Three Types of Victims

Okay, parents. There are some things we survivors of sibling abuse need you to get straight.

In general, there are three types of victims in sibling abuse cases. Knowing these types will help you suss out what's really going on in your home.

The one who responds appropriately: It's not always the case that we're "equally contributing" to the caterwaul you hear going on daily. Yes, you like to dismiss the fights like that, but we need you to examine them a little closer. When we respond to uncalled-for attacks, we are exercising our basic human right to defend ourselves. We have a right to respect. And it is your job to recognize if a sibling is intentionally provoking us.

The one who does not respond: On the other side of the coin, if we don't defend ourselves, it doesn't mean we're weaklings who need to learn to fight our own battles. (Which is what some parenting books *cough* *cough* Siblings Without Rivalry would have you believe.) Sadly enough, a non-responsive victim is the case where parents recognize sibling abuse the most. So you can't blame us for not defending ourselves! It's one of the best ways to get you to realize what's going on. We might be --understandably-- afraid. We might feel helpless, and like any attempt to defend ourselves will be futile. We might have believed you when you said "it takes two to make a fight," and feel guilty if we defend ourselves. We might know we'll get in trouble if we respond, so we decide it's not worth the effort.

The one who responds inappropriately: In a case where a victim responds by bullying back, we still need you to get real about the root cause. Yes, it's not respectful to insult someone, even if they insulted you first, BUT it still stands in the way of accountability to just punish the victim without understanding he might have been goaded. We need you to listen to our grievances BEFORE you give out punishments. Stand back and observe a little. Does one kid always tend to be angry when they attack, but the other is always smiling, and generally looking gleeful? Does one kid seem more hurt than the other? Can you tell what the intentions are behind their words? Is it revenge or a power trip? And above all else, LISTEN TO US. Believe it or not, children could give you the answers you're seeking.

In these cases, you also have a tendency to correct the victim more than the aggressor. I don't know exactly why this is, but maybe it has to do with the fact that you yourself also feel intimidated by the bully. You know on a certain level that correcting the bully will lead to more resistance, while correcting us will not. You need to fully acknowledge the aggressor's part. Make yourself learn all the ways he or she taunts, teases, belittles, and embarrasses us. And hold them accountable. Acknowledging these parts will ultimately lead to a better correction plan--one that truly takes all aspects of the fighting into account.

Seek for understanding. It will help you find more--and better--solutions.

The No-Blame Game

A while ago, I was dealing with  a bully coworker. I didn't know what to do, because all of my attempts to stand up to bullies in the past have not gone so well. I was surfing the Net, looking for any smidgen of advice I could find. I came across this website, which offers pretty helpful advice in fighting back workplace bullies. One of the tips that really resonated with me concerned advance preparation. It said something along the lines of "be prepared for your colleagues to say that what's going on is a 'personality conflict' between you and the bully."

I had suspected that was going to happen. People never want to admit that one party really is to blame. 

You hear over and over again from people to not "play the blame game." This infamous Blame Game. Tell me really, though, how often have you seen people play this?
I wonder if we sometimes suffer from the reverse problem--not that we blame too much but that we shy away from blame. We play the no-blame game. We're afraid to put blame where blame is due.

Why do we do this?

I think there are two reasons. The first is that we're afraid of danger (for lack of a better word). Every party is always both wrong, both right, so we can heave a sigh of relief and go on our merry way. Because if one party was wrong, we would have to deal with an uncomfortable imbalance in our world. That imbalance is unsettling to us, and we don't want it to exist.

The second reason is we secretly believe we're more "enlightened" thinking blame is always evenly dispersed. It's mature...isn't it?...to disperse blame evenly. To see both as guilty. Only a childish brat would think one side was right and the other was wrong. You're a wiser, more sophisticated person for always believing blame belongs to both sides.

This needs to change. We need to get real that some people intentionally harm others, either out of a lack of awareness, a lack of empathy, or a genuine desire to cause harm. And in response to that harm, it is appropriate--even necessary--for a victim to rise up. Victims should respond assertively and appropriately according to the situation. And they often do. The larger problem is not the victims' response.

