Society Denial Quotes

We live in a society where people are often more offended by those who point out child abuse than by the abuse itself. In other words, society does not view abuse as the problem; the problem is you pointing it out. Society's basic mindset is that "If we don't talk about abuse, then it's not happening." Similarly, children are attacked when they point out the dysfunction around them. ~ Darius Cikanavicius

As the incidence and fear of rape on college campuses have increased, the term rape has been generalized to mean 'misuse; diminish the effects of; steal; defeat': "I just went to the mall and raped my VISA." "My dad phoned this morning and raped my buzz." "She raped my coat." "Michigan got raped by Carolina in the NCAA final." The extension of the term rape to such contexts ameliorates the word and appears a denial on the part of college students of the seriousness of the crime. ~ Connie C. Eble

We mute the realization of malevolence- which is too threatening to bear - by turning offenders into victims themselves and by describing their behavior as the result of forces beyond their control. ~ Anna C. Salter

I used to pray you know, pray to God that He would somehow stop it. All the nights of listening to my mother scream and things breaking. Of holding my brother and sister and listening to them cry and begging me to stop it.'
My voice is slow and steady like a freight train at night.
'I was too young, and we were always told that they'd put us in foster homes where people would rape us if we ever said anything. So we explained away the bruises and my mom wore big sunglasses whenever she left the house. And we invented car accidents if the bruising was too bad to cover with make-up. ~ Emily Andrews

DENIAL OF EMOTIONS
Our culture does not handle emotions well. We like folks to be happy and fine. We learn rituals of acting happy and fine at an early age. I can remember many times telling people "I'm fine" when I felt like the world was caving in on me. I often think of Senator Muskie who cried on the campaign trail when running for president. From that moment on he was history. We don't want a president who has emotions. We would rather have one that can act! Emotions are certainly not acceptable in the workplace. True expression of any emotions that are not "positive" are met with disdain. ~ John Bradshaw

It [treating trauma] may even cause you to reconsider some of your previous views of the world and to revise your sociopolitical perspectives. ~ Aphrodite Matsakis

The foundation is an aggressive, well-financed p.r. machine adept at manipulating the press, harassing its critics, and mobilizing a diverse army of psychiatrists, outspoken academics, expert defense witnesses, litigious lawyers, Freud bashers, critics of psychotherapy, and devastated parents. With a budget of $750,000 a year from members and outside supporters, the foundation's reach far exceeds its actual membership of about 3,000. The Freyds and the members know who we are, but the press knows less than it realizes about who they are, what drives them, or why they've been so successful. ~ Mike Stanton

As recently as 1975, a basic American psychiatry textbook estimated that the frequency of all forms of incest as one case per million. [James Henderson, "Incest", in A. M. Freedman, H.I. Kaplan and B.J. Sadock, eds., Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry, 2nd ed. 1975 p. 1532.] ~ Judith Lewis Herman

As you may already know, post-traumatic stress disorder is extremely complex. Each client has a unique, perhaps virtually unbelievable, set of experiences, and an almost equally set of reactions to those experiences. ~ Aphrodite Matsakis

In 2011, actor Johnny Depp told the November issue of Vanity Fair that he felt participating in a photoshoot was akin to rape.

"Well, you just feel like you're being raped somehow. Raped . . . It feels like a kind of weird - just weird, man. But whenever you have a photo shoot or something like that, it's like - you just feel dumb. It's just so stupid," he said.

Likening instances of being flustered or uneasy to the often life-shattering experience of rape has become a far too common comparison in modern lexicon.

The phrase "Facebook rape" is perhaps the most widely used, which implies one person has posted on another person's Facebook account - usually something intended to embarrass the person.

But the casual, flippant use of the term "rape" in instances that do not involve sexual violence is highly problematic in that it trivialises one of the most despicable invasions of a human being.

Desensitising the masses to the term "rape" is just another way the conversation surrounding sexual assault is derailed or diluted in society.

