Towards the end of my college years, I was working at a bookstore. One afternoon, I was talking to one of my coworkers about an upcoming fundraiser for a local organization that worked with victims of domestic abuse. I made a remark about how there were over twice as many animal shelters as domestic abuse shelters in this country. She said, “Good.” I was surprised. I didn’t expect that response and really know what to make of it at first. Did she feel that animals were more deserving of support and humane treatment than abused humans? Or, did she think there were more animals than domestic abuse victims in need?
After some questions and conversation, it became clear that while she was sympathetic to victims of domestic abuse to a point, she was more inclined to give unalloyed sympathy and compassion to animals because they were more clearly helpless, more clearly not responsible for their situations. I suppose it is less complicated to see an animal in need and feel for it. The issue of human volition is taken out of the equation. You don’t have to try and understand why someone wouldn’t “just leave” an abusive situation when you think of mistreated animals. With animals, you consider the external facts, the situational factors and other individuals acting on that animal. By contrast, we might view domestic abuse victims as somehow partially responsible because they are “choosing” to stay in that situation.
Judging someone who has a hard time leaving their abuser is, I believe, a way we shame victims of domestic abuse, and I don’t find it particularly compelling. Still, I recognize the logic of the argument, even if I don’t buy it. It’s harder to ignore human agency when considering people in terrible situations. Part of this is because, of course, it’s hard to have a family member in an abusive relationship and to witness them tolerate mistreatment and return to their abuser. I get that this can be hard to watch and to understand. Maybe my coworker had had that experience. However, on a societal level, it’s not hard to understand why many people do go back to abusive situations. As a society we have tolerated and even championed as law the mistreatment and dehumanizing of women. Think about the fact that until 1993 some states still did not legally allow for rape to exist in marriage, meaning when you said “I do,” you were also saying, “Anytime you want to force me to have sex you can with no legal repercussions. Til death do us part.” 1993, people. That’s very recent.
Out indifference to domestic abuse victims plays out in a variety of ways including lack of police response to domestic abuse calls and lack of any real punishment for abusers. The majority of physical or sexual assaults of women, including assault that ends in murder, is perpetrated by people the women know, usually a partner or ex-partner. We don’t have a great history of taking these threats seriously or punishing this bad behavior. Add to this some women are in financially precarious situations that make it hard to leave. And, probably the biggest issue of all, individuals who are victims of abuse are psychologically harmed by the abuse as well as physically. As an abuse victim, someone you love and trust, who you want to continue to love and trust, is devaluing your life by physically assaulting you. This kind of trauma has ramifications for abilities to navigate the world, to feel safe, to evaluate options. You are in a psychologically compromised situation, told by society that your abuser isn’t really doing much wrong, certainly not enough to warrant real police intervention. So, while I can acknowledge that there is volition of the abused to consider, to me, it seems pretty clear there’s some serious external and situational factors to consider.
When I brought these things up with my colleague, she agreed generally but still admitted that it was easier for her to relate to animal victims of human callousness, carelessness and violence. My coworker is an educated, bright, middle aged, politically progressive woman who identifies as a feminist. The fact that even she felt her compassion strained when thinking of the difficult, complex situations abuse victims often find themselves in…well, that didn’t give me a lot of hope for other folks. Or maybe it’s just that those little kittens on the holiday PSAs from human shelters are just too cute. It’s hard to compete with sweet, cute needy animals.
I found myself thinking about this conversation during the uproar after the hunter Walter Palmer shot and killed Cecil the lion in Zimbabwe last week. Amid the outcry about the death of the lion, various journalists have discussed the lack of public outcry about human rights violations in that same country over the years. How can we care so much more about wildlife than humans? they’ve asked. I remembered my coworker’s comments on victims of domestic abuse and again came face to face with the fact that it’s a lot easier to see animals as victims who deserve our attention, compassion and intervention than it is to see our fellow humans that way. Think about this: enough consumer pressure was put on airlines in a few short days that several major carriers will no longer carry big game “trophies.” That’s some quick work, though probably a PR no-brainer with not a lot of economic downside for airlines. I mean, how much profit are they forfeiting by not transporting big game trophies?
Unlike this, the public grows quickly weary of following and understanding stories of violence and injustice experienced by humans, like those folks living under Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe and, before him, under colonial rule. Or, consider this, one of the handful of top results in a Google search for “Cecil the Lion” this week was a page titled, “If You Got Mad Over Cecil the Lion, Here Are 5 Ways You Can Bring About Change.” People want to take this outrage and turn into action. Do a Google search for a current human tragedy, say the war in Syria, and you get copious pages of stories about Syria. Midway down the third page of results, the World Food Program has a page on Syria, including how to help. There are organizations you can give to – time, money, etc. – to help Syrians, in and out of Syria, but it’s clearly not foremost on our minds even when we are actually thinking about Syria.