Bystanders need to change their response to how they handle these situations. When they see the unmistakable signs of one person abusing another, they need to do a few different things. The first is that we need to get comfortable with being uncomfortable

There is room for not picking sides while simultaneously holding a guilty party accountable. The trick is to focus on words, actions and intentions. Is either person name-calling, insulting, intimidating, belittling, or embarrassing the other party? These actions are never acceptable. Hold them accountable. What's their intention behind the action? Do they have a genuine problem, or do they just want a power trip? Look out for "reacting" vs. "seeking out." Reacting to a problem (in an acceptable way) is fine. Constantly seeking out a reason to pick on someone is not.

Parents need to be open to the idea of guilty parties. It's not as simple as "both parties are equally to blame all the time." Sometimes there's a guilty party. Sometimes there's not.  When there's a guilty party, that person needs to be held accountable. Finding this person is the first step to attaining equilibrium.

It Can Happen to Anybody. . .

I hate trite, overused sayings. But there's one phrase where I'll make an exception. "It can happen to anybody," applies perfectly to victims of sibling abuse. Often used after an unfortunate event befalls an otherwise capable person, the phrase "it can happen to anybody" means that bad stuff can happen to the best of us. Misfortune does not discriminate. Being smart or tough or brave or kind or rich or hard-working or quick or talented or anything else will not always protect you. Life is evil, and does not care how much you've paid your dues. When it decides to smite you, you don't stand a chance. So when bad things happen, you are not automatically to blame.

Many people think differently. After hearing about something horrible that happened to an acquaintance of theirs, these people will chalk it up to being the victim's fault. They want to distance themselves from the truth that something equally bad can happen to them. And in a weird mirroring of this belief, victims blame themselves, but for different reasons. We want to believe that as long as we are good and strong, we are invincible. Nothing bad can happen to us so long as we play our cards right. And if something terrible does happen, it must have been our fault. Because if it wasn't, and life really was just pure randomness, then it means we are powerless in the face of evil.

The sad truth is that, in many situations, we are powerless. This is especially true when we're children. When we're children, we are victims of circumstance. We are randomly assigned a family, and we are victims of our parents' action--or inaction. We are also victims of who our siblings turn out to be. In all my observations of families experiencing sibling abuse, something has become clear: anyone can be a victim, and anyone can be an aggressor.

One family I know of had interesting personality combinations with their children. Their older child was a quiet nerd. The younger child was a social butterfly. As they grew older, these differences became more pronounced. By middle school, the older daughter's nerdy tendencies had made her an outcast. The younger daughter quickly moved up the social hierarchy and became a cheerleader in high school.

As anyone familiar with high school stereotypes will tell you, traditionally the cheerleaders and jocks pick on the nerds. Cheerleaders are "winners" and nerds are "losers" in fantasy high school land. (In reality, I didn't find this to be the case, but it's a fitting metaphor, so I'm going to use it.) Exactly the opposite happened in this particular family.

The older daughter, the nerd, picked on the cheerleader.

As I've said before, there are a few common reasons why a sibling becomes a bully. In this family's case, the older child became a bully because of her insecurity. She was a loner at school who was picked on by other kids because of her poor social skills and weird habits. To rectify her insecurity, she abused her sister, giving herself a power trip and temporarily relieving herself of her own self-hatred.

This ironic situation is not an isolated incident. I have seen other families where an otherwise strong, assertive person found themselves a target of bullying. Like the family in A Case Study, the primary target was an assertive, independent, straightforward individual. One thing she never did in response to the bullying was ignore it. She always took a stand, always made sure to correct Allen when he was bothering her. This was done at the expense of the parents saying, "stop fighting!!!!!!," but she didn't back down. Her responses, however, were not successful.

