The following piece is part of a series of articles and essays on sexual assault and harassment in WashU’s social justice and activist community. This piece contains discussion of sexual violence.
12 radical words used to shame survivors
What does rape apology sound like in activist communities? It sounds surprisingly similar to anti-violence discourse.
Social justice rhetoric is used by defenders of perpetrators to bridge the incongruencies between survivors in our community and this vague image of global liberation. Their rhetoric becomes a communal framework that cannot hold the reality of violence in our community; it is a purely theoretical framework that sees a survivor as incompatible with some abstraction of violence on a global scale. It’s a framework that uses the same vocabulary, concepts, and ideas of justice in order to defend sexual violence.
This is a sample of some of these perfectly nice words that can be misused as mechanisms for attacking survivors.