11/04/2023
Recent allegations against entertainer Russell Brand have reignited existing debates on the validity of alleged survivors’ allegations of abuse.
What does the hashtag believe women or believe survivors mean? Skeptics of the believe survivors movement claim that the hashtag means we should believe ALL survivors, believe any and all allegations without skepticism and on faith alone. And the claim is not completely unfounded. Often time the accusation of not believing survivors of nonconsensual sexual behavior is used as a way to completely shut down any inquiry. You may be called a victim blamer or a perpetrator of rape culture. It’s worth looking at the genealogy of this phrase. What ideas does it descend from? What political influences underpin it? And what are the uses and abuses of it? As we look at this history, we’re going to be using philosophical concepts like knowledge, power, & space to answer these questions.
In order to understand the hashtag BelieveSurvivors, we have to go back 15-20 years, to the phrase “Break the Silence.” Societies across the globe and throughout history have often blamed women who were sexually assaulted for being intoxicated, for being dressed wrong, for going to certain locations. Many religious communities believe it is the duty of women not to dress “provocatively” in order not to tempt men, because apparently men have no free will when shown too much skin. These narratives still exist today and they have the effect of silencing a person.
But, the imperative to “Break the Silence” created new spaces for language to flourish allowing survivors to develop the knowledge needed for them to understand their experiences absent discourses which stigmatize and/or blame survivors for what occurred to them. This knowledge, that it’s not their fault they were assaulted, is itself empowering. It is empowering to overcome the silencing narratives of a culture which tolerates and solicits sexual abuse. It is a productive or positive type of power that gives them or invests in them a way to understand themselves, and provides a new mode of understanding their circumstances. And, the more survivors who speak out about their experiences the greater solidarity builds amongst survivors. As this type of knowledge spreads among survivors the power related to it grows.
These spaces also become objects of scientific discourse: by healthcare specialists analyzing the effects of trauma on the body, by therapists developing tools to address the effects of abuse on the psyche, etc.
And, from these new discourses and the solidarity between survivors & allies, we see the focus of anti-rape & anti-violence rhetoric move towards society at-large. “The rhetorical progression from ‘break the silence’ to ‘believe women’ is a subtle but important one: Whereas ‘break the silence’ put the onus on survivors of sexual assault to tell their stories—however painful or retraumatizing that may be—‘believe women’ attempts to shift responsibility onto those who hear and bear witness to them.”1
As Feminist icon, Gloria Steinem, once said, “Obviously, ‘break the silence’ and ‘believe women’ are sequential. You can’t be believed until you speak, and the more women who break the silence, the more we are believed.” The purpose of Believe Survivors is to alter our frame of reference towards taking allegations of sexual & domestic abuse as seriously as we would any other crime. It is about creating a new norm for responding to such allegations.
Understanding the connection between “break the silence” & “believe survivors” allows us to more closely look at this concept of space. When we use the word space, we don’t primarily mean a physical space, we mean a linguistic space, a space where signs & signals inhabit a world and serve as guides on how to navigate through the world. Spaces develop, they grow in & through the relations between the speakers and the listeners.
Listen to this blog post by The Blue Bench a sexual assault prevention & survivor support center located in Denver, Colorado. “Often, survivors of sexual assault first tell someone they know about their assault, and if they aren’t believed, they won’t tell anyone else. This can mean that the survivor won’t report or seek counseling or other support services, leaving them completely isolated in dealing with their trauma, which can be incredibly overwhelming.” Within these initial small spaces between just two people like a person and a doctor, a nurse, a therapist, a friend, or a police officer, within this micro-space instinctively not believing an allegation forecloses on the expansion of spaces where a survivor can navigate their own experiences.
Blue Bench continues, “Therefore, believing a survivor when they tell you that they have been sexually assaulted is critical. One caring and positive experience of sharing their story can set a survivor on a trajectory toward healing.”
The building of space that comes from Believing survivors and the knowledge gained from survivors speaking out gives doctors, nurses, therapists, police, lawmakers the power to help survivors develop the spaces where they can heal, the spaces where abusers can be held accountable, and the types of knowledge that forecloses future abuses from occurring.
We’ve talked about the uses of this phrase, but what about its abuses? There are those that acknowledge there may have been some instances where legitimate allegations were instinctively discounted for the reasons I listed earlier. While recognizing assaults are of course bad, Bari Weiss of the New York Times worries we may have gone too far. Skepticism towards survivors is not only rational but desirable. “I believe that it’s condescending to think that women and their claims can’t stand up to interrogation and can’t handle skepticism. I believe that facts serve feminists far better than faith. That due process is better than mob rule.”2 When Bari hears the echo from anti-rape & anti-violence advocates, she hears Believe ALL survivors, no matter what. “I believe that the ‘believe all women’ vision of feminism unintentionally fetishizes women. Women are no longer human and flawed. They are Truth personified. They are above reproach,” she says. Is this in fact the case? According to Weiss and other apologists, the danger of Believing All Women means we are unaliving due process; we are condemning alleged perpetrators of abuse to guilty until proven otherwise. It is the valid & rational way to be skeptical, and it is invalid & irrational to blindly believe all alleged survivors uncritically.