Rape is, and should be considered universally, as a serious societal sickness that occurs within the "toxic silence" that surrounds sexual assault as Tara Moss put so elegantly in her recent Q&A appearance.

Further to that, the use of the term can be a trigger for rape survivors in that it may jolt terrifying memories of their own experience.

According to the ~ Emma Elsworth

Unlike other forms of psychological disorders, the core issue in trauma is reality. ~ Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

In my view, the spurning of DID is highly connected with knowing and not knowing about child sexual abuse. Side by side with denial of childhood trauma and of severe dissociation, is an unmistakable cognizance of dissociative processes as they are embedded in our language. We regularly say things such as, "pull yourself together", "he is coming unglued", "she was beside herself", "don't fall apart", "he's not all there", "she was shattered", and so on. ~ Elizabeth Howell

It is indeed the truth of the traumatic experience that forms the center of its psychopathology; it is not a pathology of falsehood or displacement of meaning, but of history itself (p. 5) ~ Cathy Caruth

And the victim must have been broken and must remain so, so that the externalization of evil is possible. The victim who refuses to assume this role contradicts society's simplistic view. Nobody wants to see it. People would have to take a look at themselves. ~ Natascha Kampusch

What a brilliant cover story. In a success-obsessed society like this one, what's the best rock to hide something under? It's the rock called failure. ~ Jon Ronson

Over and over victims are blamed for their assaults. and when we imply that victims bring on their own fates - whether to make ourselves feel more efficacious or to make the world seem just - we prevent ourselves from taking the necessary precautions to protect ourselves. Why take precautions? We deny the trauma could easily have happened to us. And we also hurt the people already traumatized. Victims are often already full of self-doubt, and we make recovery harder by laying inspectors blame on them. ~ Anna C. Salter

DENIAL
Defense mechanism in which the existence of unpleasant realities is disavowed; refers to keeping out of conscious awareness any aspects of external reality that, if acknowledged, would produce anxiety. ~ Benjamin James Sadock

To hold traumatic reality in consciousness requires a social context that affirms and protects the victim and that joins the victim and witness in a common alliance. For the individual victim, this social context is created by relationships with friends, lovers, and family. For the larger society, the social context is created by political movements that give voice to the disempowered. ~ Judith Lewis Herman

I feel that some people have a hard time with the truths around us, not only the sexual abuse by priests, but all bad things. I call it chosen ignorance. This modified form of ignorance is found in people who, if confronted with certain truths realize that they have to accept them and thereby acknowledge evil, and that scares them. Opening up and letting the truth in might knock them off their perceived center. It is too hard, period. ~ Charles L. Bailey Jr.

The survivor movements were also challenging the notion of a dysfunctional family as the cause and culture of abuse, rather than being one of the many places where abuse nested. This notion, which in the 1990s and early 1980s was the dominant understanding of professionals characterised the sex abuser as a pathetic person who had been denied sex and warmth by his wife, who in turn denied warmth to her daughters. Out of this dysfunctional triad grew the far-too-cosy incest dyad. Simply diagnosed, relying on the signs: alcoholic father, cold distant mother, provocative daughter. Simply resolved, because everyone would want to stop, to return to the functioning family where mum and dad had sex and daughter concentrated on her exams. Professionals really believed for a while that sex offenders would want to stop what they were doing. They thought if abuse were decriminalised, abusers would seek help. The survivors knew different. P5 ~ Beatrix Campbell

In order to believe clients' accounts of trauma, you need to suspend any pre-conceived notions that you have about what is possible and impossible in human experience. As simple as they may sound, it may be difficult to do so. ~ Aphrodite Matsakis

