“Hurt People Hurt People” Nah, Hurting People Hurts People

If you’ve ever unintentionally hurt somebody, this is for you.

The first picture on a roll of 35mm film. Unintentionally taken by the author, intentionally not a picture of anything.

So, I’m going to be super vulnerable here and admit that this essay is a mess. Harm is such a difficult living concept to hold that I have been writing and re-writing for weeks. Each time, I return to the essay with more edits than ‘the Holy Bible’ and less confidence in my ability to say anything useful about Harm. A lot of this text reads to me as multiple introductions to many essays I have not actually written sexily stringed together. However, I am going to embrace the message of the text and stew in my own discomfort as I share this essay, as messy as it is. After all, this is why It’s Lowkey Theory exists: this slowed down and ruminative writing exercise exists to account for my journeys of seeing life in all its complexity and trying to make sense of it regardless. And, sometimes, making sense of complexity is a bunch of introductions stringed together sexily. Hopefully, though, this essay does not cause harm. And, more hopefully: if this essay does cause harm, may it encourage me to navigate the dysregulation of causing harm with the will and ability to show up meaningfully to a process of harm-reduction. Anyways…

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First, let’s clear some things up.

Unintentional vs Intentional Harm (as understood during the drafting of this essay):

• Intentional Harm —> person A purposefully hurts person B with the desired outcome being Person B experiencing harm. person B being hurt might be one of many desired outcomes of the harmful actions. the desire for person B to be harmed could be accompanied by person’s A desire to enact power, a desire to uphold normative behaviour or thought, a desire for wealth, or so much more.

• Unintentional Harm —> person A hurts person B without a deliberate purpose to harm person B, here person B being harmed is neither desired nor expected. (despite person B’s harm being the very real result of person A’s actions). person A, alongside having ‘mistakenly’ caused harm to person B, might also be behaving negligently, carelessly, recklessly or thoughtlessly (which, in the case of a legal process, will affect how person A is held liable for their actions).

• Intentional harm is not necessarily ‘worse’ and unintentional harm is not necessarily ‘better’ as the experience of being harmed is often not directly proportional to the intentions of the person causing harm. So, in other words, just because person A harmed person B by accident does not magically make the harm less harmful.

• The distinction is made here care-fully and thought-fully; knowing that intentionality hardly affects how harm is received, knowing that intentionality is complex (often effervescent), knowing that intentionality can only really be known by the person causing harm, and knowing that intentionality gets realised through a process of deep internal reflection which many people who have harmed people have not, themselves, undertaken.

• Much like The Law, I find the concept of culpability very useful, though also quite complicated.

Yes, this is from Wikipedia. No, universities do not regard Wikipedia as a reliable source. Yes, here I care very little about what universities regard.

• Though, I am less interested in culpability and more interested in the ways in which people, who did not intend to harm someone, ‘deal with’ the reality of having harmed a person.

Second,

• ‘This Society’ refers to the white-supremacist cishetero-patriarchal capitalist worlds we are forced to exist in.

• ‘Another World’ refers to the possibilities of a Liberated Society that may or may not exist in our collective futures.

With that said… let’s get into it, yeah?

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In a loving view of the world, we (as humans, super generally) do not want to hurt one another. Still, as I am sure you have experienced; humans hurt one another all the time. Much of the harm, specifically on an interpersonal level, is considered (by the situational antagonist) to be ‘unintentional’. And while This Society has legal and cultural mechanisms for dealing with all kinds of harm, there exists a vacuum on how to ‘handle’ the reality of having harmed someone and how to reckon with the possibility of inflicting more harm in the future. As I muse with my comrades, as we actively dream of Another World that could be brought into existence, it matters to me how we’d manage harm as a community. Especially in the context of Another World NOT built with the bricks and cement of hierarchies, theft, and subjugation. How will we, as a community engaged in freedom-driven living, respond to so-called unintentional harm when it shows up in our collectives (on our subsistence farms, in our classrooms, between one another)? And how do we respond to unintentional harm in liberation-orientated ways?

