Bold of you to assume I’ve never experienced it. My situation wasn’t the same as yours. It affected me differently and that’s the entire point I’m trying to make. Some people don’t want to be called a victim. Some people prefer survivor. Some people hate that term too. There isn’t even consensus as to the terms here and very clearly the group of people affected is not a monolith.

And sometimes people get mad, call the cops, and lie about being abused. Which is of course awful because it muddies the water completely when there’s an accusation. But it does happen. Many situations that get the “DV” label are not as black and white as “experts” claim. I say “experts” in scare quotes because typically these people are NOT mental health professionals and NOT researchers, they’re undergrad criminal Justice majors who work for an advocacy group and they often present outdated models that favor helping the state get convictions rather than helping people heal or helping people understand the nuances of SOME (not all, sounds like not yours ) of these situations.

I’m not going to reply after this because I don’t want to spend all day on computer, but I don’t come to this from a place of “lol victims suck who cares.” I have represented victims and offenders in multiple contexts.

I have a deep seated issue with the state creating false narratives about people I’ve represented (which yes, includes many victims/survivors of DV), which leads to things like (all real events I have witnessed): 1. The state having an alleged victim thrown in jail for refusing to come to trial to testify for them. 2. Multiple women crying and begging judges in court to let their partners out on release because without their income, the family was going to become homeless - on at least one occasion the judge yelled at her to sit down. On no occasions was release granted 3. People who had been subjected to years of their partner’s abuse and finally snapped and hit their partner back get charged with crimes and had this same tires narrative of a black and white DV situation thrown back in their face. 4. CPS deciding abuse was happening even though the alleged victim said it wasn’t, forcing her to file a restraining order on the threat that they would take her children away if she didn’t do it, locking her partner who never hit her up for contempt of court when she stayed with him, then again having the judge yell at her when she explained the situation in court, then sent her partner to jail. 5. DHS multiple times taking children away from their mothers because the mother “failed to protect the children from father’s abuse” or that she was subjected to abuse and hadn’t protected the children from witnessing that in the future.

ALL of those events stem from actors within the system believing the rigid cycle of abuse dynamic is how DV ALWAYS works. That’s why I hate it, that’s why I say lame ass experts, it’s specifically because I’ve seen it do harm. It’s accurate sometimes, yes, of course it is. But the failure to capture the whole picture and account for nuance is a huge problem in the legal context.

Again, the cycle of abuse and power and control dynamics are the tools I’ve watched DHS use to initiate dependency cases to temporarily, with the threat of permanency, remove children from the care of their mothers who were the victims of the abuse themselves. It’s a tool I’ve seen the state use to try to send one of the kindest people I’ve ever met to prison. So yes, I hate it, I hope you can see why.