For all this talk about us being a nation at war with child abuse, and for all the media hype about witch-hunts and false allegations - and don't ever let anyone use the word witch-hunts about this; there were no witches - the fact remains that in 1994, it is extremely difficult to come forward with allegations of sexual abuse. And the external forces of denial are almost overwhelming. If a case as verified as mine meets with denial, I dread to think about the experience of people who don't have the kind of corroboration that I do. And I really worry that we're getting close to a point where it's going to be impossible to prosecute child molesters, because we don't believe children, and now we don't believe adults. (Cheit "Paper presented at the Mississippi Statewide Conference on Child Abuse and Neglect" Jackson, April 29 1994.) ~ Ross Cheit

During a period in which women and children's testimony of incest and sexual abuse were gaining an increasingly sympathetic hearing, lobby groups of people accused of child abuse construed and positioned "ritual abuse" as the new frontier of disbelief. The term "ritual abuse" arose from child protection and psychotherapy practice with adults and children disclosing organized abuse, only to be discursively encircled by backlash groups with the rhetoric of "recovered memories", "false allegations" and "moral panic".
Salter, M. (2011), Organized abuse and the politics of disbelief. ~ Michael Salter

Who even had the right to place singlehood on the list of pathetic stuff in the Encyclopedia of life? I often feel much happier if I am alone, at least until I remember that it's not very socially acceptable to be alone, single, and lonely. Sometimes I feel like even a harem would be more acceptable than a single person. Because something must be completely wrong with someone if nobody wants them. How stupid! Something is wrong with this person! She's happy when she's alone! She's happy to be by herself. Handle that, if you can. ~ Rose S. White

Oddly then, in our search for meaning, we often assign victims too much blame for their assaults, and offenders too little. Our inconsistencies do not seem to trouble us, but they are truly puzzling. After all, if the offender is not to blame for his behavior, why would the victim be, no matter what she did our didn't do? Our views make sense, however, if you think that we are trying to reassure ourselves that we are not helpless and, that, in any case, no one is out to get us. ~ Anna C. Salter

I am not sure if we are numbed to the reality of rape, but here's the sad irony. While the word rape can add an edginess to your language, talking about actual rape is taboo. I didn't know this until one of my friends was raped. Then I knew this, because I didn't want to tell anyone. If she were mugged, I would have told everyone and raged. ~ Christine Stockton

Our society needs criminals like Wolfgang Priklopil in order to give a face to the evil that lives within and to split it off from ... It needs the images of cellar dungeons so as not to have to see the many homes in which violence rears its conformist, bourgeois head. Society uses the victims of sensational cases such as mine in order to divest itself of the responsibility for the many nameless victims of daily crimes, victims nobody helps – even when they ask for help. ~ Natascha Kampusch

Today's society is wanting in such a way that Honor, Integrity, Trust, Compassion, Empathy are left for the homeless and their pets. ~ Solange Nicole

All abusive systems are facilitated by bystanders, whose awareness of what is disavowed is always partial, resulting in a state of knowing and not-knowing. As dynamics shift, bystanders may behave like victims - passive, helpless, frightened and frozen, or like perpetrators - taking vicarious and voyeuristic pleasure in abuse or actively aiding and abetting the abusers. ~ Sylvia Solinski

Actually, nothing hurts like hearing the word slut, unless it is hearing the word rape dropped about carelessly. Again, a word I wouldn't have thought much about, except that when I was in high school a girl gave her senior speech on her best friend's rape. She ended not with an appear for women's rights or self defense, but by begging us to consider our language. We use the word 'rape' so casually, for sports, for a failed test, to spice up jokes. 'The test raped me.' 'His smile went up to justifiable rape.' These references confer casualness upon the word, embedding it into our culture, stripping it of shock value, and ultimately numb us to the reality of rape. ~ Christine Stockton

If you are slightly different, if your face doesn't fit, they judge you and consign you and throw away the fucking key.
They never, ever stop to think that THEY might be wrong, that THEY are making a mistake. Don't get me wrong, I haven't been the victim of a massive miscarriage of justice - I'm not saying that - BUT I know what it's like to be stinking judged before people have even bothered to find out what you are about. They have boxed me off into the ugly group even before I have opened my gob.
SOCIETY IS SHIT. ~ Rae Earl

