My least favorite word
When asked for your least favorite word in the English language, the most common answer is "moist." Moist is a word which combines some sounds which many English speakers find unpleasant as well as tactile imagery that many find unpleasant to imagine. A moist pipe. A moist rag. Moist food in the sink. However, if you ask me for my least favorite word in the English language, I would have to say that it is "abuser." I say this as someone who, many times in my life, has had cause to use the word abuser. For a long time I described a strong handful of people as "my abusers" and not for lack of good reason to do so. However, what "abuser" lacks in tactile viscera or goyish distaste for saying "oy," it instead makes up for with terrible semantics. "Abuser" is a word which is both incredibly emotionally charged and polarizing; while also being absolutely ambiguous and vague.
Abuser is such a vague word that Merriam-Webster's Dictionary, the most liberal and descriptivist of all standard English dictionaries, merely defines abuser as "a noun," with no further elaboration. Wiktionary defines it as "one who abuses something or someone." As for the definitions of "abuse?" Merriam-Webster has many definitions for us: We have "a corrupt practice or custom," "improper or excessive use or treatment," "language that condemns or vilifies usually unjustly, intemperately, and angrily," "physical maltreatment," "to put to a wrong or improper use," "to use excessively," "to use without medical justification," "to use or treat so as to injure or damage," "to attack in words." OK, so an abuser is someone who does any of those things? So someone who chit-chats with me at work because they're lonely is "my abuser?" After all, it's not the proper use of a librarian.
Now, obviously, we know that meaning is contextual. When we say "abuser" we obviously do not mean someone who uses my business card to clean the grout from their bathroom tiles. Rather, we mean those abhorrent awful people who abuse other human beings interpersonally. In a social work context, there are more precise definitions (which would be swiftly rejected or misappropriated immediately if I introduced them to the public discourse), but we have no commonly accepted colloquial definition of interpersonal abuse; and because the word is so charged emotionally, you are never permitted to question someone as to what they mean by abuse. Asking for details could be retraumatizing. Never mind that "abuse" could refer to someone calling me a slur on the street, or someone persistently saying cruel things about me online; someone trying to socially isolate me locally through slanderous gossip; or someone subjecting me to years of controlling behavior; someone forcing sex on me one time while I was unable to consent; or someone beating me regularly, for years, for being a faggot. I have experienced all of these, and they hardly feel equivalent. Yet, the word "abuser" collapses all of these perpetrators of all of these forms of harm into one word. For any of these cruelties, were you to question someone for using the word "abuser," they would be quite upset with you, perhaps rightfully so.
Ultimately, though, we are left with "abuser" as meaning nothing more precise than "someone who has hurt another person" or, conservatively, "someone who has badly hurt another person." Whether it be a man who beats his wife and kids, or someone on their tenth girlfriend who they have isolated her loved ones, or a trans woman who made unwanted sexual advances on someone in a support group her first year out of transition, or someone who got drunk and said cruel things to their former romantic partner shortly after they broke-up, or someone who fell into a toxic codependent friendship where both parties left hurt and traumatized, or someone who told a lie about a former friend, or someone who just made everyone around them feel like shit through small insensitive comments. Sometimes, it even is used to refer to someone who has caused some sort of abstract harm against nobody in particular. "Abuser" is a word which collapses everything as severe as child sexual abuse with cheating on a monogamous partner and with the oh-so-terrible "screenshot dunk on a private account."
To be clear, interpersonal violence, intimate partner violence, child abuse, sexual assault, and all the other ways you can traumatize another person are real. I am not trying to downplay the acts themselves as being less harmful than they really are. I am criticizing the ways that we talk about the term "abusers."
Everybody Poops
The undeniable truth of humanity is that there does not exist in the world a single living human being who is not capable of harming another person in some manner or another. In fact, there does not exist a single living human being who is incapable of traumatizing another person in some manner or another. Everybody is capable of healing and great acts of love and justice. Everybody is capable of causing harm. Everybody is capable of great kindness, and everybody is capable of great violence. If you do not believe yourself to be capable of severely hurting another person, then you are the most likely person to find yourself having severely hurt another person, at some point in your life, if not multiple times. It is the capability to recognize our own potential to hurt which also allows us to avoid hurting others.
