responses to abuse, just like we’re going to be vulnerable to police infiltrators and a hundred of other serious problems.

Conclusions

We still say: Believe survivors. Abuse and sexual violence—especially in a gendered way—are a huge problem in our movements and in our whole society. But in multiple situations that we’ve experienced and other similar ones we’ve heard about since then, there aren’t actual people behind the accusations saying “I was hurt, I was abused, I don’t feel safe sharing space with this person.”

This should be commonsense: don’t believe random things you hear from complete strangers on the internet. Don’t automatically believe people who are sharing a rumor or passing along an accusation if you haven’t had the chance to see how reliable they are in real life. Don’t automatically believe people who are saying they represent someone who has to remain entirely anonymous, who is making accusations without any details. For the sake of security, you can look into them and make sure they didn’t appear out of nowhere, make sure they’re not a cop, make sure they’re grounded in the movement, and also make sure they know what they’re doing. If there is a real person they represent, someone who has been harmed, that person needs support both in an immediate way and in a long-term way. They need support that is trauma-informed. No single person can offer all that support, and even well intentioned support can lead to a survivor becoming more isolated or more entrenched in their trauma, if the support people are not experienced. And people who don’t get effective support dealing with trauma often adopt coping mechanisms that are harmful to themselves or to others.

Finally, there does need to be an understanding that sexual violence, gendered violence, abuse in intimate relationships, and abuse anchored in other systemic oppressions are very real and they need serious attention. However, there is no real consensus, no protocol, no magic solution for responding to abuse. We say this as people who have been abused or experienced violence: being abused doesn’t automatically mean you know how to fix the problem of abuse, which is a social problem. You know what your needs are, and with good support, with resources, you can figure out what you need to do to heal. There’s also the question of how the person who caused harm can transform to stop causing harm, and one of the most neglected questions, how we can all change our group systems and the broader culture so that abuse is not an inevitable, daily thing, and when it occurs, we’re all better at responding to it and achieving real healing and transformation.

What does transformative justice mean in your experience?

Agata: In my entire involvement in the anarchist movement, I have not seen a single “transformative justice” process that went right. I read literature about how it should work, and how amazing and progressive it was, but to see it actually working: this has never happened. Instead, what would normally happen is more harm being caused and copious amounts of gossip and rumour-spreading across the movement, the further the better. Hell, I even saw people who used access to this gossip for cheap social status points. I don’t think these behaviours were the main factor behind the failures of these processes, but they certainly didn’t help. They created a strong impression that the movement does not consider the issue of addressing interpersonal harm with the seriousness it ought to be addressed.

You may ask what my proposed solution to this problem is. The honest answer is: I have no clue. What I do know is that it has to be a collective discussion that would develop it. And that this discussion must be based on real-world situations and problems, rather than on imaginary or aspirational ones. And that to have it, we need to create an environment where people will feel enabled to say what they really think, rather than perform in the way that they figure will cause them the least harm. And that during this discussion, we will need to tackle an extremely difficult task of both prioritising the principle of believing the survivor as well as making sure we are not consumed by the actions of bad actors bringing up false accusations. And that we will have to find ways of making sure that the actions of these few bad actors don’t serve as tools of escaping accountability by those who did harm someone. And about a million other issues.

Difficult as it is, we must take action to improve our justice practices. And I recommend doing so instead of doing nothing, before the current unacceptable situation continues to destroy us as a movement.

Garden: I think a lot of people don’t realize where transformative justice comes from, or they expect these situations to have perfect, happy resolutions, or most of their experience is with these horrible situations like what Agata and I have been describing.

As a friend recently reminded me, a friend who grew up in a situation with a lot of violence, transformative justice arises from anti-authoritarian feminists in communities that are targeted for extermination by the prison system, by police, by the artificial scarcity of capitalism, by racism and colonialism, and by the way patriarchy makes harmful behavior recirculate amongst the groups of people who have already been harmed the most.

In this context, survival is a victory. When people don’t have to call the cops, that’s a victory. When one more person doesn’t have to get fed into the prison system, when one more survivor of abuse doesn’t have to get humiliated by police interrogations and court processes, those are victories. When someone gets help moving out of a harmful relationship and they get help finding a safe place to live, that’s a victory. When a person who is hurting others faces a collective pushback, and they get told that their harmful behaviors are not acceptable, that’s a victory. When we have truly community-rooted resources to help people heal from trauma, to help children understand and heal from the violence they witness or the violence inflicted on them, when these resources are accessible and also have a social analysis rather than a purely individual or religious one, these are victories. If a neighborhood or the movement in a city can bring several of these victories together with collective participation at some level – we’re already talking about the beginnings of a transformation.

Clearly, there are pessimistic versions of this and optimistic versions. Maybe the best we can hope for is getting support to the person who has been harmed. Or, maybe we can actually prefigure revolution by transforming the very nature of our interpersonal and collective relationships.

In either case, we all need to step up and implicate ourselves. That means recognizing that there are no easy answers. We have to do the best we can in each situation. If a person or group gets in touch and demands you stop all communication with a certain individual or group, you have the ability to say no, to find other ways to support healing and transformation. If the people making demands give you an ultimatum: obey or you’ll be punished, you’ll be cancelled too, it’s clear they’re acting like authoritarians. And authoritarians, no matter how good their intentions, are no good at responding to oppression – not at the institutional level, not at the social level, not at the interpersonal level. Nobody has all the answers for fixing this problem. But we have seen that this method—anonymous accusations, ultimatums, ghosting or ostracism, no emphasis on healing, no path to reconciliation and transformation, no attempt to look at collective culture—has only caused more harm.

Agata and Garden