Denial forces victims to retreat in lifeless existence, dieing in the shadows of buried trauma and painful memories. ~ Trudy Metzger

It wasn't just heartbreaking but it broke my identity! All that anguish that was deep hidden in me because rejections from family and friends started to pour out like a current in the sea that would seem destructive. ~ Santosh Avvannavar

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe. ~ Frederick Douglass

We live in a world in which women are battered and are unable to flee from the men who beat them, although their door is theoretically standing wide open. One out of every four women becomes a victim of severe violence. One out of every two will be confronted by sexual harassment over her lifetime. These crimes are everywhere and can take place behind any front door in the country, every day, and barely elicit much more than a shrug of the shoulders and superficial dismay. ~ Natascha Kampusch

You know in politics you are dealing in the realm of choices. You don't always have clear-cut decision between a thoroughly principled position and a thoroughly unprincipled one. You're making snap decisions with paucity of information, generally trying to do the best that you can, but you will make errors, and sometimes it's a decision between a bad and a worse alternative. It has to be done, because we need to order our society, and of politics it can literally be said: Bad job, but someone's got to do it. ~ Peter Costello

Currently we see around us an ever more apparent loss of vigor of our society: increasing fixity of the power structure and bureaucratization of all levels of life; impotence of political institutions to carry off great projects; the proliferation of regulations affecting all aspects of public, private, and commercial life; the spread of irrationalism; the banalization of opular culture; the loss of willingness by individuals to take risks, to fend for themselves or think for themselves; economic stagnation and decline, the decleration of the rate of technological innovation...Everywhere you look, the writing is on the wall. ~ Robert Zubrin

He should be careful of the influence of those with whom he consorts, and he runs a great risk in becoming a member of a large society, for large bodies tend toward the leveling of individuality to a common consent, the forming and adherence to a creed. ~ Chaim Potok

In spite of hopes to the contrary, pornography and mass culture are working to collapse sexuality with rape, reinforcing the patterns of male dominance and female submission so that many young people believe this is simply the way sex it. This means that many of the rapists of the future will believe they are behaving within socially accepted norms. ~ Susan G. Cole

The Second Wave Society is industrial and based on mass production, mass distribution, mass consumption, mass education, mass media, mass recreation, mass entertainment, and weapons of mass destruction. You combine those things with standardization, centralization, concentration, and synchronization, and you wind up with a style of organization we call bureaucracy. ~ Alvin Toffler

The right combination is between a free economy and social policy that addresses the needs of society and creates equal opportunity. ~ Benjamin Netanyahu

As a society, we need to get lots more flexible about what constitutes beauty. It isn't a particular hair color or a particular body type; it's the woman who grew the hair and lives in the body. Keeping this in mind can only make things better. (341) ~ Victoria Moran

Most historical accounts were written by fallible scholars, using incomplete or biased resource materials; written through the scholars' own conscious or unconscious predilections; published by textbook or printing companies that have a stake in maintaining a certain set of beliefs; subtly influenced by entities of government and society - national administrations, state education departments, local school boards, etcetera - that also wish to maintain certain sets of beliefs. To be blunt about it, much of the history of many countries and states is based on delusion, propaganda, misinformation, and omission. ~ James Alexander Thom

Security is the denial of life ~ Germaine Greer

Having the Mass in one's native language is no guarantee that a person will understand the mystery of the Mass. On the contrary, if the vesture of the ceremony is too familiar, the participants too easily thinks he has mastered what it's all about. The familiar becomes the routine, the routine becomes ignored. Our own language is a comfort zone that insulates us form the shock of the Gospel, the scandal of the Cross, the lure of the unknown. I would rather have a huge dose of foreignness, of music that is not current, words that are strange, language that is archaic, hieratic gestures that are grandly incongruous to a democratic society. A person thrown into this situation knows at least that he is dealing with something utterly different and possibly far deeper than his day-to-day occupations. ~ Peter Kwasniewski