Beating a bully has nothing to do with how "strong" the victim is. Even secure, confident people can be attacked. I've said this before and I'll say it again: To beat a sibling bully, parental action is crucial. Kids cannot do it on their own. A bully needs to be held accountable by an authority figure. He or she won't obey a peer.

And another, equally powerful message must also be conveyed: If you were a victim of sibling abuse, it wasn't your fault. Nobody asks to be bullied or "invites" bullying. Bullies will bully if they want to. It doesn't say anything about your character if you happened to be a target. Bullying, like any other trauma in the world, can happen to anybody.

Don't Forgive Yourself

In all the research I've done on forgiveness, I've noticed a recurring theme. I see it on blogs, on pithy Internet memes, in books, and in scholarly articles. It's the idea of forgiving oneself. Equally as important as forgiving the aggressor, they say, is forgiving yourself. For what you did or didn't do in the relationship. For what you said or failed to say. For the person you were. It doesn't matter anymore, they say. Forgive yourself.

When we're talking about abuse, though, forgiving ourselves isn't necessary. We didn't do anything wrong. 

I find it odd how frequently victim blaming gets pulled into conversations about sibling abuse. I was having a conversation with my cousin one day, and we were discussing my relationship with my abusive sibling. Or, rather, she was telling me how she saw our relationship. For your information, my cousin and I live approximately 350 miles apart. We see each other twice a year if we're lucky. We didn't grow up together, and our relationship is casual at best. We hardly know each other, and she certainly doesn't know anything about my family's intricate relationship dynamics. But during this conversation, as I'm explaining why I'm not attending my sibling's wedding, she says to me, "Well, she has things to apologize for, and you have things to apologize for."

Excuse me? How can this person--who hardly knows anything about my relationship--automatically assume we're both equally guilty? It is not a universal truth that "it takes two to tango." That applies to many relationship problems, but in cases with abuse, assuming equal blame is wrong and harmful. The victim is never to blame for someone else's abusive actions. 

I've come to realize the saying, "Damned if you do, damned if you don't" rings especially true for sibling abuse. If you do stand up for yourself, you'll fight with your sibling, and you'll hear the often-proclaimed-but-hardly-ever-questioned "it takes two to tango" line. If you don't stand up for yourself, you get walked on and everyone from therapists to estranged family members will tell you later in life that you were "playing the victim" all along, and had you defended yourself, or communicated your expectations (ya know, to your eight-year-old sibling), or yelled louder or acted tougher, all of this wouldn't have happened. 

When I was growing up and getting picked on, I didn't stand up for myself all that much. Part of it was fear, but another part was knowing in the back of my mind that my efforts would be futile. I knew I would just hear the "Now, now, Sybil. It takes two to make a fight," line, and the grown-ups would send me on my merry way. And then I would feel even worse, because I would be angry and helpless.  

But it turns out that even when you don't fight back, you still hear the "it takes two to tango" line. From people who can't bear the uncomfortable truth that maybe, just maybe, there is a guilty party who deserves accountability. 

There's a very simple reason why victims don't need to forgive themselves. What happened to them was not their fault. From all of my observations, I have noticed one thing: if the parents aren't on board, nothing the victim can say or do will do anything to stop the abuse. Children don't have control here. In the family unit, parents are the authority figures, the children are submissive to the parents, and the siblings relate to each other as peers. When sibling abuse is happening, the parents have the primary responsibility of stopping it. 

I believe strongly that if anything is going to stop sibling abuse, it is education. Parents need to be educated on recognizing harassment, and knowing what to do if it happens. When abuse is going on, it is often because the parents don't recognize it. It is not because the victim is weak. It is not because the victim needs to be assertive. It is because the victim got unlucky, and must live at the mercy of his or her parents' decisions.

So don't forgive yourself. There's nothing to forgive. The type of person you were never mattered. It wasn't your fault.         

The Real World

When I talk about parents needing to intervene during bullying situations, an argument I get from time to time is that such action does children a disservice for life in The Real World. A child being bullied, they say, must learn to stand up for himself. As adults, victims won't have Mommy and Daddy coming in to rescue them, so they best learn to fend for themselves now.

