I originally wrote this piece in 2017, at the height of the MeToo movement. But I was recently inspired by Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez’s poignant and courageous Instagram live, in which she draws connections between sexual violence and white supremacist violence while recounting her experience during the U.S. capitol insurrection. I felt it was relevant to conceptually revisit continuums of violence, in hopes of presenting another tool to recognize how our country’s violent institutions speak to, overlap, and inform each other.
CW: Sexual violence, sexual harm
On the Netflix show “The Fall,” Stella is a gritty British detective whose dry loathing of men is nearly palpable. She’s catching a serial killer named Paul Spector, who has almost every aspect of privilege imaginable: white, male, straight, attractive, and middle-upper class. Aside from his troubled childhood in foster care, he’s practically impervious to identity-based oppression, which makes him the perfect candidate to be a serial murderer of young, powerful white women.
“The Fall,” a gripping three-season saga, reveals just how creepy and grotesque serial killers can be. But there’s something that sets this show apart from your average serial killer show.
As the scene I’m watching stiffens, Stella’s co-detective, Jim, enters the room. Jim and Stella have a history: they had an affair and Stella eventually moved on, advancing in her career. Now, coincidentally, she and Jim are working together on a case. Stella has made her standing with Jim evident — strictly professional — but Jim doesn’t know how to take “no” for an answer. In the previous episode, he showed up at Stella’s door in a drunken rage attempting to physically and emotionally coerce her into having sex. Now I’m 32 minutes into season two, episode six, and Stella and Jim are preparing to interrogate Paul when Jim provides a stern proverb of caution to Stella. Jim tells Stella she is about to come “face to face with pure evil.” According to Jim, Paul Spector “is not a human being; he’s a monster.”
Stella responds, “Stop, Jim, just stop. You can choose to see the world like that, but you know that it makes no sense to me. Men like Spector are all too human, too understandable. He’s not a monster; he’s just a man.”
Jim retorts, “Well, I’m a man, and I hope to God I’m nothing like him.”
Stella claps back with a feminist ass-whooping and says, “No Jim, you’re not, but you still came to my room uninvited and mounted some sort of drunken attack on me…What did you want? To fuck me, nail me, bang me, screw me?”
Jim stands there, looking pitiful, pasty, and teary-eyed, while I sit in awe, shocked that this happened on national television. Stella caused Jim to recognize the link between his toxic masculinity and the killer’s.
Stella made a striking observation that many people are too privileged, ignorant, oblivious, or cowardly to grapple with or even acknowledge: no one is separate from the large-scale oppressive systems that silence and marginalize particular identities. To alienate yourself from this truth means you are embedding yourself deeper in complicity, blind to the fact that you are part of the problem.
In this specific context, Stella is distilling what is called the Continuum of Violence (COV). It is a concept originally used to illustrate how facets of rape culture contribute to systemic violence against women. The COV can apply to other oppressive systems regarding race, class, sexuality, religion, and ability. Now, I realize that this is a daunting concept to reconcile; recognizing where our actions fall on the COV is an emotional process, particularly for people who consider themselves liberal or progressive. Liberals and progressives herald value systems that supposedly support marginalized identities’ liberation, but we are still steeped in a society premised on violence, domination, and control. The COV requires us to examine the more tedious, minute, and intimate parts of our lives and ourselves.
Toward a Better Understanding of Violence
The COV is an illustrative conceptual tool that allows us to classify and connect acts of violence to recognize them systematically. The Continuum of Violence Against Women was the first and most widely accepted rendering of the COV, but the COV helps us understand many domination and power systems.
If you Google the Continuum of Violence, the images that appear address violence against children, women, racial groups, and other marginalized communities. Feminist scholar Liz Kelly coined the COV Against Women in 1987. She argued that violence against women was not merely episodic behavior that arose from crimes of passion, but rather a symptom, and even a function of, an oppressive, gendered system. The Continuum does not create a hierarchy of severity. Instead, it shows how violence manifests in different forms: verbal, emotional, psychological, and physical acts. It describes how each form of violence connects on both a small (frequent, daily, passive, inadvertent) and large (less frequent, historical, active, purposeful) scale.