“Hurt people hurt people” is a pithy saying people throw around when they’re attempting to make sense of why someone harmed another person. “Hurt people hurt people” tends to centre the investigation of harm rather than the harm itself. “Hurt people hurt people” shifts our attention from the person who was harmed to the person doing the harm: to their motivations, their history, their pain. And while it may be true that people who have been harmed can go on to harm others — it is not an impenetrable truth, nor is it something that is always true. But, “hurt people hurt people” persists because it’s simple and sounds cool.

“Hurt people hurt people” can say many things, things like:

1. That people who have suffered harm will harm others.

2. That all people who harm others have, themselves, been harmed before.

3. That harm is an unavoidable cycle that we are always already within.

To me, “hurt people hurt people” is a fascinating idiom that fails to hold all there is for people who cause harm to understanding harm and harm reduction. Instead, I offer something that is less cool and yet (somehow) pretty simple: Hurting people hurts people. And I offer this with the hopes that sitting with the reality that harm has occurred rather than investigating the causes of harm might surface as a method of navigating post-harm life that centres the person harmed rather than the person who caused the harm.

I have been harmed. Some of the harm has been small, other harms have been so large they still exist in my body (nestled in the crook of my elbow, wedged between the separation of my ears and skull). Similarly, I have harmed people. I do not enjoy harming people, I rather generally derive no pleasure from witnessing someone be harmed, and I actively work towards less harm existing in the world. Still, I have harmed people. I can insecurely say that the harm I have caused in this world has been unintentional, however, I can confidently claim that the harm has been harmful. And while I have found that dwelling on the reasons why I have harmed people to be incredible content for therapy, I find critically reflecting on my actions post-inflicting harm to be far more suited for public engagement. This essay is a mere piece.

I’ve noticed that most people who have unintentionally hurt someone do not know what to do once they realise they have hurt somebody. A lot of our fight, flight, faun, and freeze responses lead us to attempt a variety of unhelpful strategies to evade any sense of the shared reality; both the shared reality that we hurt someone and the shared reality that someone is hurt by us.  And the shared reality exists in the truth that regardless of what we do next, we can’t un-hurt that person. But, we can try — and we do try — to un-hurt people on micro and macro levels of humanity. People try to un-hurt people all the time: they use manipulation to attempt to un-/re-write the shared reality, they refer to the painful parts of their life history to argue that their pain controls (not informs, actively controls) their decision-making processes, they punish themselves in sacrificial rituals of atonement probably mimicked from religious indoctrination, or they may internally-externally spiral at the prospect of facing consequences for hurting someone.

Consequences. There are consequences to hurting someone; private consequences (like intimate relationships of all kinds falling apart) and public consequences (like being shamed by a loosely-organised collective or, even, being jailed). And, in the face of the realisation that you have indeed hurt somebody, unintentionally, the consequences can feel like an ever-evolving impending doom. Because in that moment — instead of attending to the hurt, being present with your capacity for being hurtful, doing what is in the best interest of the person you have hurt — you are hyper-focused on what is most important to a deeply afraid (a deeply uncomfortable or deeply emotionally challenged) version of you: defending yourself. You hyper-focus on defending yourself because you can’t possibly be a “bad person”; you are a “good person” who made a “mistake”. And in the dust of your Phoenix-like consequence-avoidance strategising, an un-erasable image remains in its shape: you hurt someone. So… what now?

As a younger version of myself, I was a people-pleaser. This means that I found it so distressing, deregulating, and disarming to cause any kind of displeasure to a person that I built my life around ensuring that I was constantly and dishonestly agreeable. I may have thought it was a selfless means of making the people around me happy, however, it was a selfish act of protecting my own peace. If I made it so that everyone around me liked me, if I made it so that everyone around me had no reason (read: no option) to express their displeasure at my actions — perhaps then I could avoid the discomforts that come with: being wrong, being ill-informed, being impatient, feeling ashamed, feeling disappointed in myself, feeling attacked, feeling misunderstood, and more. As a younger version of myself, my comfort mattered more than the agency of the people around me; my comfort mattered more than people being able to have un-controlled free-will interactions with who I was, what I felt, what I thought, and what I did.

ouch.

