Lighthouses by Emmylou
When I was growing up, my heart, mind, and vulva pulsed with the new connections I was constantly making. Sex was something new, not yet used as a strategy to hurt myself and others, an act inextricably tied with abuse. I had always been the kid who knew the most about sex, a body of unpracticed knowledge that was wise beyond my years. The maturation of my sexuality in high school rendered me a firecracker of lust and unattainable obsession, lying awake at night with my heart furiously pumping freshly unleashed hormones, my hands clutched in sweaty fists around bundles of my sheets, an overloaded current of sexual tension.
The touch of a breast, the taste of saliva not mine, the feel of an erection through a pant leg, it all filled me with wonder and overwhelming arousal. Everyday life became composed of an endless potential of eroticized encounters, interactions deeply laden with landmines of curiosity and attraction. Crackling with electricity, I fumbled my way through my first sexual encounters, trying to balance both these new feelings and the gravity they could entail, delicious anxiety hanging in the air.
in an almost symbolic loss of innocence, I grew involved with an older, abusive man the weekend of my high school graduation. My freshly established radical openness must have seemed like ripe, low hanging fruit to him. I viewed him as a sort of passport in the d.i.y. punk ethic lifestyle I so badly wanted to be a part of, while he was slowly manipulating me into thinking that some forms of unconsensual sexual behavior passed in the real radical world, implementing my sense of awe and naiveté to coerce me into acts and behaviors that were unhealthy for my body and my soul. Sometimes, his abuse was blatant (such as when he would abuse me in ways similar to how he had told me he had abused others years before, but had sworn he would never do again), but he would mask his abusive tendencies in rhetoric that supported his righteousness and ensured my silent confusion. It has taken me years to untangle my internalizations of this abuse from my actual sexual desires and perceptions of romantic and sexual relations, which has been a tenuous process of recovery and careful sifting.
I’ve often said that the reaction of my so-called community once I came out was just as traumatic as the abuse I endured during the context of that relationship. Initially empowered, I stepped forward with multiple other women who had also been abused, raped, or harassed by the same man. Since we all came out together, the community couldn’t look away or deny the reality of our experiences. Therefore, there were a few months during which the perpetrator experienced a few uncomfortable bans: he was no longer welcome at our feminist collective, where a few survivors lived, and could not be a part of the organizing process of a fledging infoshop. I assume that someone suggested he write letters to the survivors as a part of his accountability process, but all I remember of his 3-sentence letter to me was his question, “If I work on my shit, will it even be worth it?”
However, a lot of the potential community response was stifled by his response to these accounts, a pattern which mirrors perpetrator behavior 101: he blamed us for the abuse we had experienced, claimed that we were the actual abusers, denied the abuse had ever happened, or assumed no responsibility for his actions whatsoever. I think this antagonistic response really confused a lot of people, and this general community ambivalence translated into a lukewarm effort to hold him accountable. His appropriation of survivor support rhetoric to protect himself and demonize the survivors went over the heads of a community not fluent in recognizing the art of subtle abuse and emotional blackmail. Over time, the survivors and their supporters were increasingly told that he really was “working on his shit” despite any supporting evidence and that the past few months of mild reclusiveness had been punishment enough. Gradually, people began embracing his presence again, especially new people traveling through town and new additions to the neighborhood. People were more than willing to forget than anything had ever happened, especially people who were uncomfortable talking about sexual assault in the first place.
Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the people who still weren’t comfortable with the perp (like the survivors) were thought to be uptight, no-fun elitists. It was at this same time when the infoshop we had been working to keep running closed, and mysteriously, the perp’s house became the new hip hang-out, radical library, and show space. Most of the infoshop’s library materials ended up there under the guise of being temporary storage, and with a lack of other venues in our small town, most punk and riot folk bands are now invited to play at his house. So, the survivors are forced to either swallow their discomfort in order to be a functioning part of the punk social scene or face a future of marginalization and stigma, since over the past two years, the abuser and his crew have successfully co-opted all of the previous neutral community spaces. If you want to party, if you want to hang out, go to shows, check out a rad book, or be popular in the punk scene in my town, you gotta be down with a man who also happens to be a repeat abuser. There have been no attempts to check in with the survivors’ feelings about this unfortunate turn of events, and no seeming awareness how this set-up forces the survivors to choose between their social lives and their boundaries or healing processes. Not surprisingly, some of the survivors have chosen to start hanging out with the perpetrator again, while some haven’t. This rift between the survivors has been used as fodder by those who insist that the perpetrator is actually a “good guy” to make those survivors who still do not want to be around their abuser feel like there is something wrong with them for not “getting over it” quickly enough.
The faith I once held in the viability of self-sustaining radical communities to address their own needs has disintegrated as I have been made painfully aware that some issues, namely, sexual and domestic violence, are repeatedly overlooked in order to maintain a comfortable, cohesive party/show atmosphere. If you are a person whose presence threatens this superficial integrity, you can expect to be slowly phased out, made irrelevant by your social invisibility, your demands made trivial by an attitude that conveys that you’re crazy for still talking about “it.”