I have several problems with this point of view, and I will happily dissect each one of them for you.  

The first problem, and most glaringly obvious one (at least to me) is that if parents truly believe this philosophy, then 90 percent of them are not following it. From what I've seen, victims do defend themselves--and Mommy and Daddy do nothing more than stand in the way. Nobody likes to hear fighting, and when parents hear bickering in the background--even when it's a victim asserting herself against a bully--parents immediately intervene to shut the fight down. Parents don't stay out of it--they step in to yell "STOP FIGHTING!" If you truly believe that a victim must defend herself, then let her do the work you believe she should do.

In addition to parents not putting two and two together, there's a second problem I believe must also be addressed. Does bullying happen in The Real World? Sadly, it does. I myself have been targeted numerous times by power-hungry individuals seeking to project their insecurities onto me. But there's a key difference between life at home and life in the adult world: control. When you're a kid, you're at the mercy of the home environment. When you're an adult, what you deal with is your choice. If I have a problem with somebody, I can stand up for myself. If and when that doesn't work, I can choose to leave the relationship. I can dump the jackass boyfriend, I can move away from crazy roommates, I can leave the job with the bullying coworker. In short, I can seek a better life elsewhere if defending myself doesn't work out. As an adult, I am much more able to protect myself.

Home life is very different. If defending yourself against your bully brother or sister doesn't work--time and time again--what do you do? You can't cut off a relationship with them until you turn eighteen. So you're stuck. You are stuck being abused and you live your life expecting to be mistreated. Which is a terrible, terrible lesson to teach a child. The reason children must be protected is because they have no control. When a person does have control, then it's appropriate to expect that person to fend for themselves. But not until then.  

And what about the bully? What is he learning about The Real World? Well, I'll tell you. He's learning: That it's O.K. to be mean. That it's just fine and dandy to get what you want by using force. That projecting your insecurities onto others is an acceptable means of handling your shortcomings. That getting a laugh out of humiliating others is a harmless form of entertainment. How will he fare in real life? How do you think he'll treat his spouse? His coworkers? His employees? The family he marries into? 

I've seen plenty of families where the victims stand up for themselves. And I've seen them do it calmly, firmly and consistently. Sometimes these interactions are successful, and many times they're not. Does this tell us that bullying is unbeatable? I don't think so. Recent bullying research shows us that the intervention of an authority figure is often the most effective way to beat bullying. And I strongly believe that when adults do their job--protect and discipline their children--positive results will follow. 

I don't see disciplining a bully as "rescuing" or otherwise stunting the development of the victim in any way. In fact, I believe that intervention is exactly what the victim needs to fully develop his or her best self. Parents may be wary that a child will see himself as helpless when an adult intervenes. The irony is that children who grow up in safe, nurturing environments where bullying is not allowed are more confident and more likely to defend themselves should the need arise. I can tell you from firsthand experience; a surefire way to ignite learned helplessness in a child is to feed him to the wolves over and over again with no protection.

When parents embrace the mentality of protecting and correcting, they not only carve out a better future life for their children. With their respectful former bully and confident former victim in hand, they create a better "Real World" for all of us. 

Victim Blaming

I was sitting on the couch in my therapist's office, trying hard to absorb what he had just said to me. I felt confused. It just didn't make any sense. We had been discussing my past with my siblings, and how this connected to the overwhelming depression and anger I had been feeling for the past few years. I wanted to get better, and was looking for answers. After a few sessions of listening to my problems, my therapist presented to me the reason why: it was all my fault. 

"I think that no matter who your siblings were, this would have been the outcome," he said. "Your personality invites it," he told me, referring to the bullying (and my nicey-nice temperament). At the time, I thought that since he was my therapist, he must have been right. So I ate his words, and said to him, "I guess if I had fought back, my sister would have stopped being mean to me."

"Oh I guarantee you she would have," he replied. 

Looking back on that conversation disgusts me. I do not believe, for one second, that what happened to me was my fault. As I've said before, there are many factors that contribute to sibling abuse. The victim him- or herself is not one of them. 

