Freedom Is Not a Reward
There is something deeply unsettling about the way so many people respond to violence. Almost every time the public learns about a case of domestic or intimate partner violence, two conversations begin simultaneously. One is about the perpetrator. The other is about the victim. What is troubling is not that questions are being asked, but to whom those questions are directed.
Why did she stay? Why didn’t she leave? What did she expect? Didn’t she know what he was like?
While people spend days searching for answers to those questions, the question of why someone believed they had the right to humiliate, control, or beat another human being is often pushed to the margins. Almost imperceptibly, the violence itself ceases to be the central issue, replaced instead by scrutiny of the life of the person who endured it.
This is not an innocent shift.
It reveals the way we think as a society.
We find it far easier to analyze other people’s decisions than other people’s violence.
Although it is no justification, there is a reason for this. Human beings have a profound need to believe that the world is fundamentally just—that bad things happen to those who have made mistakes, while good things happen to those who have made the right choices. This belief offers a sense of security. If we can identify the mistake the victim made, it becomes easier to convince ourselves that the same thing could never happen to us. We tell ourselves that all we need to do is be wiser, more careful, more cautious than they were.
It is a comforting illusion.
The truth is far more unsettling.
People do not become victims because they are foolish or weak. People enter relationships out of love, trust, and hope. Sometimes they fail to see what everyone else sees. Sometimes they do see it but believe things will change. Sometimes they have nowhere to go. Sometimes they leave, only to return. Sometimes they are afraid. Sometimes they are trapped financially, emotionally, or psychologically.
These are all human vulnerabilities.
None of them, however, is a justification for violence.
A mistake is not a crime. Violence is.
Here lies one of the greatest paradoxes of our time. We expect almost perfection from the victim. We expect them to recognize the danger early. To leave immediately. Never to return. To report everything. To remain consistent. To behave exactly as we imagine we would behave from the safety of our own homes.
We expect far less from the perpetrator.
Their violence often becomes little more than a footnote in a story we have transformed into an examination of someone else’s life choices.
Primo Levi, a survivor of Auschwitz, warned that the greatest danger lies not only in those who commit evil, but also in a society that ceases to recognize it—or begins to explain it away. His words are no less relevant today than they were then. Evil rarely enters through the front door. More often, it slips in through the small compromises we make with our own conscience, through phrases such as “He had it coming,” “She chose him,” or “She knew what she was getting into.”
The moment we begin searching for reasons why someone is not innocent enough to deserve empathy, we have already taken the first step toward normalizing violence.
And it is precisely here that we arrive at a question far greater than the issue at hand—the question of freedom.
Because the way we speak about victims also reveals how we understand freedom. Do we believe it is a right that belongs to every human being, or a privilege reserved only for those who have always made the right decisions?
Freedom does not mean that we will always make the right choices. Quite the opposite. Its very essence lies in the possibility of making mistakes. Of trusting the wrong people. Of loving those who will disappoint us. Of changing our minds. Of staying too long or leaving too soon. These are the risks that freedom inevitably carries.
If we strip someone of their right to dignity, empathy, or protection because they made a wrong decision, then we are no longer defending freedom.
We are defending privilege.
The privilege of believing that only those who have lived flawless lives deserve understanding.
But freedom is not a reward for making the right choice.
If it were, it would be called privilege.
Perhaps that is why, the next time we read about someone else’s suffering, we should pause before passing judgment. We should ask ourselves whom we questioned first.
The perpetrator?
Or the victim?
Because the answer to that question says far less about them than it does about us.
A society that constantly searches for reasons to withhold empathy gradually loses the ability to distinguish responsibility from punishment, mistakes from crimes, and freedom from privilege.
And when that happens, it is no longer only one person’s freedom that is at risk.
It is the freedom of all of us.
I love to philosophize.
Doroteo is my philosophy.
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