The tactics that abusers use
Moira Donegan on AOC and what she told us:
On Monday night, after making several public allusions to the gravity of her experience, AOC used Instagram Live to describe her experience of the Capitol attack on 6 January. She spoke of hiding in her office as the mob breached the Capitol; she hid behind the door in a bathroom as she heard people ransacking the rooms outside. Someone came into the bathroom where she was hiding, their face on the other side of the door that she hid behind. At one point, a voice yelled, “Where is she? Where is she?” That turned out to be a Capitol police officer, but he did not identify himself; Ocasio-Cortez describes feeling ambivalent and uncertain about who he was and why he was really there.
Eventually, she escaped, and wound up barricaded in the office of Representative Katie Porter, of California, and later she moved to the office of Representative Ayanna Pressley, of Massachusetts. She spoke several times of how she feared the marauders could attack, with the intelligence she was receiving from security personnel mixing with her own anxious imagination. If she turned that corner down the hall, would an insurrectionist mob appear with guns? If bombs were found a block away, did that mean the building she was sitting in could explode? It’s clear from her account that at several points throughout the day, she thought she was going to die.
The description of these events on the broadcast – the terror and trauma AOC recounted, the frankness with which she detailed her mounting fears of bombs and guns – would already have been remarkable. But early in the broadcast, as she described her frustration over Republican calls to move on from the insurrection, she revealed something else: “I’m a survivor of sexual assault,” she said, the first time she has made that disclosure publicly. “The reason I say this and the reason I’m getting emotional in this moment is because these folks who tell us to move on, that it’s not a big deal, that we should forget what’s happened, or even telling us to apologize,” she said. “These are the tactics that abusers use.”
Which, I’m guessing, is not a coincidence, but a commonality. The same kind of people are drawn to today’s Republican party and to a habit of being abusive.
In recognizing the common rhetorical strategies used by both Republicans eager to minimize the attack and perpetrators of gender violence eager to avoid accountability for their treatment of women, AOC was echoing feminists who compared Donald Trump’s increasingly hostile and reckless behavior in the last two months of his term to a pattern common to domestic abusers, who are known to escalate their violence in the weeks immediately following their victim’s severing of the relationship.
I hadn’t thought of that before. It’s interesting. Not surprising, but interesting. Of course angry entitled violent abusive men get even more angry and violent and abusive when their victim escapes.
AOC is correct in her observation that the rhetorical strategies used by Republicans – to deny their own wrongdoing, attack the victims seeking accountability, and to pretend that the true wrongdoing has been committed against them – are the same strategies deployed by other tyrants, be they political or domestic, seeking to uphold other unjust and dangerous systems of power.
Because what else would they do? It’s not as if they can turn to reason and argument and persuasion and justice. They have to use the tools they know.
I’m not sure how true this be. It’s easy to say “the other party is the abusive one”, but I’m not sure that there actually be any fewer abusers on our side of the bipartisan divide. (I’m talking about personal abuse, not results of voting and the like.)
Of all US presidents in recent memory (and perhaps all US presidents ever), I can think of two that never — as far as we know — sexually harrassed or abused women: George W. Bush and Barack Obama. (Maybe Jimmy Carter? I’m not sure.) One of each party. And I know that US Presidents are a very small sample size, even anecdotally small, but …
Or did I misunderstand what you wrote?
GW @ #2, yep, you totes missed the point. Read it again.
That it’s the same kind of people, but not necessarily the same people? That impulses such as anger and entitlement can lead people either to the Republican Party, or to becoming abusers? (Or, of course, to both)
The tactics of abusers, a habit of being abusive. Not all abuse is sexual. Bullying, vindictiveness, gaslighting, minimizing, DARVO, these are common actions of abusers. And of Republicans.
Great article, but
Really? So it is not even “sexual violence” anymore, but “gender violence”? What the heck would that even be???
The thought and behaviour patterns are remarkably similar, though as you say this shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. The end of this essay packs a powerful punch–Graeber and Wengrow suggest that the origins of global hierarchy really start in, and with, the family.
‘For instance, almost everyone nowadays insists that participatory democracy, or social equality, can work in a small community or activist group, but cannot possibly “scale up” to anything like a city, a region or a nation-state. But the evidence before our eyes, if we choose to look at it, suggests the opposite. Egalitarian cities, even regional confederacies, are historically quite commonplace. Egalitarian families and households are not.
Once the historical verdict is in, we will see that the most painful loss of human freedoms began at the small scale – the level of gender relations, age groups and domestic servitude – the kind of relationships that contain at once the greatest intimacy and the deepest forms of structural violence. If we really want to understand how it first became acceptable for some to turn wealth into power, and for others to end up being told their needs and lives don’t count, it is here that we should look. Here too, we predict, is where the most difficult work of creating a free society will have to take place.’
https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/5409/are-we-city-dwellers-or-hunter-gatherers