Victim blaming is a problem in discussions about sibling abuse. While my therapist is probably the most blatant example of the problem, I've seen it creep up in other resources too.

The parenting classic Siblings Without Rivalry trespasses into victim-blaming territory with its proposed solutions for bullying siblings. In the chapter "Siblings in Roles," the authors address bullying behavior in their subtopic "Freeing Children to Change." They use a little formula called, "No more 'victims,' no more 'bullies'." They show how this works with little cartoons where a parent can "free a bully to be compassionate and a victim to be strong." 

So that seems harmless enough, right? What's wrong with that approach? 

A couple of things. 

First of all, what the authors are proposing is the "don't use labels" approach. This has been used before in bullying prevention, but it has never been used--and isn't supposed to be used--as a main solution. Not calling the bully "a bully" and not calling the victim "a victim," is supposed to be one of many, many tactics that can be used to help prevent bullying. But it is not the panacea for ending bullying. And it is surprising to me that the authors of Siblings Without Rivalry present it as such. 

My second beef with this approach is the assumption the authors are making. They're assuming that if a child is being picked on, that child is weak. Throughout the book, not just in the chapter on sibling roles, the authors provide example after example of a bully picking on a sibling who is meek and mild. They're implying the bullying is happening because the victim is timid. Not a single anecdote is given for cases where the chosen victim fights back. 

And unlike what Faber and Mazlish have presented to us in their book, victims do fight back. In real families, sometimes the victim is timid, and sometimes the victim is tough. Sometimes the insults cause the victim to shrink back, and sometimes they make the victim lunge out. But in either case, the result is the same--the victim's reaction almost always has no effect on the attacker. I've seen many families experiencing sibling abuse. Whether the victim reacts passively, aggressively, or assertively, the bullying almost always continues. (This is why it's important for parents to understand that sibling abuse can exacerbate the fighting between siblings, and even if the two of them are fighting, it's important to get to the guilty party and hold that person accountable.) 

What does a victim have the power to do? They have the power to

• (Try to) avoid their sibling
• Tell their parents the bullying is bothering them
• Emotionally distance themselves from their sibling
• Stand up for themselves ("stop making fun of me," etc.)

I know children who have done all of these things, and still the bullying didn't stop. Ask people who were once victims of sibling abuse,and 99.999% of them will tell you, "I DID stand up for myself!!!....And it never worked." This is why "learned helplessness" is one of the long-term effects of sibling abuse. It's not that victims are "weak," it's that their attempts to protect themselves have very often failed. 

Within the family, children are not in charge of punishments. Those belong in Mom and Dad's territory. And as any parent will tell you, one of the first rules of parenting is to not nag and yell, but follow through with consequences. If a child misbehaves, that child gets one warning. If he doesn't comply, his action should be immediately followed with a consequence. So what if you're a kid, and you can't give out consequences? What happens then? 

Also, a parent saying "stop it" is very different from a child saying "stop it." Parents are the authority figures in the family, and are in charge of setting family rules and expectations. Unlike siblings, parents are not equal to their children. They hold power over their children, and are expected to make their children comply. Siblings simply do not have this power. 

This power dynamic shifts once the kids grow up. When you're an adult, you have the power to cut off a relationship with your sibling. This couldn't have happened before, when you were both living in the same house. But as an adult, you finally do have the power to provide consequences--in the form of taking away your sibling's privilege of having a relationship with you. This threat of "treat me respectfully, or else you'll lose me" is often enough to make the abuser comply. And if they don't, then the power is still in your hands, and you can finally punish your sibling--permanently. 

To my old therapist--I can guarantee fighting back would not have stopped my sibling. But more involved parents, family expectations implemented earlier, and consequences would have. In finding solutions for sibling abuse, pointing fingers at the victims will not empower them. Instead, let's hold the proper parties accountable, and take the burden of blame off the victims' shoulders. What happened to them is not their fault.