Victims of Victims

I've created a new Yahoo! Group called "Victims of Victims."

Throughout the past century, physical and emotional abuse have been a serious problem in our society. Traditionally, abusiveness in the household was kept secret. This secretiveness, in turn, allowed the abuse to flourish because no one wanted to acknowledge it. By the mid to late 20th Century, you could find abuse in some form in virtually every household.

Fortunately, towards the end of the 20th Century, people in abusive situations started coming forward. As more and more people told their stories, the problem became a bigger and bigger part of the social consciousness. By the dawn of the 21st Century, people finally recognized it as the societal cancer it is, and always was.

Unfortunately, our awareness of it did not become a cure any more than chemotherapy did for cancer. Our awareness of abuse has helped stem the tide and stop some of the worst of it, but has also caused considerable collateral damage; in the same way chemotherapy makes the patient sick, so too does our awareness of abuse sometimes harm the innocent.

Nobody is perfect; we all do "abusive" things we regret later. The problem is, society has become so paranoid of abuse in all forms that often just being accused of abuse carries a stigma. For all intents and purposes, a person accused of abuse becomes guilty until proven innocent.

A police officer I spoke to once put it quite eloquently: "We have to take every complaint, no matter how small, seriously because there have been one too many dead wives found on their kitchen floors."

Victims of Victims is a support group for people who have been victims, not of traditional abuse, but of "abuse victims" who use society's paranoia with abuse as a tool to abuse their "abuser." This group is for anyone who's ever had someone call the police on them when they didn't deserve it or been unfairly slandered by "victims."

Maybe some of us have made genuine mistakes in the past... but none of us deserve this.


Click to join Victims of Victims