Since then — for reasons that, yet again, have more to do with my own health & wellness rather than the people around me — I have made efforts to grow comfortable with being uncomfortable. And — for reasons that, non-similarly, have everything to do with the people around me — I have spent much time re-negotiating the ways I attempt to protect myself from the emotional labour that follows harming someone; emotional labour that, I argue, is necessary for actively practicing harm reduction. Part of this has involved a renegotiation of my own ideas of “bad” and “good” people, allowing myself instead to exist simply as a person who is neither good nor bad and has the capacity to harm people, has the experience of having harmed people, and has the desire for less harm to exist in the world. Prison abolition work has been extremely useful in this regard.

To bastardise a line of thinking that has been better expressed elsewhere: Labelling someone as a “bad person” (a person who is innately and inherently “bad”, a person who has always been and always will be “bad”) gives way for institutionalising them in the name of micro-and-macro managing the possibility of future harmful behaviour. From prisons to the legally-bound ownership of a “mentally ill” person, from getting expelled to losing your job, This Society has made attempts at protecting the “good” people from the “bad” people. There are many moments where the attempts fail:

1. “bad people” with money avoid jail time or harsher legal consequences while people responding to food insecurity by stealing are considered “bad people” who should be removed from rest of “good” society;

2. mental illness is framed as something that creates “bad people” which on one hand results in the demonisation of everyone and anyone diagnosed as mentally ill while on the other hand allows “mental illness” to become a get-out-of-jail-free card for “bad people”;

3. cancelling makes “bad people” more profitable while “good people” just trying to crowdfund their livelihood clamour for profitable attention on social media websites run by “bad” and “good” people;

4. victims of genocide resisting death are treated the way This Society does “bad people” while billionaires (resource hoarders) are heralded as the Best People Anyone In This Society Could Aspire To Become;

5. moreover, popular and/or systemically desirable (white, thin, able-bodied, gender normative, wealthy) people are almost always assumed to be “good people” while unpopular and/or systemically undesirable (non-white, fat, disabled, gender non-normative, poor) people are almost always assumed to be “bad people”.

Aside from the aforementioned trouble with how the “good people” vs “bad people” dichotomy is employed — witnessing this, my main problem is that “bad” and “good” depends on who you are talking to while somewhere in all of this, the reality — someone was hurt — is lost. The reality, that of someone being hurt, loses weight when weighed against the discourses of “good” and “bad” people; discourses that we could and would spend centuries debating. Yet! Yet, despite their pitfalls both in conception and practice, the constructs of “bad people” and “good people” persist because This Society does not know what to do when someone hurts someone else (let alone people who hurt people ‘unintentionally’). It’s… awkward. So, “good people” and “bad people” alike are able to avoid feeling their way through causing or experiencing harm and instead can occupy their minded-bodies with navigating consequences and investigating causality.

In the face of this, I am left with a lingering curiosity: what if the Hurt was allowed to exist without the threat of erasure? What if hurting people hurt people and we focused on the reality of Hurt without immediately rushing to “solve” or even “explain” it? What if once realising you ‘unintentionally’ hurt someone, regardless of the consequences, you allowed it to change you instead of immobilise or define you?

As a gender diversity and inclusion educator, I engage with harm often. It’s kinda the whole thing. And part of my work involves engaging directly with the sources of harm; whether that be harmful ideals, harmful practices, harmful policies, or people who have caused harm (not: harmful people, but people who have caused harm). I have found, anthropologically, that many people avoid the reality of having caused harm, as I’ve explored above. This is true of people across political axis and true of people existing at multiple intersections of oppression (to me - oppression is Big Harm-a, Harm Incorporated, a God of Harm). And many people try to use apologies as time-machine-like and harm-erasers because, in the case of a person who does not desire to cause harm, being harmful is hella discombobulating and can lead to a kind of inertia that does not adequately address the harm caused. What would happen, instead, if people who caused harm reached into the difficulty? What would happen, instead, if they were willing to get sticky and covered in the muck of social relating, not just to protect their egos but to protect the people around them?

I have learned so much about This World in my short amount of time on this planet. One of the biggest lessons I continue to learn is that shame is a generative tool that is often used in activist spaces. We use shame as an activist tool because we hope that shame will generate change, however, in my experience it doesn’t. Shame makes people hide; shame doesn’t make people change.