Yet, despite this, the public discourse has turned "abuser" into a class of person. The harm-doers. There are "abusers" and there are innocents. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore writes, the entirety of the prison industrial complex is dependent on the dichotomy between the criminal and the innocent. The innocents must be protected from the criminals, who unfortunately keep invading our communities to hurt people. If we could only weed out all of the criminals, then we would have a safe community. The humanity of the one who causes harm must be erased in order to justify the prison-industrial complex; for why would you care about the violence done to a criminal? They are, after all, a criminal, and if they did not wish to suffer the violence of prison, they should not have broken the law. Now, the violence of prison is not the same violence as the act of interpersonal exile, but it is still the same toxic cultural mentality beneath them both; and if you criticize any element of carceral culture, you are quick to be accused of "defending rapists and abusers." Indeed, you often see people wish graphic harm and violence upon "rapists and abusers" without any specification of who counts as an "abuser;" and anybody who objects or raises concerns is thus labeled "an abuse apologist" or "rapist defender." Rape is violent, and awful! It's not good! But difficult, challenging, traumatizing forms of harm are at the center of the Transformative Justice movement, a Black feminist led movement that seeks to create better solutions to community violence than the prison-industrial complex.
Abusers are not secret invaders
The unfortunate reality is that abusers do not begin outside of our communities and work their way in. No matter how aggressively you "remove the abusers," you will never stop finding more abusers. They are community members who, due to whatever circumstances or lived experiences or psychology or bad decisions etc. have come to severely hurt another community member. Perhaps they were elevated to such a high position of authority in the community that the power corrupted their moral compass. Perhaps they have severe mental illness or a substance use disorder. There are so many reasons they might have come to hurt another person, but that does not change that they were the same beloved community member you knew them to be when they joined your community.
Abusers are not born with the propensity to do harm; nor do they irreparably acquire it through childhood experiences or a moment one day where they decided not to care about the well-being of other people. If you remove the word abuser from the equation, what you are left with is the truth: There are people. People exist in community with one another. Sometimes, one person harms another person, perhaps severely. Abuse is a verb. It is something somebody does to someone. It is not a trait they hold. It is not a class of person. It is not socioeconomic. Abusers are not a strata of society wielding power over the survivors, as a class. Abusers are not paid more in wages. Abusers do not hold Abuser Privilege. Abusers do not own more of the world's economic capital as a class (even if those rich and powerful men of the world do tend to be awful people interpersonally.)
Abusers are not a social class
There is not a human being on earth who is incapable of causing harm. All genders, all races, all disability statuses, all ages, all sexualities, all socioeconomic classes. Even a child can give another child lasting trauma through bullying or worse. Systemic harm and interpersonal harm are, of course, never completely separate from each other, but they also are not the same thing. Even in an imaginary perfect communist utopia where there is no systemic violence to speak of, there will still always be interpersonal harm. People will hurt each other as they have done for all of human history. Even, occasionally, severely and irreparably.
White People is a social class. Straight People is a social class. Abusers is not social class. Oh, if only every privileged social class in society was so easy to join! What a great way to climb the economic ladder of society! Alas, abuser is a meaningless, broadly applied term which refers to an event, an act, not an identity. There are even those reprehensible people who continuously cause interpersonal harm, who conduct controlling and harmful behavior on everyone around them continuously for years and years who refuse to stop. Those who are beyond rebuke. Yet, still, they are not an organized class. Their violence is not a systemic oppression against an underclass (although, of course, there is often overlap in some circumstances.) They are individuals who are causing a lot of harm, perhaps on purpose! Perhaps they suck ass! Perhaps they get their kicks from hurting people. Perhaps they are a literal sociopath or severe narcissist and even the most intensive therapy would struggle to treat their disorder. Yet, still, they are not a class of person. They are individuals causing harm. In a just world, we will have a solution for dealing with them which is not incarceration or physical violence.
Abusers can be anyone, but for some reason they are seemingly always trans women
It also cannot be ignored that the label "abuser" is far more quickly applied to some more than others. Transgender women are labeled "abusers" for the smallest of offenses, and any misconduct is swiftly construed as unforgivable and deserving of exile. If you ask what they did, "they are an abuser" should be a sufficient answer to you, or you are an abuse apologist. A cisgender man will literally beat his girlfriend and people will debate if he is "an abuser" and a transgender woman will post about her weird fetish on the internet and be labeled a "predatory abuser." People are quick to assume that any transgender woman who writes about this phenomenon "must be a rapist" or "must be an abuser." It is transmisogyny, clean and simple.
Of course I would hate such a vague, charged, and broadly applied term when it is used against my people constantly. When we are seeing such a huge spike in public rhetoric accusing transgender people of being pedophiles who are grooming children through feminist propaganda. Of course I would insist on a specificity and scale of harm.