Silence introduced in a society that worships noise is like the Moon exposing the night. Behind darkness is our fear. Within silence our voice dwells. What is required from both is that we be still. We focus. We listen. We see and we hear. The unexpected emerges. ~ Terry Tempest Williams

Moreover, as America becomes an increasingly multi-cultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat. ~ Zbigniew Brzezinski

Suicide creates his own society: to shut yourself off from other people in some dingy, rented box and stare, like Melville's Bartleby, day in and day out at the dead wall outside your window is in itself a rejection of the world which is said to be rejecting you. It is a way of saying, like Bartleby, 'I prefer not to' to every offer and every possibility, which is a condition no amount of social engineering will cure. ~ Al Alvarez

I try to persuade people to act in ways that are not only in their own interest, but in the interest of society at large. ~ Eric Schlosser

A man abandoned by himself on a desert island would adorn neither his hut nor his person; nor would he seek for flowers, still less would he plant them, in order to adorn himself therewith. It is only in society that it occurs to him to be not merely a man, but a refined man after his kind (the beginning of civilization). For such do we judge him to be who is both inclined and apt to communicate his pleasure to others, and who is not contented with an object if he cannot feel satisfaction in it in common with others. Again, every one expects and requires from every one else this reference to universal communication of pleasure, as it were from an original compact dictated by humanity itself. ~ Immanuel Kant

The US is a business-run huckster society, and its primary value is deceit. ~ Noam Chomsky

From my films, you can at least learn about Iran, you can get a sense of the history and the society. But no such films have been made about Afghanistan, so you really can't know much about it. ~ Mohsen Makhmalbaf

The measure of a society can be how well its people treat its animals ~ Mahatma Gandhi

Society is always engaged in a vast conspiracy to preserve itself - at the expense of the new demands of each new generation. ~ John Haynes Holmes

From "The Book That Changed My Life":

-"But your journey is never over until you return from it to share with society what you have learned." ~ Robert Ballard

-"We never anticipate being changed by what we read. Such an experience cannot be planned for." ~ Brother Christopher


~ Robert D. Ballard

A good person can make another person good; it means that goodness will elicit goodness in the society; other persons will also be good. ~ Bhumibol Adulyadej

We mustn't be stiff and stand-off, you know. We must be thoroughly democratic, and patronize everybody without distinction of class. ~ George Bernard Shaw

When our bodies are sick and people extend their sympathy, bring us soup, offer up solutions. When our minds are sick, people tend to shy away from you, be afraid, or call you outright crazy. I'm fascinated by the way society and individuals view mental illness, and most of my shorts comment on that. ~ Anna Akana

The reason that people in the intellectual community argue that football is dangerous is because there's now a large swath of society that has no relationship to physicality or potential violence. ~ Chuck Klosterman

The mother's and father's attitudes toward the child correspond to the child's own needs ... Mother has the function of making himsecure in life, father has the function of teaching him, guiding him to cope with those problems with which the particular society the child has been born into confronts him. ~ Erich Fromm

God says it is our duty as Christians to take care of widows and orphans and to help the poor within the Christian society ... And Jesus said, "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me" Matthew 25:40 KJV]. ~ Billy Graham

Do not presume to judge the Qui, Mr. President. Your society aspires to an ideal that exists only at levels like the United Regions. Analyze your world's history and you find pockets of feudal life that continue to exist today. Cultures where rape victims are killed so as not to dishonor their family; countries where the male of your species has so little self-control, the female is obliged to hide behind cloth for fear they will tempt them into carnal acts; regions where children are slaughtered for no reason. And this was all before our invasion. ~ Kayla Stonor

