Do Abusers Thrive in Secrecy?

I wouldn’t be writing this if I thought the answer was a straightforward “Yes.”

I feel kind of weird writing this, because I’m disagreeing with one of the most common points made by anti-abuse activists who have many, many years of activism behind them. But….it hasn’t been such a great week for anti-abuse activists with many, many years of activism behind them.

The points I’m going to make here will be very nitpicky, very quibbly. The feeling of trying to talk about this reminds me of something I did in first grade. The teacher was sternly lecturing the class to never talk about someone else behind their back & I raised my hand and started asking about all the edge cases, what about if you’re saying something nice, what if you’re planning a surprise, what about if you’re confused about something they did & not yet sure how to talk to them about it? And my teacher snapped at me to shut up.

I genuinely had no recognition that she was saying that because other girls in the class were hurting each other’s feelings by gossiping.¹ That basically any time someone states a big grand injunction like “Never talk about someone else behind their back” or “Abusers thrive in secrecy,” they’re saying it in response to specific people being hurt, in order to try and change people’s behavior so less people will be hurt. And when someone like me takes that as an invitation to a, like, philosophical discussion about the edge cases, the natural response is, Jesus Christ, people are being hurt and I’m trying to help, and you’re arguing with me about definitions?

Probably “Never talk about someone behind their back” and “Abusers thrive in secrecy” are good things to say on net, probably they help people, and normal people recognize and are benefitted by that instead of arguing. But they’re also contradictory. It’s not impossible that some of those little girls remembered being scolded by their teacher and had a harder time telling their mother about the weird thing that some adult did to them, because they didn’t want to talk about him behind his back. I think that not being clear about edge cases of big moral statements like this, allows hurtful people to take advantage of the edge cases. So I’m going to quibble.

Something that’s definitely true: a given abuser thrives when his abuse is secret from anyone who might stop his abuse or punish him.² But “Abusers thrive in secrecy” implies more than “A given abuser thrives when his abuse is secret from anyone who might stop his abuse or punish him, and that applies to multiple abusers.” When people say “Abusers thrive in secrecy,” they’re often urging people to be more open about their abuse in general, with the idea that this will help protect them against abuse in general. And I don’t think that’s exactly true.

Some edge cases:

Imagine a Catholic priest who is looking for a child whom he can abuse without being caught. A child tells that priest, in the Sacrament of Confession, about other abuse that the child has been through. Now the priest knows that the child is a good target for abuse, and subjects the child to abuse. If the child had kept this secret from the priest, the priest would have picked a different target.

The child is probably telling the priest about it because the child doesn’t recognize their previous abuse as abuse—the child is confessing because the child thinks “I am guilty of a sin.” So this might seem like a bad counterexample to “Abusers thrive in secrecy.” Okay, let’s try another one.

Imagine a therapist who is deciding which of his patients to abuse. A patient tells him in therapy about her experience being abused. He now believes she's an especially good target for abuse—it worked for her previous abuser, at least for a while no one stopped him—and he abuses his patient. If she hadn’t told him, she wouldn’t have seemed like such a good target.

But in both of these cases, the victim’s abuse history is known to the new abuser, but is secret from most people. In fact, part of the reason the priest picked the kid is because the priest knew the kid had only disclosed his previous abuse in confession; part of the reason the therapist picked the patient is that he knew the patient had only disclosed her abuse in therapy. The abusers felt confident that abuse would only be disclosed in confession or therapy. So let's try another example.

A rapist who is part of a rape gang is looking for a new victim. The rapist hangs around a foster care home for children and picks up a girl there, partly because he knows that the reason she is in the care home is that she has been abused before. Everyone in the community knows that she has been abused before, it’s made visible by the fact that she's in a care home. But this rapist believes he’s less likely to be stopped and punished than her previous abuser was, partly because the girl’s previous abuser was probably white, & this rapist is a Pakistani immigrant. He correctly believes that the government is reluctant to go against South Asian immigrants who rape white girls, because the government is afraid to worsen race relations. If the girl’s abuse history had been secret, he would have been more likely to target a different girl whose abuse history he knew.