There are marginal spaces lying in wait for girls like me. I occupy a void made for me by those who have grown tired of my insistence on perpetrator accountability and community support for survivors, a space made by those who didn’t listen to or believe the survivors in the first place, who would rather I plug my mouth with a beer. They know, unconsciously or not, that my silence and invisibility guarantees their comfort and pleasant obliviousness in associating with a man who has been violating women for at least the past ten years.
However, some of the most terrifying moments have been those, not in which I dealt with people who tried to downplay my experience (“It’s not like he actually raped anybody”), but those moments in which I doubted myself. These came in the aftermath of my devastatingly casual disassociation from people I used to call my friends, when I started feeling increasingly lonely, crazy, and scared. These were the moments when I sat home alone when my friends would go to a party or show at my abuser’s house, asking me whether “we can talk about it later” so that they might be preemptively absolved of any guilt they might feel for associating with my perpetrator. These were the moments I forced myself to acknowledge my perpetrator in public settings, because I felt like I had no other options but to move on. These were the moments when loneliness set in and I contemplated compromise, when I thought that I must be wrong because almost no one was standing with me. These were the moments when I realized that my perpetrator didn’t need to work to be accountable because no one was challenging him anymore. He wasn’t uncomfortable anymore…I was.
Unfortunately, the local anarcho-punk community I once identified with I have realized is not capable or willing to address my immediate needs or boundaries. My disentanglement from the scene has been excruciating, but I know it’s what I need. I’ve realized that even in radical, activist, punk, or anarchist communities, oppressive behaviors aren’t checked at the door. Instead, they manifest in overt and covert ways, conscious and unconscious. Only within these communities, these abusive and disrespectful actions and words are sometimes even harder to articulate and recognize, because they are embodied in people we are supposed to trust, to band with against the “larger forces” of the state and capitalism. And in the case of intimate partner violence and sexual violence, survivors are all too often relegated to the sidelines because their communities are unwilling to do the work to create safe spaces, validate survivors, and challenge and hold accountable perpetrators. In too many cases, the rape culture of the mainstream has not yet been dismantled in punk and radical communities, so victim-blaming and other rape supportive attitudes are perpetuated and go unchallenged.
Needless to say, I have been digesting a fair amount of disillusionment. Do all radical communities silently harbor perpetrators even when multiple survivors have come forward with their stories of being assaulted, raped, and violated by the same guy? Do all survivors have to go through the painful process of slowly losing faith in a scene once thought to offer a path out of the typical misogynist bullshit? How are we supposed to deal with our trauma when there isn’t an adequate community response to abusive behavior and resources offered by the mainstream are stigmatized? Why is it that, if the perpetrator is charming and popular, all bets are off?
My ethics and dreams are now solely in the realm of a working hypothesis, a fumbling for answers. What would actual radical-minded survivor support look like? How would communities deal with survivors’ triggers in party, show, and conference contexts? How would perpetrators be dealt with? Would they be ostracized or would there be a task force of people invested in the simultaneous challenge/growth of the abuser? What community structures can we create to address this pervasive and potentially divisive issue? What groundwork needs to be laid so that survivors can finally feel that coming forward will not be a futile attempt to find support, validation, and hope?
I know this much is true: No survivor should ever be made to question herself due to lack of community support. No survivor should be pressured to move on or cut her perpetrator slack just because everyone else is doing it. No survivor should ever feel invalidated because people minimize or deny the abuse that was inflicted upon her. No survivor should be made to feel like she’s going insane, constantly attempting to engage in conversations most people stopped participating in weeks, months, or years ago. It is not the responsibility of the survivor to hold her community and her perpetrator accountable! We are already spending enough energy trying to take care of ourselves, let alone educate others on why they’re supposed to care about sexual violence or why this problem absolutely needs to be addressed by radical communities.
In moments of despair, I have struggled to find other survivors (or allies) who are also disillusioned and frustrated with the way that sexual assault, rape, and abuse is (not) handled in radical, anarchist, or punk communities. I would like to engage in a network of radical survivors supporting each other, sharing survival strategies for dealing with abusive partners or ex-lovers, tips on how to deal with triggers, sharing stories about how the trauma we have experienced has become embodied, harm reduction strategies, what we can do if we lose our sense of community when we come forward with our stories of being assaulted, what we can do to feel a little less abandoned when we are sitting at home alone.
I feel that survivors in so-called radical or anarchist communities are in a unique position. Because of the nature of our ethics or beliefs, we often exist in communities on the fringes of society and inhabit subcultures that resist or challenge the outlets through which social problems are typically addressed: the criminal justice system, state-funded social programs, or the assistance of bourgeoisie professionals. However, as the survivors of sexual or domestic violence, we have often found that there are not adequate support or justice systems within our communities to handle the abuse and violence we have experienced. So, what do we do? What do we do if we encounter victim-blaming or rape supportive behavior when we are raped, assaulted, or verbally/emotionally/physically abused by a celebrated community member? What do we do when are perpetrators refuse to be accountable? What do we do when the communities we used to be a part of disenfranchise us? What do we do when, at the end of the day, we feel utterly alone, unsupported, and silenced?
