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Conflict Is Not Abuse

Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair

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Conflict Is Not Abuse

By: Sarah Schulman
Narrated by: Sarah Schulman
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About this listen

From intimate relationships to global politics, Sarah Schulman observes a continuum: that inflated accusations of harm are used to avoid accountability. Illuminating the difference between conflict and abuse, Schulman directly addresses our contemporary culture of scapegoating. This deep, brave, and bold work reveals how punishment replaces personal and collective self-criticism, and shows why difference is so often used to justify cruelty and shunning.

Rooting the problem of escalation in negative group relationships, Schulman illuminates the ways cliques, communities, families, and religious, racial, and national groups bond through the refusal to change their self-concept. She illustrates how supremacy behavior and traumatized behavior resemble each other, through a shared inability to tolerate difference.

This important and sure-to-be controversial book illuminates such contemporary and historical issues of personal, racial, and geo-political difference as tools of escalation towards injustice, exclusion, and punishment, whether the objects of dehumanization are other individuals in our families or communities, people with HIV, African Americans, or Palestinians.

©2016 Sarah Schulman (P)2018 Tantor Psychology Psychology & Mental Health Relationships Social Psychology & Interactions Social Sciences Mental Health Middle East Social justice Health Social Conflict

Critic Reviews

"A concluding call to address personal and social conflicts without state intervention via police and courts caps off a work that's likely to inspire much discussion." (Publishers Weekly, starred review)
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The author excuses inappropriate behaviours such that they should not draw conflict let alone be considered abusive however lacks the nuance to address the ongoing impacts of objectifying or demeaning behaviours - the author does not qualify the impact they do have which may not be considered 'abusive' but would help to discern why they become confused and conflated. I was very disappointed by this book. The author uses a weird set of anecdotal examples to try to illustrate non abusive behaviour as if they present a reasonable baseline, however, these examples are still yuck or reductive and demeaning, yet this is never acknowledged, there's no self awareness.

Struggled with the lack of nuance

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I only got half way through this. I found the examples very problematic in relation to power dynamics in workplaces and whether a supervisor or professor should have a relationship with a student. Not just this example though.
There was one Schulman gives of her own account of being attracted to a coworker during a work lunch or dinner and she starts objectifying her.

And there were other examples about consent that were questioning a woman’s believability in relation to sexual assault.

Of course, a minority of women make false claims, I don’t deny that. But as a recent ‘survivor’ of date rape, it is so important that women are believed. I never reported my experience and many of my friends have never reported theirs.

Now that we see all these cases of women, men and non binary people in the army not reporting out of fear for their lives, those few cases that weren’t true shouldn’t be given the attention they do, compared to the constant violence women and others face.

Controversial examples don’t make sense

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