This week, words by Jennifer Michelle Greenberg have been making the rounds. Jennifer tweeted: “Reporting an abuser doesn’t ruin their life. They did that themselves. Reporting an abuser doesn’t damage their reputation. It makes it more accurate. Reporting an abuser doesn’t hurt their family. It protects them from abuse. Reporting an abuser isn’t gossip. It’s integrity.”

I wanted to add a few additional thoughts (six to be exact):

1. If you have been abused and didn’t report, it is NOT your fault if that person went on to abuse others.

2. Abusers are very good at turning things back around on those they seek to control and manipulate, even going so far as to claim that you speaking your truth is abusive to your abuser. Having people who understand abuse – from therapists to folks at crisis centers to good friends – can help when things are murky.

3. You never owe your abuser a second chance. You do not need to forgive people who have harmed you. If you choose to, that’s OK. If you do not, that’s OK.

4. People who abuse others are human beings, not monsters. People who abuse others are often really warm, caring, and generous towards many people in their life. This is REAL and meaningful. We cannot use our experience with a person to discount another person’s experience, even if it hurts or feels deeply confusing. We all need to do the work of expanding our capacity to experience conflicting emotions and truths if we want to break the cycles of abuse. We can love someone and need for them to do better.

5. People who abuse others are deserving of accountability (which is an act of love) and community (because we do not heal in isolation). That does not mean people who have been harmed by someone need to do that labor, but it does mean the larger community has a responsibility to provide a space where the abuser can be held accountable if they are willing to do the work. Not everyone is willing to do the work, but casting abusers out of a community without the community taking a real hard look at how they all contributed to conditions where abuse happened simply sets the stage for more abuse down the road. We must be in this together which will mean discomfort and facing our own behaviors.

6. We live inside of toxic, violent systems, and we have ALL been indoctrinated into a culture where gaslighting, manipulation, and coercion are normalized and romanticized. The chances that each of us have done harmful, toxic, or even abusive things in the past are VERY HIGH. The chances that we harm someone in the future is inevitable. This is what it means to be human. Centering people who have experienced harm does NOT make it OK to enact violence on an abuser nor does centering survivors mean dehumanizing others in effort to make ourselves feel righteous. Dehumanizing abusers not only contributes to the “abusers are monsters and I could never be (or love) a monster” narrative that makes us less likely to hold ourselves and people we care about accountable, but it also contributes to the “perfect victim” narrative which sets the stage for victim blaming because we only want to believe people who fit a very particular kind of narrative.

Being human is messy. This stuff hurts. And we all need to be doing the work to understand how to do accountability in a way that is ultimately an act of love (for self, for relationship, for community, for earth) and not one of punishment, vengeance, or revenge.