The COV describes a power and control system that normalizes identity-based violence — violence perpetrated against a person or group due to their race, gender, sexuality, religion, ability, age, nationality, or political affiliation. The most important thing to understand about the COV is that often the acts of violence on the insidious, micro-aggressive end of the scale allow the acts on the overtly hellacious end of the scale to persist. So the Continuum debunks excuses like, “it’s just a joke,” if the joke’s crux normalizes harm.
Identity-based violence works much like a sickness. The symptoms often show up gradually, but even a slight cough or an occasional sniffle can turn into pneumonia if left untreated. The same applies to norms like catcalling. If these behaviors are left untreated, they develop into a disease like rape. Unfortunately, we are all carriers of the disease, and the symptoms are so common that we forget that they’re products of a sickness at all. The COV articulates how “benign” behaviors potentially accumulate, escalate, and normalize violence.
To be clear, the COV does not rank acts of violence, therefore it does not rank the trauma or harm caused by various acts on the continuum — that is for survivors to determine for themselves. Instead of creating a harm hierarchy, the COV posits that all actions on the continuum are equally relevant in perpetuating identity-based violence. Disrupting misogynistic practices is as urgent as disrupting rape and murder — when the former is permitted, the latter is allowed to thrive. Everything on the Continuum is deeply linked, and it complicates the notion that violence is a cut-and-dried hierarchy.
I’ll complicate the hierarchy notion even further by providing some personal context. I am a queer Black woman who has spent most of my life in predominantly white, liberal spaces. I have experienced racism of all kinds, but the type that has caused me the most harm has been at the hands of people who claim to be my friends, lovers, and partners. I have had conservative strangers and peers violently threaten me as they call me a “fat ass ugly nigger.” I have had cis men physically intimidate me while they make transphobic comments.
On the other hand, I’ve also had close “liberal” friends tell me I would be prettier if I had “normal” (white) hair. I’ve had white partners fetishize me. One even said the n-word and argued with me about why he should be allowed to say it. While those overtly bigoted, physical altercations left me wounded, they didn’t leave lasting harm on my dignity in the way that my experiences with those close to me did. One would assume that my physical altercations would outrank the seemingly non-violent moments in my life, but that’s not the case. Using a continuum, rather than a hierarchy, allows survivors of all types of violence to claim and understand their pain in the way they choose. And it prompts everyone to recognize the violence within their actions, even if they aren’t rape and murder.
The Illusion of Distance
What I’ve noticed about progressive and liberal spaces is that we are often so obsessed with “moving forward” and heralding our affinity for change that we create a false moral gulf between ourselves and conservatives. In other words, by believing we are the arbiters of “progress,” we tend to think less critically about our actions, as if only bigots, racists, sexists, homophobes, and serial killers can commit these acts. As if violence only manifests through KKK hoods and pussy grabs.
However, our “high-horse” is more like a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” — toxic social norms posing as progress. The moral confidence of liberalism reminds me of the fable of the tortoise and the hare: the liberal is the overly confident, forward-moving hare whose speed and intellect blinds him from recognizing his flaws. The COV allows us to close the false moral gulf we’ve constructed and grasp the fact that acts of violence can occur in any space, to anyone, regardless of the moral high ground we think we have. It clearly illustrates that we are all functioning as part of a system with specific violent outcomes, and under this notion, liberals cannot claim to be separate from these problems. What’s more, we perpetuate the problem just as much as the next conservative.
Ask yourself this question: how is it that liberals manage to commit acts of identity-based violence against the very groups they are trying to liberate?
How can my white male classmate theorize about the Black feminist bell hooks and interrupt me in the process? How can my Black male friend march for Black Lives but call trans women deceitful? How is it that my white female co-worker can work at a non-profit for racial equity and then say that my (Black) opinions are unprofessional?
