A Quote by Miroslav Volf

If no one remembers a misdeed or names it publically, it remains invisible. To the observer, its victim is not a victim and its perpetrator is not a perpetrator; both are misperceived because the suffering of the one and the violence of the other go unseen. A double injustice occurs-the first when the original deed is done and the second when it disappears.
It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil. The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain. The victim demands action, engagement, and remembering.
Bites are usually not random attacks by strays. The great majority of biting dogs belong to a family member or friend of the victim. When a young child is the victim, the attack almost always occurs in the family home, and the perpetrator is usually a 'good' dog that had not previously behaved in a menacing way.
Trump is not the victim of the judicial system; he is or has been the defendant in 3,500 lawsuits - that's not the mark of a victim but rather a perpetrator.
I think I wanted to write a book about the relationship between the victim and perpetrator in which the victim agrees to remain silent.
The guarantee of safety in a battering relationship can never be based upon a promise from the perpetrator, no matter how heartfelt. Rather, it must be based upon the self-protective capability of the victim. Until the victim has developed a detailed and realistic contingency plan and has demonstrated her ability to carry it out, she remains in danger of repeated abuse.
In order to escape accountability for his crimes, the perpetrator does everything in his power to promote forgetting. If secrecy fails, the perpetrator attacks the credibility of his victim. If he cannot silence her absolutely, he tries to make sure no one listens.
The fact is, violence is not only not a beautiful thing, but it's also very painful and not without consequences for the perpetrator as well as the victim.
an act of forgiveness sets the victim apart from the perpetrator, who failed to act humanly towards the victim at the time he committed his crime.
If forgiving depended on the culprit owning up, then the victim would always be at the mercy of the perpetrator. The victim would be bound in the shackles of victimhood.
As the victim, you offer the gift of your forgiving to the perpetrator who may or may not appropriate the gift but it has been offered and thereby it liberates the victim.
As a young victim of bullying and then, later, a vindictive perpetrator of violence myself, I've known both sides of this experience, and I tried very hard in the writing here to be as absolutely honest as I possibly could, to not romanticize myself or my past actions or cowardly inactions in any way.
As a writer of colour, you have to be victim or perpetrator.
I did not know that the first step in any domestic violence relationship is to seduce and charm the victim. I also did not know that the second step is to isolate the victim. The next step in the domestic violence pattern is to introduce the threat of violence and see how she reacts. We victims know something you [non-victims] usually don't. It's incredibly dangerous to leave an abuser, because the final step in the domestic violence pattern is to 'kill her'. Over 70% of domestic violence murders happens after the victim has ended the relationship.
When you're the victim of the behavior, it's black and white; when you're the perpetrator, there are a million shades of gray.
I think the first step is to understand that forgiveness does not exonerate the perpetrator. Forgiveness liberates the victim. It's a gift you give yourself.
If you are not the victim, don't examine it entirely from your point of view because when YOU'RE not the victim, it becomes pretty easy to rationalize and excuse cruelty, injustice, inequality, slavery, and even murder. But when you're the victim, things look a lot differently from that angle.
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