During the aftermath of #RhodesMustFall, UCT was a battleground of epistemologies, methodologies, and pedagogies. In non-academic language, there were people beefing all over the campus about what was taught, how it was taught, and why certain knowledges did not pass the institutional pencil test. It was students vs students, staff vs staff, and staff vs students, workers vs employers, and everyone vs the administration. At the epicentre of this, many ‘liberal’ people struggled with the shame of being cogs in the machine of colonialism that hurt non-white, non-male, non-cis, non-hetero, non-abled, non-thin, and non-South African students and colleagues. Honestly, for a liberal - for a person who desperately wants to be “good” - realising that you’ve been working for Big Harm-a (Harm Incorporated, the God of Harm) is dysregulating. It’s dysregulating, but it won’t kill you.

At the core of most conflicts were emotionally dysregulated adults (and children) struggling with the reality that they hurt someone and the reality that they could hurt someone again. Mixed with the fear of ‘not knowing how’ to un-hurt the person, their shame eventually resulted in them hiding; publishing essays under pseudonyms instead of attending plenaries, blaming students for the collapse of their careers instead of unpacking what their careers were built upon, and retaliating in the form of neatly-packaged manuscripts that spoke of a liberation movement from an incredibly uninvolved perspective. And, while years of conflict has since settled into a fiction of peace, there exists (in the underbelly of post-RMF UCT; hell, post-RMF South Africa) hurt that can not be unhurt and people who’ve learned how to hide their harm behind ‘transformation’ language, silence in the face of witnessing institutional violence, and meaningless attendance in diversity & inclusion committee meetings. Because (like an institution of This Society would) instead of sitting with the harm, the university continues to attempt bandaging the site of harm without anyone having to look directly at it. How do you begin to treat a wound you refuse really to look at?

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It disappoints me to say that all I have to leave you with in an admission of lack. The question of “so, Siv, what do I do after I have hurt someone?” is too contextual for me to l naïvely generalise here.

One of my favourite people, Jane Bennett, shared a question she asked in a class of hers with me. The question was “a friend comes to you after she has been assaulted. What do you do?”. She shared with me that the majority of her class turned to action: you report the offender to the campus security, you file a police report, you seek justice. However, when Jane asked me the same question I gave her the answer she was looking for: “You pause to focus on the person who was harmed and you hold space for them in any ways they need that happen to match up with your own capacity”. You make tea, you get them a change of clothes, you affirm their desire to shower even if it destroys evidence, and you affirm their need for safety following an experience of danger. You do everything in your power to give the person hurt space to just be hurt — and once the wounds scab you try, together, to make life possible in the face of irreversible harm.

While this essay (unlike the above example) deals not with intentional harm but unintentional harm, (while this essay is focused on the persons who caused harmed instead of the person harmed) the question of what happens after someone is hurt holds the same answer for me. You (as a witness) focus on the one who was harmed and offer care, you give care, you receive care. However, the question of what you (as person who caused harm) is to do after you have unintentionally hurt someone is a question I intentionally leave unanswered. It matters that we exist in This Society with its limitations and it matters that we are attempting to build a Different World on This Society’s ashes. It matters that we do this together, as honestly as we can, without forcing survivors to do the emotional regulation work that people who have harmed someone should be doing for themselves.

If you have unintentionally harmed someone, you have to intentionally take it seriously; so seriously that it pushes you to move past the barriers of shame, fear, discomfort or dysregulation in order to show up for the harm you have caused regardless of the lack of a blueprint on how to do it. If you have unintentionally hurt someone, regardless of external consequences, there should be internal consequences that affect you so much that it changes you — and, hopefully, you do not have to hold these internal consequences on your own (though, perhaps, you will have to). At the very least: we owe the people we have harmed more than a fight, flight, faun, and/or freeze response that lead us to attempt a variety of unhelpful strategies to evade any sense of our shared reality of harm.

And, ultimately, this essay is an invitation to strategise harm-reduction together. Perhaps, then, we can begin to reckon with the unchangeable truth that Hurting People Hurts People. Perhaps, it is worthwhile to stop trying to change the reality of harm. Perhaps, there is value in doing something else?

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This essay is specifically about unintentional harm as I am not qualified nor do I desire to unpack intentional harm. While I am not creating it here, I trust in there being a corner of the internet where someone is willing and able to unpack intentional harm. If that is what you seek, I hope you find what you’re looking for.