Our goal, as Christians, is to dominate society ~ Pat Robertson

Let me tell you, sir, that if you wish to be accepted into Bath society you will do well to mend your manners!' retorted Abby.
'I've none to mend, and not the smallest wish to be accepted into Bath, or any other, society. ~ Georgette Heyer

A lot of teenagers today are influenced by the media's depiction of perfection. I want readers to understand they don't have to follow the unofficial laws society creates, to be liked by others. ~ Erica Sehyun Song

In short, my vision of a responsible free society is one in which we discourage evil, but do not prohibit it. We make our children and students aware of the consequences of drug abuse and other forms of irresponsible behavior. But after all our persuading, if they still want to use harmful drugs, that is their privilege. In a free society, individuals must have the right to do right or wrong, as long as they don't threaten or infringe upon the rights or property of others. They must also suffer the consequences of their actions, as it is from consequences that they learn to choose properly ~ Mark Skousen

But you are telling me, Susan, that the 'Society for Humanity' is right; and that Mankind has lost its own say in its future.' 'It never had any, really. It was always at the mercy of economic and sociological forces it did not understand--at the whims of climate, and the fortunes of war. ~ Isaac Asimov

It is the mark of a primitive society to view regression as progress. ~ Neale Donald Walsch

Without a positive male role model in your life, it is extremely difficult to become a man who benefits his family and benefits society. ~ Donald Miller

According to bourgeois standards, those who are completely unlucky and unsuccessful are automatically barred from competition, which is the life of society. Good fortune is identified with honor, and bad luck with shame. ~ Hannah Arendt

While all men within our territories are protected in worshipping the Deity according to the dictates of their consciences; it is rationally to be expected from them in return, that they will [demonstrate] the innocence of their lives and the beneficence of their actions; for no man, who is profligate in his morals, or a bad member of the civil community, can possibly be a true Christian, or a credit to his own religious society. ~ George Washington

Party tactics?" "People like your wife are dangerous." "Why?" Hamilton asked. "They don't belong to any group. They fool around with everything. As soon as we turn our back - " "So you destroy them. You turn them over to the lunatic patriots." "The lunatic patriots," McFeyffe said, "we can understand. But not your wife. She signs Party peace petitions and she reads the Chicago Tribune. People like her - they're more of a menace to Party discipline than any other bunch. The cult of individualism. The idealist with his own law, his own ethics. Refusing to accept authority. It undermines society. It topples the whole structure. Nothing lasting can be built on it. People like your wife just won't take orders." "McFeyffe, ~ Philip K. Dick

In these lands we are not experiencing the primitive infancy of capitalism but its vicious senility. Underdevelopment isn't a stage of development, but its consequence. Latin America's underdevelopment arises from external development, and continues to feed it. A system made impotent by its function of international servitude, and moribund since birth, has feet of clay. It pretends to be destiny and would like to be thought eternal. All memory is subversive, because it is different, and likewise any program for the future. The zombie is made to eat without salt: salt is dangerous, it could awaken him. The system has its paradigm in the immutable society of ants. For that reason it accords ill with the history of humankind, because that is always changing. And because in the history of humankind every act of destruction meets its response, sooner or later, in an act of creation. ~ Eduardo Galeano

For a society as abundant and as blessed as ours, to have as many disadvantaged children as we have does not bode well for our long-term economic future. ~ Marianne Williamson

In society, in the best institutions of men, it is easy to detect a certain precocity. When we should still be growing children, we are already little men. Give me a culture which imports much muck from the meadows, and deepens the soil,
not that which trusts to heating manures, and improved implements, and modes of culture only! ~ Henry David Thoreau

If anything, the people who moved to Jonestown should be remembered as noble idealists. They wanted to create a better, more equitable, society. They wanted their kids to be free of violence and racism. They rejected sexist gender roles. They believed in a dream. How terribly they were betrayed. ~ Julia Scheeres