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Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair

Book by Sarah Schulman · 8 quotes · Conflict, Exclusion, Separation

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Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair Quotes

“In order to “protect” ourselves by keeping our lives small and shutting out intimacies, we could actually be hurting ourselves, missing out on a transformative experience of the heart, and sabotaging our small but crucial contribution to making peace.”

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Book:Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair
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“I am examining the inaccurate claiming of “abuse” as a substitute for problem-solving. I make plain how this deflection of responsibility produces unnecessary separation and perpetuates anxiety while producing cruelty, shunning, undeserved punishment, incarceration, and occupation.”

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“False accusations of harm are used to avoid acknowledgment of complicity in creating conflict and instead escalate normative conflict to the level of crisis. This choice to punish rather than resolve is a product of distorted thinking, and relies on reinforcement of negative group relationships, when instead these ideolo- gies should be actively challenged. Through this over-statement of harm, false accusations are used to justify cruelty, while shunning keeps information from entering into the process. Resistance to shunning, exclusion, and unilateral control, while necessary, are mischaracterized as harm and used to re-justify more escalation towards bullying, state intervention, and violence. Emphasizing communication and repair, instead of shunning and separation, is the key to transforming these paradigms.”

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Book:Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair
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“Without in any way minimizing the role of violence in our lives, I am looking, simultaneously, at how a heightened rhetoric of threat that confuses doing nothing, normative conflict, and resistance with actual abuse, has produced a wide practice of over- stating harm.”

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“As individuals, we have enormous power in the ways we abandon the scapegoated, or instead stand up for them. We have power to change the ways we encourage shunning and instead do the work to facilitate communication. Simple shifts in personal behavior and their expressions in political structures of power, produce changing public norms which can make huge differences in individual and collective experiences.”

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Book:Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair
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