One more example. A man becomes an anti-abuse activist. He’s charismatic and eloquent, so he’s a very successful activist. He encourages women to publicly disclose their abuse history—& due to his charisma a lot of women want to be around him, & because he’s an anti-abuse activist, former victims feel safe around him. Now he’s surrounded by women who are vulnerable to abuse, and he knows how they were abused before, what worked for their previous abusers and what didn’t. What happens next?

Here we have a situation where the idea that “Abusers thrive in secrecy” is actively used against victims to make them vulnerable to continuing abuse. So I do think that being very, very precise about how we talk about abuse isn’t just philosophical quibbling, it has real consequences for victims, even if only in edge cases.

What these four examples have in common is that each of the abusers benefited from a) knowing about his victim’s abuse history and b) predicting that his victim would be less likely to disclose his abuse, or unlikely to be believed if she did disclose it.

Generalizing from “An abuser thrives when his abuse is secret from people who might stop or punish him” into “Abusers thrive in secrecy” smuggles in some confusion about, like…what a group is. This is something I notice myself getting mixed up about a lot when I am trying to think in terms of groups of people. A group is several people who have something in common, but “having something in common” can mean one of two things: “being alike, having a shared trait” or “working together towards a shared goal.” Eliding these two types of groups can cause very inaccurate predictions—which is not just an academic point, inaccurate predictions mean people get hurt.

So. Abusers are a group defined by the fact that they are alike, they all commit abuse. They are not a group defined by mutually working towards a shared goal. Obviously some abusers work together to hurt people. But an abuser can benefit, as an abuser, at the expense of another abuser—in a way that, for instance, an environmentalist can’t benefit as an environmentalist at the expense of another environmentalist. Environmentalists are working on something together, they all succeed as environmentalists when the environment is better. Abusers aren’t working towards a better world for abusers. Any given abuser benefits most from a world where he knows about all other abuse that has happened (because then he knows who is most vulnerable to abuse) and no one else knows about the abuse that he himself commits. Abusers don’t thrive in secrecy; each individual abuser thrives in a secrecy differential. He benefits when his victim is less likely to disclose his abuse, or less likely to be believed if she does disclose it, than if someone else had abused her.

Focusing on how secrecy enables abuse, without talking about how openness enables abuse, can imply that continued cycles of abuse or cultures of abuse are much more the fault of victims than I think they really are. Abusers get away with abuse when they aren’t stopped or punished. One reason an abuser might not be stopped or punished is that the victim is keeping his abuse a secret, but speaking out only helps victims when openness causes other people to take action against abusers. An abuser benefits from finding secrecy differentials, and asking victims to disclose their abuse history (whether in confession, in therapy, in court, or in anti-abuse activism) —without first making very, very sure that increasing the number of victims disclosing true stories of abuse will result in increasing the amount of action that other people take to stop and punish abusers—can create these differentials.

1. As you can imagine, the reason I didn’t know is that none of them were gossiping with me. A little girl who asks really nitpicky edge-case questions about when gossiping might be okay….is not a little girl with whom other little girls wish to gossip. Whenever I think for a fraction of a second that maybe it was homeschooling that made me weird, I remember this, & I know I was doomed anyway.

2. When I’m talking about hypothetical or general situations, I’m going to use “him” when I need a pronoun to refer to an abuser, and “her” when I need a pronoun to refer to a victim. This isn’t because I think all abusers are men or only women can be abused, and it’s not because I don’t recognize that “they” is grammatically valid when referring to a single unknown or hypothetical or otherwise indefinite person—it’s because I need to be really, really clear here when I’m talking about an individual and when I’m talking about a group of people, and after many drafts it seems like this is the best way to do that.