On repairing harm in community
How individual, relational, and organizational change creates safer futures
I began writing this post months ago when one of my local communities was contending with yet another ripple effect of sexual violence. Although the initial events happened in years past, the impact is ongoing. Being amidst the enduring harm and hurt that follows relational violence is gut-wrenching for so many reasons. One of them is that the violence is almost never anonymous. Instead, the people involved usually know each other, and the community that holds them knows them well, too.
Most of us want to see the best in people. That admirable faith in our fellow humans can also make it hard to acknowledge when someone we know has caused harm. To face such wrongdoing requires us to see both the very best and the very worst in people at the same time. Often, it’s easier to focus on just one or the other, ignoring the contradictions of being alive. To really notice those contradictions, the capacity for good and bad in most humans, often means rewriting our straightforward stories about the people and communities we know and love. That revision can be heartbreaking.
I know that heartbreak well because I’ve witnessed the complicated aftermath of relational and sexual violence many, many times. Doing so is at the center of the research, writing, consulting, speaking, and teaching I’ve done for more than fifteen years. I’ve heard hundreds upon hundreds of people’s stories about struggling to address and survive such harm. And I’ve also seen this trouble play out in my workplaces, among my loved ones, and in so many of the communities I cherish.
In groups of people who care for one another, it can be so hard to access and lead with tenderness when, in the wake of violence, the story we knew by heart must change. We’ve probably all seen or heard of a community that blames or shames a victim for what went wrong. That’s a lack of tenderness, and it comes from a challenge inherent to being human: To recognize what went wrong means feeling pain. To avoid feeling that hurt, communities regularly dismiss people who experienced assault, harassment, or abuse. In these victim-blaming scenarios, a community leaves the work of feeling and processing pain to individuals who tend to themselves alone.
When communities don’t access tenderness, they reinforce harm.
It can also be challenging to offer tenderness to people who have caused harm. In a culture that systematically denies and erases sexual and relational violence, one that likes to pretend such harm doesn’t exist, to treat harmers with tenderness can feel risky. It can seem like letting someone get away with behavior that’s not OK. But that’s not what I’m talking about. Having tenderness for people who have caused harm does not mean accepting or condoning their behavior. It does not mean staying connected to that person when doing so is unsafe. And it does not mean remaining part of a community that keeps enabling a person’s ongoing misdeeds. It does mean continuing to see and treat harmers as nuanced humans who have strengths and weaknesses, who have value in the world and who also cause hurt.
Although it’s not easy, communities can hold the complexity of two things at the same time. One, they can have clarity that a particular behavior is unacceptable. And two, they can maintain their integrity by continuing to treat community members as both worthy and flawed. Communities struggle when they think clarity and integrity are mutually exclusive. In that space of either/or thinking, tenderness goes away.
When communities don’t access tenderness, they reinforce harm. To shame, blame, punish, expel, isolate, and judge people is to rely on a bigger system of violence. That system is baked into many local cultures, and it exceeds any single instance of interpersonal violence. Although expelling a misbehaving community member might solve a short-term problem, it does not prevent future violence. It also does not transform the community for future generations. When communities isolate people who have either experienced or caused harm, they stop short of the most important work: Growing a collective capacity to acknowledge mistakes, learn from them, and repair harm.
Communities can develop longer-term safety, and begin the ongoing work of preventing future violence, by encouraging members to work on themselves, their relationships, and their organizations. Below, I offer a few ideas for each level, and I emphasize actions that can generate collective security. I do so because sexual violence is never isolated. Although we may hear about specific events and know the names of individuals who have experienced or caused harm, relational violence is pervasive and systemic. Providing immediate support for someone who has experienced assault or harassment is crucial and important. So too is building accountability for a person who has assaulted or harassed someone. If you are looking to grow the skills to support individuals in these ways, please reach out to me and inquire about whether my communication coaching or consulting would be useful for you.
In this post, instead of emphasizing these individual skills, I focus on actions that can support a whole community, ones that get at the root of the problem and shift a culture.
Action at the individual level
Reflect on the messages you received about boundaries while you were growing up. How did the people around you set boundaries? What happened when they did? I encourage you to answer these questions about physical, temporal, spiritual, and emotional limits. Thinking back to these early lessons, notice how what you learned depends on your social location, identity, and cultural history. You might have learned that you didn’t need to notice or honor someone else’s boundaries, or that it was inappropriate to set your own. Â
Next, consider how these early lessons shape you now. Most of us, in some small ways, either go along with others to please them, or we discount others’ limits. These things happen on almost a daily basis. We might continue to work when we need to rest, or we might fail to yield to a fellow pedestrian on a sidewalk or another driver on the road. These tiny moments are part of a larger culture of violence, and we can shift it by (a) more fully honoring our own, internal yes and no and (b) becoming someone who can joyfully receive and affirm someone else’s yes or no.
If you’re looking for more resources to support your individual-level action, check out these two books.
Action at the relational level
Organize your interactions around consent. Usually, people think of consent primarily in the context of sexual encounters, but it goes well beyond that. In fact, Dr. Lamiyah Bahrainwala and I conducted award-winning research showing that, for consent to be anti-racist, it must be thought of beyond sexual contexts.
Just like any form of communication, consent norms vary by culture, language, and history. As I’ve written about elsewhere, people understand the complexity of these norms well. Although there’s not a perfect formula for every situation, you might try out and adapt a few of these things for your specific context:
Ask someone’s permission before giving them advice they haven’t requested.
Prior to sharing a difficult story about your experiences, use verbal or nonverbal cues to notice if the person has the capacity to listen.
In the middle of a conversation or activity, check in about how the other person is experiencing your connection.
Small moments like these may seem insignificant, but the more we practice them in mundane encounters, the more we demonstrate care for others. In so doing, we affirm people’s desires and willingness for discussion, emotional work, physical labor, disclosure, privacy, or physical contact. As I described in my last post, these interactions are building blocks that create larger, systemic shifts.
If you’re looking for more resources to support your relational-level action, check out this podcast and this blog post. The lessons drawn from dance communities are great for anyone interested in building relational consent.
Action at the organizational level
In your workplaces, churches, gyms, dance studios, schools, and other hubs, have ongoing conversations focused on these questions: What does our community most want to see, feel, and experience in the world? How can this imagination guide us now?
Sometimes, organizations will put most of their energy into identifying what they don’t accept. They’ll disconnect from problematic people or groups, and that can be an important way to maintain alignment with the community’s values. But it’s important to complement that work with a clear sense for what the community does want. The yes must be as loud—if not louder—than the no. Acting based on a shared, collective dream may mean building time for rest and play into an organization. It may mean developing trauma-informed policies. It may mean disrupting perfectionism by creating space for vulnerability. It may mean rethinking leadership. And it may mean learning about transformative justice and community conferencing. Overall, it’s important for organizations to continually reflect and act on what they want to create and bring into the world.
If you’re interested in more specific details about how organizations can transform violent systems, stay tuned for announcements about my second book. It’s provisionally titled Transforming Trauma: A Relational Approach to Disorganizing Systemic Violence. I expect it to be out in 2025.
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You might have noticed that, unlike many similar publications, I’m posting once a month instead of once a week. Up next, on November 18, I’ll explain why. Spoiler alert: Going slower is about building thriving relationships and a more just world.