Hours before my ex-partnership changed forever, we watched on a Ted Talk a couch long-dented from use. The Ted Talk elevated the storytelling of a formerly incarcerated man. As a Black man, his punishment for one night of actions, even once released from prison, felt unending. His main lesson for his audience was “People are more than the worst things they do.” I agreed with this, and I still do. I believed prisons were obsolete for true reform of spirit and society, and I still do. My ex-partner felt the same way, and our shared belief in restorative justice was one of the many reasons we were so compatible holding hands through this very Ted Talk.
After the talk came to an end, we closed the computer and ended up in the white plush sheets of my bedroom. What happened that night I immediately labeled as “they went inside of me without asking.” I didn’t want to say Rape because Rape is punishable by law. I didn’t want to use the the word Rape because it meant that something was broken into, far harsher language than trespassing. I took years to call this night for what it was because I could see this loved one’s immediate regret. They reeled themselves in and cried, “I’m afraid of my hands.” Weeks later, they sent me an apology song. Weeks later, they sent me a handwritten apology letter, all with a promise of continued remorse, reflection, and moving forward. I thought at the time I couldn’t shift the terms of our relationship based on this incident because that would constitute punishment for something they promised would never happen again.
All this to say, I punished myself instead and stayed in a sexual relationship with this person. I didn’t name their actions or consequences that would have benefited me because we had so fondly referred to our relationship as a cooperative. I stayed because I told myself a true teammate-style power couple could “work through anything,” and we had potential to be one. I stayed because when they came out as transgender months later, I knew trans feminine folks are too often framed in a binary as Perfect or Evil – to allow them to exist somewhere in between is a place of humanization. There were enough good things, like laughter and lake walks and switching outfits, to know this person was more than that horrible moment.
Whenever I told a friend over the phone what happened, I framed what happened as an accident, a slip in entitlement to my body and my time. I wish someone had told me that an apology isn’t good enough in this case, but, then again, maybe I wouldn’t have listened to an individual’s voice when my ex-partner and I had promised each other community.
But, then there were more sexual assaults over the course of years. None were as obvious as the first, but they piled on alongside my anger towards them. My body grew impatient for basic dignity and touch without fear or dissociation. They often said to me, “I feel like you’re still punishing me” whenever I spoke about it, which always bought me back to the memory of the night where this all began. Sometimes, as continued self defense, they would reference a bell hooks book about change. I felt guilty for my emotions not being true to my politics. Maybe they felt the same about themselves.
But, the fact that they were always “right” based on co-opting restorative justice language nearly broke me. In this brand of leftist politics, saying the right words and maintaining a tick-box of various identities is often enough to be “good” without consequence. This, combined with my experiences of childhood sexual abuse, was enough to make me feel like whether I stayed or whether I left, rape or continued assault was inevitable within this community or any community. This feeling is both why I stayed for as long as I did and why I took the risk to ask them to leave.
However, when we eventually ended our relationship, I immediately feared that I or the books they read didn’t teach them well enough to not assault again. There was a part of me that told myself that I failed as an activist and I failed as a trans person loving another trans person. As justice, I took over the lease – I didn’t have to be the one to move. This upset them of course because it was the first time I gave them consequences for their repetitive actions that formed a pattern.
I’m sharing this with you because survivors, even abolitionists and activists, will tell themselves a million different things to stay in a harmful or abusive situation or to take the heat for it. In this case, I didn’t want to call what was happening abuse, so I called it harm because harm I told myself I could handle.
I regret, for lack of a better word, that we attempted to lead our own practice of restorative justice without long-term outside support that could have guided me to my most truthful language. Placing the work of a community or society on each other made it so I couldn’t leave the toxic sexuality of our relationship.
Since then, I have found some of the resources I had previously been looking for. Both groups center communities and fellow survivors directly impacted by childhood sexual abuse. These groups include Generation Five and Hidden Water; the latter, for example, provides four separate meeting circles: Green Circle for those who were harmed as a child or young person; Purple for those who have caused harm and are ready to take responsibility; Blue for people who have relationships with someone who has been harmed or caused harm; Orange for non-offending caregivers of this who were or caused harm. Both groups mentioned break the binary of survivor and abuser being the only parties to remember, feel impact, or take responsibility for abusive events.
What’s still missing are resources and education for people who have caused sexual harm before it transforms into abuse of bodies or power. It’s a place that is not prison. It’s a place where a survivor’s forced forgiveness is not the goal. It’s a place that releases the survivors from the thought or burden of what I have done, which is turn myself into a physical lesson plan. I numerously asked my ex-partner to seek out such a group, a workshop, a tangible resource of any kind and they always came back empty handed. Even in my own experiences of co-facilitating and attending “How To Support A Survivor” workshops at colleges, nearly everyone in the room identified as a survivor, nearly everyone in the room was a cis woman – meaning, we never got to conversations of prevention or the tangle of ways different people of different identities experience violence.
Practicing an idea of restorative justice without outside involvement or generative tools became self-defense for the both me and my ex-partner – as opposed to offering each other time, resources, and space to appropriately process or heal. As a survivor, I ultimately put society’s healing before my own, and I’ve learned this is not how it works. Instituting personal boundaries isn’t punishment. The loss of boundaries is not restoration. The restoration is in healthy mentorship; tools accessible for folks at different stages in their own mourning; the restoration is in being held by others who share your own experience; the restoration is in defining your own terms of accountability, which includes distance and perhaps disappearance from my life, but not a dumping by the state.
After all, a relationship is not a site of activism, a community is.