Abusers are not yours
Another thing I hate about the word "abuser" is the terming of "my abuser." To claim someone as "your abuser" always shuts down the question of what you are talking about. My "person who hurt me." So often, "my abuser" is "my ex I am on bad terms with" or sometimes even "someone from my past I'd prefer you not to meet because they will tell you undesirable truths about my behavior when they knew me." When I used the term, I used it interchangeably to refer to people who had indeed abused me, in terms of child abuse, but also for people who spoke ill of me. "My abusers" was the nebulous miasma of people who had hurt me. A way to blame them for my mental illness and trauma, truly all the unfortunate circumstances of my life, without having to think about the specifics of the who and what and how. By calling them "my abuser" I had an ownership of them, a permanent relationship between us, of abuser and abusee, even after years of never speaking to each other or even living in the same place. They became a nebulous conspiracy of people who were out to get me, surely spreading lies, surely plotting my downfall. Perhaps one of them was doing some of that, but not surely all of them were doing all of it.
In therapy, we unpacked this. I learned to radically accept what happened to me. I learned the incredible power in letting go of "my abusers" and allowing the relationships between us to end, relationships which had already ended in every matter except my own insistence at labeling them as "my abuser" the same way I would label someone as "my friend" or "my lover." I stopped calling any of them "my abuser." I began describing them with the definite article. "The guy who sexually assaulted me." He is not "my abuser" (present tense), he was "the guy who sexually assaulted me" (past tense.) Ten years out, there is nothing between us. It was an event. It happened in the past. To this day, I still think of it regularly. I still have to reassure myself "it's okay for this person to touch you here, this is not like before. You can stop at any time." But the event itself is over. He is not in my life. I am not in his life. We have no relationship anymore. It's in the past.
Perhaps if I was actively being abused by someone, I would have use for "my abuser." In the way that I might have use for "my stalker" when I am actively being stalked by some ghoul who is obsessed with me. In the way that I might have use for "my assailant" when describing the person who hit me to my boss. But when the event is over, you have no use for "my abuser." When you are living separately, no longer fleeing them, no longer having to defend yourself, then "my abuser" only grips the blade into your flesh.
I know that immediately removing the blade from your chest may kill you, but so will leaving it in forever. Eventually, you have to carefully, surgically, strategically, remove the blade and allow the doctors to give you stitches. You have to allow the stitches to dissolve in the hot water. You have to allow the scar to fade as decades come and go and the cells of your skin die and replace themselves. No, it may never fade completely, but gripping the hilt of the knife in your chest and saying "this is my knife" does not give you power over the knife.
How the fuck do we know who the abusers are
If there is ever a term that, once applied to somebody, immediately justifies any and all violence directed at them for the rest of their lives; then that term must be precise and bound. Fascists, war criminals. People where we can very clearly identify the reprehensible act and say for certain that this person is beyond rehabilitation, that violence is necessary to immediately stop them from perpetuating their harm against others. I am not saying you need "a judge and a jury" for every nazi you punch, but we must be precise and constricted in who we ascribe the "okay to hurt" label to. It is unacceptable for us to derive our morals from a term as incredibly vague as "abuser." We might as well be calling them "sinners" or "heathens." Actually, "heathen" is more precise and semantically transparent than "abuser." At least you know why you have beef with the heathens from the term heathen.
Because, what we see, is that once "abuser" became a word that immediately justified violence, people began applying the term to anybody they wished to be hurtful towards. You're not being "petty to your former roommate" you're "fighting back against your abuser." There is nothing new or revolutionary about this behavior. People have lashed out against others in their lives for all of human history.
Indeed, it is absurd how often you find situations where there is a messy breakup, an honestly pretty normal messy breakup, where both sides are labeling the other "their abuser" in order to justify being as hostile and cruel as possible to their ex and to convince their shared friends to exclusively side with one friend over the other. If you take away the word "abuser" and force them to use descriptive, transparent language to describe what their ex did to them, you will immediately understand the situation. Perhaps one of them truly was emotionally, physically, or sexually abusive towards the other. Or, perhaps, they were jealous, they were cold, they were selfish. Perhaps it was a miserable relationship between two people who should not have been dating each other, but neither person had trapped the other in a dynamic of power and control. One way or the other, we now have a much better handle on the situation.
