Lecter A.A. Wierstamann

Recently, while re-titling sections on the Map Wiki page about Newgon, I realized we lack a word for a specific type of bigotry and oppression – the one that targets people who underwent sexual abuse. I want to call this phenomenon “antisurvivorism”. I regret not being able to specify sexual abuse in this term, but I don’t want to end up with a word that’s too long and hard to say.

There exists a persistent idea in some parts of the society that sexual abuse survivors have everything handed to them. This strongly contradicts my experiences of being one, and the discrepancy between this narrative and the reality annoyed me for a long time. So, here I will detail how exactly sexual abuse survivors are dealing with bigotry and oppression.

Fake claiming and victim blaming

Fake claiming and victim blaming are the most widely known types of bigotry against survivors, although they’re rarely explicitly referred to as bigotry. These are beliefs that either what the survivor is describing never happened at all, or it was somehow provoked, or actually consensual, and therefore not real abuse. This attitude is frequently applied to survivors who are critical of the stereotypes they deal with or otherwise socially disruptive.  

The “ruined” narrative

The mainstream view of sexual abuse includes claims that this event traumatizes you forever and makes you unfit to perform as a member of the society. The traditional point of view, focusing on women and people perceived as women, may present having undergone sexual abuse as a lesser form of promiscuity. The victim, if they’re believed to be a victim, is spared some of the responsibility for what happened to them, but is still seemed as unfit for being a wife, as less pure and more at risk of wanting sex outside of marriage again (note that the traditional model does not recognize rape by spouse as rape). The liberal model inherited the idea of sexual abuse as inherently ruining and paints the picture of a horrifying lifelong mind-altering trauma, after which you may not be able to actually have consensual sex or enjoy being around people that remind you of your abuser (stereotypically, a man).

The shared message of these approaches is: there’s now something very wrong with you, and it’s going to be wrong forever. Both views are additionally traumatizing and place real life limitations on open and known survivors, where other people decide they need to manage and monitors their activities and abilities. Fake claiming is often present when the person objects to being seen as broken or does not perform brokenness correctly. 

The “abuse cycle” narrative

Another common view that prevents abused people from opening up and makes the ones who are already known into a target of vigilance is the belief in abuse cycles. According to this stereotype, victims of abuse are disproportionately more likely to become abusers themselves. In application to sexual abuse, this belief heavily targets men and people perceived as men, who were, or are suspected of being, victims of CSA. Such people are limited much more and monitored with much more prejudice when it comes to their interactions with children. In some cases “you were raped as a child” may even come up as its own form of accusation – implying mental illness and sexual perversion. This can also be regarded as a type of the “ruined” narrative.

Censorship and the “inappropriate” narrative

Stories of sexual abuse survivors are commonly considered “mature content” and heavily policed. This may include attaching a very high age rating (even if these are someone’s real memories from age 5), selective ban of some words (“rape”, “sex” are frequently banned), or removing the material altogether as too upsetting and disturbing. This is done both to cautionary retellings of sexual abuse and to fantasy-like content some survivors make to cope. Fake claiming is frequently present.

Forced separation

A particular type of silencing and censorship, employed mostly by traditionalists, includes creating an artificial opposition out of outspoken survivors and those who have not yet realized they are victimized. This takes form of creating mocking comparisons of SJWs, who are ugly, fat, loud, and inherently unfuckable, and young girls/tradwives, who are pretty, quiet, easy-going, and obedient. The former are presumed to try to speak over the latter, to make up abuse where there is none, and to sow hate towards innocent men. Envy and lacking sex is commonly attributed as a motivation, fake claiming is almost always present. 

This tactic helps discredit politically aware former victims in the eyes of current victims and prevents anti abuse ideas from reaching the ones they’d help the most – much like age ratings on media about abuse.

Turning victims into tools

Sometimes presence of sexual abuse survivors is convenient, and their existence becomes an argument in defense of some political idea, and it’s rarely something that would actually keep anyone safe, and rarely even something they themselves asked for. Mostly they’re being used for anti immigrant laws, homophobic/transphobic laws, giving more funding to the police, increasing oppression of convicts. The group of survivors in the focus is most often white cis women and girls, meanwhile everyone else is ignored. The “ruined” narrative and expecting performing brokenness often take place.

The radeviant look at the problem

From the point of view of radeviance, “sexual abuse survivor” is a deviant role. The existence of survivors is often perceived as directly disruptive, because it forces other people to confront the idea that sexual abuse exists in close proximity to them. Because of this dynamic, identifying yourself as a sexual abuse survivor is frequently interpreted as a political statement against how the society is organized (or how your family/church/school is run). As a way to artificially contain this identity, the society makes up a narrative where identifying as a survivor serves some kind of a material gain and therefore must be gatekept from intruders by fakeclaiming. 

In reality there are no pragmatic benefits to being an open survivor in comparison to remaining closed. The best possible scenario – aligning yourself with people in power as a means to oppress and subjugate someone else – will still lead to you being suspected and tokenized and placed below those who are “pure”. False accusations (read my previous post on the topic of the violator role) are also very often pushed by people who have more power and privilege than both the appointed victim and the accused, and both of the latter end up hurt by the consequences.

In addition to that, the view of survivors as chasing some benefits has a strong overlap in practice with antisemitic conspiracy theories.