To be fair, it’s very hard to take in the complexity of the situation in Syria and imagine how we can affect positive change there. ISIS and Bashar al-Assad are daunting problems. But what about Syrians leaving Syria, Syrians fleeing violence, persecution, starvation, rape, abduction, death. How do we view them? Compassionately? How do we treat them? Supportively? Kindly? Thousands of Syrian refugees being rejected right now from the United Kingdom can answer that with a resounding, “No.” I can understand that taking in thousands of refugees is also a bit daunting, probably not daunting on the scale of mounting a ground war against ISIS, but logistically and financially stressful for a country. However between 2011 and 2014, (according to this article in The Guardian) the U.K. accepted fewer than 4,300 asylum applicants. Germany and Sweden, during that time granted asylum to over 38,000 and 42,000 respectively, with thousands of applicants still being processed. Hey, word of advice, asylum seekers, head to Germany and Sweden before trying to hump it through the chunnel.
More disturbing than this to me, is the way that policy makers and the public try to cast these folks as something other than refugees deserving of help. I don’t get the hysteria around immigration in general, but I especially find it appalling when the migrants are fleeing such horrific situations. One British truck driver said on in interview on public radio this week that he didn’t understand why all these migrants didn’t go through the “proper channels” if they really were deserving of asylum and help. He said it’s because they’re not really deserving. They are, according to him, “No-good, thieving scum.”
Before we Americans judge our British cousins too harshly, I’d like to remind people of the terrible mistreatment by our country of central American refugees fleeing the violent fallout of the drug war over the last several years. If you pressed people who see these migrants running in desperation as lazy and trying to “cheat” somehow, if you asked them what they would do if their family had been murdered, people in their community were being extorted and threatened by gangs and the police forces around them are either corrupt or incapable of securing their homes and lives, what would they say? What would any of us do in that situation? Obey legal regulations governing migration or obey higher laws – laws of love and survival, even moral imperatives that drive all of us to seek a better life, a safer life for ourselves and the people we love. Outside of ISIS recruits, who on earth can’t understand the need to leave Syria right now?
Considering this, I’ve decided that some version of what psychologists call the Fundamental Attribution Error is going on here, impeding our ability to be compassionate. Basically, when we observe and evaluate the behavior of others, we attribute much greater emphasis to personal choices and personality characteristics than to situational factors. Those migrants are lazy, thieving folks who are going to put unnecessary burdens on our economic systems! In contrast to this, when we evaluate our own actions, we are much more likely to view the external situation as having greater power over us. It’s not my fault there’s a war being waged here – I’m fleeing while I’m still alive! This is a widespread fallacy of logic and thinking. Of course it’s even championed by some folks in power and some news sources. View your own situations with lenience; judge everyone else, particularly those different from you. I get that egging on this way of thinking can be beneficial for people in power – it’s that whole divide and conquer thing. Get folks all riled up about illegal immigrants stealing jobs so that they won’t mind that we’ve failed to penalize large corporations that melted down our financial system through that whole, fun subprime mortgage tango a few years back. Remember that? It was fun. What I don’t understand is, on a personal level, why people are swayed by it. Why do we make the fundamental attribution error?
Of course one obvious reason: we love to scape goat. It’s a lot easier to blame illegal immigrants for our economic hardships rather than corporate policies, big moneyed power in Washington, criminal Wallstreet speculation as well as the lack of any kind of oversight and control over any of this. There’s something primal under this, I think. Humans look at other humans and want to believe they have more power over their situations than they do. It’s terrifying to confront how little power we have over our own lives. When you have to face the fact of large-scale, institutionalized discrimination, corruption and greed…ugh, it makes you feel very powerless indeed. We want to believe that individuals have a lot of volition and a lot of power to make choices in their lives so that we don’t have to confront that we often don’t have a lot of control or power. Incidentally, I think this is why gun advocates think we need more guns after a big mass shooting. They don’t want to face that there can be this terrifying, random violence enacted on you that you may not have any ability to do anything about. Pretending that if you were there, with a gun, you could have done something somehow makes you feel better about your own precarious place in the universe, your own vulnerability to the fates.
So, I’d like to believe that there is something inherently valuable in living a life that doesn’t shrink from the dark complexities of other people’s tragedies. Of course, you can’t fix most of it, or even much of it, but I’d like to believe that if you foster compassion in yourself and even try to help others face their fears and be more compassionate, you can affect some positive change in this world.
little light, sea of fog 