At the Violence Prevention Center, we center victims, and we advocate for our community to do the same. A victim-centered approach prioritizes the rights and dignity of victims above all else. Abuse perpetrators, on the other hand, center themselves and create false narratives that discredit and de-centers victims, and much of society follows suit. We cannot adequately address domestic and sexual violence without disrupting these attitudes and belief systems. 

In order to dismantle the false narratives of perpetrators, it’s important to deepen our collective understanding of the dynamics of domestic and sexual violence. Abusive behavior, whether that be any form of domestic or sexual violence, is not caused by a lack of control, anger issues, mental health struggles, addiction, or substance use. Rather, abuse stems from abusers’ deeply ingrained faulty belief systems and their misguided sense of right and wrong. Abusers rarely do anything that they believe is wrong - to an abuser, their harmful behavior is always justified. They often understand, however, that others will view their actions as wrong, so abusers use community grooming tactics to hide their abusive behavior. 

Community grooming is when a perpetrator hides the abuse they subject victims in private while creating a positive image of themselves in public. Perpetrators often portray themselves to the outside world as charming, helpful, friendly, and respectful in order to be seen as trustworthy and kind. This portrayal is a manipulative tactic used to convince people that they are a safe person who would never perpetrate abuse. A perpetrator can seem to be a good friend or an upstanding community member in their outward-facing relationships while simultaneously subjecting a victim to severe abuse behind closed doors. These contradictions between an abuser’s public self and private self can be incredibly difficult to reconcile, and many people may not even realize that they are being groomed. Community grooming helps abusers secure enablers and allies in their efforts to discredit and dismiss victims. 

Abusers use multiple tactics to shift the focus and blame away from their behavior and to avoid responsibility. They often concoct explanations for their abusive actions, deny the abuse, or blame the abuse on the victim. They may blame the abuse on their own past trauma, on sex and substance addiction, or on mental health issues. Abusers present their own stories with denial, minimization, and distortion, and they share those stories with their community in order to paint themselves as “victims” and the true victims as “abusers,” thus creating false narratives in which they reverse the roles of victim and offender. Because of these manipulation tactics, abusers are unreliable sources of information regarding the abuse and the victim. It is impossible to get an accurate picture of what is going on in an abusive relationship without carefully listening to and believing the abused party. 

Because abusers do not believe that their actions are wrong, when a victim speaks out, abusers view the victim as harming them - from the abuser’s point of view, it’s the victim (not the abuser’s own actions) who “put them in jail,” “ruined their reputation,” and “messed up their life.” Rather than understanding that criminal charges, incarceration, revocation of custody or parenting time, protection orders, and community accountability are the natural consequences of their own actions, abusers blame the court system and their victims for “doing” these things

“to them.” This false narrative peddled by abusers seeps into broader community perceptions of abuse, and when we buy into abusers’ lies, we cause further trauma to victims. 

Domestic and sexual violence does incomprehensible damage to victims and to their children, who often witness the abuse or are subjected to it themselves. While perpetrator rehabilitation is important, society often minimizes the severity of perpetrators’ actions and prioritizes their perspectives, all while the safety and needs of victims are ignored. We see this reflected in the rhetoric around domestic and sexual violence, both in our own communities and in broader society. Think of Brock Turner, convicted in 2016 of multiple counts of felony sexual assault, and the rhetoric surrounding his case - his father’s famous quote that his son should not have to go to prison for “20 minutes of action” and the presiding judge’s assertion that prison would have a “severe impact” on Turner, therefore sentencing him to only six months of the possible fourteen-year sentence. What about the severe impact that Chanel Miller, the victim in the case, has to live with every day? This is just one example of rhetoric that reflects attitudes and belief systems that adopt the perspectives of abusers and dismiss the lifelong impacts that abuse has on victims. 

Victims of domestic and sexual violence deserve to be centered. Only abusers and rapists cause abuse and rape, and only they are responsible for their actions. So let’s put the responsibility where it belongs and stop blaming, disbelieving, ignoring, and re-traumatizing victims with our words and our actions. To move forward to a future where domestic abuse and sexual assault are eliminated, we must cultivate a community that does not tolerate violence. We must truly hold perpetrators accountable while believing and supporting victims and centering victims’ voices, perspectives, needs, safety, and healing above all else.