Unfortunately, in the public discourse, we have been given the uselessly tautological axiom of "Believe Survivors." I once shouted this at the top of my lungs while carrying a mattress. In the context of a sexual assault allegation between a heterosexual woman and a heterosexual man on a college campus this would be an easy axiom. Unfortunately, when it comes to "abusers," we have to decide who we are believing before we can decide who is the "survivor" who we therefore have to believe. Mutual accusations of abuse immediately render this axiom useless, and they are unfortunately all too common. We have to believe the survivor to believe they are a survivor. Unfortunately, once "Believe Survivors" became a well-accepted axiom, because "it's so unlikely someone would lie about that," well, people began to lie about it. They more-often exaggerate and distort things to paint themselves as faultless and the other person as "the abuser;" but they also often simply lie. So how do we know who the abusers are who we are to beat up? Why, it will be the people who are being beat up. Simple. Don't ask questions, that makes you a defender of rapists and abusers. Never mind how often abusers abuse the word "abuser" to abuser their abusee. Is it not the easiest way to isolate someone from their community?
When people read things like this, they always always always assume the author is besties with An Abuser and that this whole thing is just about Defending Their Rapist Friend or some such. This is nonsense. You have to be a fucking child to believe that that is the only reason a prison abolitionist would care about this insane and damaging way of talking about community harm. When you have been in queer/radical/activist/whatever spaces as long as I have, you will have a treasure trove of dumb shit that has gotten people labeled as someone's "abuser" and then had that used against them by someone trying to get them exiled from their community and all public spaces permanently. Particularly accusations made against trans people, especially trans women. We are so fucking quick to believe that trans women are duplicitous evil people waiting to be Revealed for who they Truly Are (someone you can be violent against for being a freak.)
We make people into abusers by making people into abusers
I've said this before many many times. This is something I believe so incredibly strongly and it is derived from my experiences as a sexual assault survivor and someone who has worked again and again at transformative justice in my communities. Someone who has taught classes on sexual consent, and advocated for other survivors of sexual assault to institutions. Someone who did activism around the need to take sexual assault seriously at an institutional level. Someone who has done work to protect people from men who serial rape women, including employing whisper networks when necessary. It is because of my experiences doing this work that I have come to this conclusion.
Treating rapists and abusers as a special class of person, and not people who have done a terrible thing that anybody has the potential to do, only hurts victims and only helps the prison-industrial complex. If you believe that only rapists rape and only abusers abuse, and that rapists and abusers are deserving of endless violence, and must necessarily lose their entire community and social support network and all of their loved ones and even their sources of income: why the hell would you ever be willing to consider that you have hurt another person?
Many studies have interviewed survivors of intimate partner violence and sexual assault, and asked them what they want from the people who hurt them. The number one thing, every single time, is always "knowing that they won't do it again to somebody else." In fact, rehabilitation usually ranks higher than prison as a desired outcome. Most often, sexual assault and relationship abuse are done by people who the survivors knew and cared about, and don't we all just want to know that the person we once saw as so beloved could go back to being the person we thought they were, but without the part of them that would cause such severe trauma to another person?
Yet the first step to rehabilitation is to truly internalize and recognize the harm you have done to another person and willingly desire to change. The number one barrier to rehabilitation is the failure for perpetrators to achieve this one simple step.
When we cannot see ourselves as human beings who are capable of hurting each other, cannot see ourselves as people who could abuse, then when we are confronted by someone who says "you hurt me" we are only left with two conclusions: "They are wrong, I did not do that" or "I am no longer a human being. I will lose everything." Time and again I have tried to work with people who have caused harm, inside and outside of transformative justice processes, trying to get them to recognize the harm that they caused. The sticking point is always "I am not a rapist." "I am not an abuser." The sticking point is not the verb "I violated their consent" "I was controlling of my ex." The sticking point is the noun. "I couldn't have violated his consent, because I am not a rapist." "I couldn't have been controlling of my ex, because I am not an abuser." So the survivor is never able to get that recognition and, in fact, their good faith attempts at getting that recognition ends up resulting in escalation, retaliation, and further retraumatization.
The material consequences of the "rapist" and "abuser" labels are huge too. "I cannot admit I did this, because doing so would cost my my entire social support network." "I cannot admit I did this, because doing so would cost me my sources of income." When we say that acts of violence against people who have caused harm are not only justified, but revolutionary, righteous, good... again, why the hell would anybody be willing to consent to a transformative justice process? Why would they ever recognize that they have caused harm? How could we possibly give the survivors anything resembling what they are owed when our only option is to un-person the one who hurt them? Something which most survivors do not actually want until after a failed attempt at seeking recognition leads to escalation and risk of retaliation.