The sexual assault scandals, including liberal public figures like Bill Cosby, Nate Parker, Kevin Spacey, Harvey Weinstein, Al Franken, and Louis C.K., have baffled many in the progressive camp (men in particular). But I believe that the phenomenon of identity-based violence within liberal spaces has everything to do with our failure to acknowledge the importance of seemingly small acts of violence. Our failure to incorporate this notion into our politics and daily lives has given birth to a brand of morality that holds hypocrisy at its center.
Anne Thériault, a prominent Canadian feminist, wrote an article about how liberal men infiltrate feminist spaces to commit acts of sexual violence. “Feminist” men enact a type of sexual violence that hinges upon their feigned feminism. She says, “they get to enjoy a special status as one of the good guys fighting the good fight, they have access to vulnerable women who think they are a safe person, and finally they have a large group of women willing to vouch for them if allegations ever do surface.”
So yes, there are people who use their liberalism to enact identity-based violence. And yes, it’s a counterintuitive notion, but it makes sense if you understand the COV. All scales of violence matter. There is no hierarchy. Misogyny performed by your peers, friends, and family should be addressed as urgently as Bill Cosby’s 49 rape cases, not because the amount of individual harm is necessarily equal, but because all acts of identity-based violence uphold oppressive systems that inevitably lead to extreme harm. Unfortunately, we’ve all inherited violent sociocultural norms, irrespective of our political affiliation. Everything on the Continuum of Violence is endemic, and none of us are immune.
Where Do We Go From Here?
I’m sure my previous sentence just made you feel a bit queasy about the state of society. But the goal of this article is to reflect deeply enough to shake our conscious ground and eventually resolve with steps to move forward. So I’ll end with four main points:
First, the COV is useful as a template for understanding many systems of domination. For example, the racism scale is another conceptual representation of the COV.
The Continuum transcends power structures, and you can use it to identify and unlearn violent symptoms continuously. This means you can also use the COV to notice patterns of violence that affect many identity groups. For example, when Liz Kelly developed the COV Against Women, she noted that heterosexual norms contributed to violence against women. This begs the question, what does a COV against queerness look like, and how does it shape the COV Against Women? How would the racism scale intersect with the COV against women? What about the Continuum of Violence against poor people? So notice how actions on various violent continuums overlap. Notice how they prop each other up. Notice how they’re inextricable and far-reaching, permeating all aspects of daily life.
Second, try to embed the concept of the COV into your daily life. Granted, this has the potential to consume you until you start seeing tiny acts of violence literally everywhere, which has certainly happened to me and it can feel paralyzing. But understanding that these behaviors are happening everywhere, by everyone, is essential. The COV can be empowering. Our most “mundane” actions and interactions have power and purpose, specifically if you benefit from identity-based violence.
Third, your ability to recognize the impact of interrupting daily acts of violence holds more power than showing up to one or two protests. Identity-based violence is not episodic but systematic. So if you can make your activism more systematic and less episodic, you have more agency for change than you think. With the ideas behind the COV in mind, you can examine power dynamics in your significant relationships and friendships. This is how we keep violence from escalating, by disrupting it at the root in the lives of people we love, trust, care for, and respect. We owe it to ourselves and our communities to intercept harm.
Finally, we’re all in this together. Chances are, you are part of the problem, and so am I. Indeed, some people perpetuate identity-based violence more than others, but we’re all responsible for upholding accountability for our actions every day. We can move the needle if we all come together and do it consistently. Don’t just rely on the most marginalized people in your life to do it. And don’t just do it for a week after you read this. Do it all the time. Set a reminder on your phone. Write it on a sticky note and post it on your bathroom mirror. Bottom line is: do better. Don’t just say it. Do it.
Note: When this article was originally written “The Fall” was on Netflix. It is no longer there and has moved to Amazon Prime (Yes, I know we hate Amazon, but I still think this show is worth the watch.)
