One of the drawbacks of the safety metaphor is that it leads to paternalism and infantilizing of victims. It can steal agency from the victims. It frames the harassed as a person who has no power, and the harasser as the person with all the power. There are ways in which this is true, but there are also ways in which it is false. Moreover, it has a bad tendency to create a perception that if the person being harassed has sufficient power to resist or respond powerfully, somehow no actual harassment has taken place. It creates a pressure for people who have been harassed to perform a correct victim response. If they fail to do so, then there is a perception that there has been no harm, no foul.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2014-08-02 05:41 am (UTC)This is very insightful! Thank you for this.