If the guy who sexually assaulted me had just said "You're right, I am so sorry. I absolutely should not have done that. I am not going to combine alcohol and sex until I can trust myself to listen to people when they are telling me to stop." then I would not have had to go through so much of the pain and trauma that followed when confronting him informally became escalation that forced the involvement of the Dean of Students and lengthy investigations and having to testify to every detail of what happened again and again. If I could have just said "thank you for recognizing what happened. I think that's a good idea for how to work on yourself. I think it would be best if we took distance from each other going forward" and then that was it? Oh, I would have had half as much PTSD from the situation as I ended up with. But that's not how the conversation went. The conversation went "I am not a rapist. I did nothing wrong because I am not a rapist." When our mutual friends each individually tried to talk to him about it, making it clear that he would not lose them as friends if he could just recognize what he'd done, he still could not recognize it. Because only a rapist would hurt someone like that.
I truly believe it could have been better. I truly believe he was not a bad person, and could have recognized what he'd done if he did not feel threatened by the possibility of losing his community. If he did not see sexual assault as something that is only done by the class of person known as a rapist, who is not really a person. He was a drunk teenager. It has changed me for life, but he was still nothing but a drunk teenager in a dorm room. He could have made a better decision. He should have been accountable to what he'd done. But at the end of the day, he was a scared teen who fucked up and was given the choice of denial or suicide.
At least with "rapist," we usually know what someone is being accused of. "Abuser" tells us nothing. Abuser has come to carry all of the weight of "rapist" while encompassing so much ambiguity that it could mean anything from "someone who made an honest mistake" to "someone who cannot be trusted to be around other people right now." "Abuser" has been used to cut vulnerable people off from their entire social support networks because someone didn't like them. "Abuser" has become a term which looms over every single confrontation over every single harmful deed. You can tell when you're broaching that conversation, in this day and age. When you ask someone to recognize harm, and to make amends. You can hear how in their head they are thinking "oh fuck, am I going to be called an abuser for this. Am I going to lose everything I have. Is it safe for me to admit that I did this? Is my only choice to go on the offensive?"
And the tragic thing that happens is once someone goes on the defensive, when they conclude they have to deny everything, they turn rotten. They become someone who can't afford to ever recognize their own potential to harm, because doing so would force them to accept all the harm they have done. They keep doing the same things again and again, because if they finally admit that this time it is a horrible thing to do to people, they have to confront that they have been doing this again and again, insisting to themselves that it's OK, they did nothing wrong, only abusers do things like that, and they are not an abuser; they insist, over and over, as they keep hurting people again and again and again. I want to believe rehabilitation is possible for anyone, but at this stage, I'm not sure we have the tools yet to help someone this far-gone. This is when the only tool left is to exile them to protect the community, so they'll go find another community where they aren't known yet. They'll talk about how awful their old community was. Crazy people, abusive even. Then they'll do the same thing, and be exiled yet again. Or maybe they'll make themself so entrenched in their new community that everyone is afraid to even try to hold them accountable. Of course the abuser would do this, it's the only way to stay in a community and stop getting accused of being an abuser! But they're not abuser. They couldn't hurt a fly! Everyone else is irrational. Only abusers would do all those things they were accused of. And they're not an abuser. Maybe they did do those things, but they're not abuse. They have to be okay because they did them, and they're not an abuser. Abuse is something abusers do, so it must not have been that bad to do. And the cycle repeats. Again, and again, and again; leaving many scars and fires in its path.
Oh, if only we had more specific words for ways people can hurt each other! Then we could have some sort of nuanced conversation about morals and ethics and appropriate accountability! Alas, everything is just "abuse" now. Gasboss, girlkeep, gatelight and all that.
Conclusion
There are many words in the English language that I don't like, but "abuser" is a word I hate most of all. "Abuser" is as charged and emotionally heavy as "rapist," as polarizing as "queer," and so ambiguous as to tell you nothing. It is so overused and misused it actually does harm to our ability to organize better community accountability processes than what is offered by the carceral state.
I'm not saying you're not allowed to use it, ever. There are certainly times it can be useful, in the right context, with the right amount of specificity. But that is not how it is used 90% of the time in the public discourse, and that is why I hate this word and have come to avoid it whenever I can, even in situations where it would probably be appropriate.
Credits
In writing this essay, I draw upon the works of adrienne maree brown, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Akwaeke Emezi, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Sarah Schulman, Marsha Linehan, Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, Maimonides, the Chofetz Chaim, and various sages of the talmud; as well as my own experiences working as a community organizer off-and-on for over ten years, and conversations with many loved ones in my life who I'm sure would prefer not to be named in such a polarizing essay.