Bari & other apologists could point to examples like Jussie Smollet, who in early 2019 claimed he was the victim of a racist & homophobic attack by MAGA hat wearing fiends. Police eventually discovered Mr. Smollet had hired two Nigerian actors to attack him and brought charges of filing a false police report against him, though these were dropped by the Cook County State’s Attorney only for him to later be recharged and convicted by a special prosecutor. The actor was lambasted for the false allegations and ultimately lost his job on the show Empire. Many used it as a prime example of #BelieveSurvivors gone too far.
While most advocates of the #BelieveSurvivors mantra will point out how the hashtag isn’t in fact BelieveAllSurvivors, and the best evidence available shows that people who allege sex crimes against them are in fact telling the truth 90-98% of the time, and it’s estimated that 77% of all sexual assaults go unreported in the U.S., it’s also not hard to see how easily this norm can be abused, as evidenced by the Jussie Smollet case.
There’s also instances where there is no actual survivor in question, simply allegations from somewhere that weaponize the knowledge that we’ve learned from #BelieveSurvivors
In 2020, the openly-gay progressive Mayor of Holyoke, Massachusetts, Alex Morse, ran in the Democratic Primary for the 1st congressional district against incumbent, establishment congressman Richard Neal. Three weeks before the primary election, the University of Massachusetts Amherst College Democrats released a statement banning Morse from campus events and claiming he used these to socialize with students and later connect with them on social media in ways that made them feel uncomfortable. Morse was also an adjunct teacher at the university. Morse was being accused of making unwanted sexual advances towards students; and because Morse was a mayor & teacher, i.e., someone with political power, the power imbalance between him and any student was problematic.
Turns out the whole thing was an orchestrated smear campaign by the College Dems and the Massachusetts Democratic Party who wanted Morse’s opponent to win. There were never any actual people coming forward making allegations. The elites in the political party weaponized the knowledge that comes from #BelieveSurvivors, i.e., the knowledge that false reports are very rare, the knowledge that most people who are sexually assaulted don’t report, the knowledge that powerful abusers frequently use their own power to silence accusers. This weaponization was possible because of people who are invested in the hashtag but have no real investment in the particulars of the specific situation. This is the public in general that is not in those micro-spaces where a survivor is breaking their silence and a doctor, friend, family member, therapist, etc. is believing them.
We could go on and on about instances of abuses of the knowledge from Believe Survivor’s. Of particular concern is when someone is accused of something very vague & abstract, like being toxic, misogynist, racist, etc, but what the accused actually did is never actually stated, and any inquiry into the subject is met with accusations of not believing survivors. Which misses the whole point because in order to believe what someone says they actually have to say something specific. Anti-philosopher Contrapoints did an excellent video on this where she lists off the six stages of cancellation that come from the abuses of allegations of societal impropriety like misogyny or racism.3
The allegations against Russell Brand, like all allegations, have their nuances. Not all the allegations are new. At least one person came out publicly about a decade ago about her relationship with Brand in the 2000s. The newer allegations are all anonymous, though there appears to be documentation like medical reports and text messages that validate their claims. All of the allegations come from a time period prior to 2014. Brand has long admitted that there was a period of his life where he was a drug and sex addict, when he engaged in misogynistic behavior (though he denies any criminal allegations), and that he has spent the last decade trying to better himself and the way he treats other people.
Once the space created from Breaking One’s Silence and Believing a Survivor gets large enough, it interacts with other linguistic spaces, like the rights of the accused, the right of society to know the truth in-itself about an occurrence, the right of society to be recompensed for an offense against societal order. You could thing of these like fields of possible knowledge or grids of intelligibility all co-mingling together, sometimes with each other, sometime against each other, sometimes irrelevant to each other. They are fields in a geographical sense where they allow us to understand our space in-itself but also ways to interpret the pathways in front of us. This knowledge literally has the power to change the way we experience the spaces we live in. These concepts—knowledge, power, space—are not identical. They describe different ideas. But, these different ideas are very closely related and reciprocally influence each other.
If you are a person invested with the knowledge of #BelieveSurvivors, how are you supposed to use it without abusing it? How are you supposed to use it and the other spaces we talked about, this amalgam of different spaces we called due process?
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