In the last month, I’ve read a few inspiring stories about people who, in the aftermath of violence, seek understanding, forgiveness, compassion, and social change, rather than vengeance, hatred and more violence. One is the story of Rais Bhuiyan, a Muslim immigrant from Bangladesh, who was organizing to stop the execution of Mark Anthony Stroman, a white man on death row, who had attempted to kill him in 2001. Stroman had shot Bhuiyan after having killed at least two others — Vasudev Patel, an immigrant Hindu man from India, and Waqar Hasan, a Muslim immigrant man from Pakistan. Stroman saw himself as taking revenge for the attacks of 9/11. Bhuiyan protested the use of the death penalty as a method to resolve the hatred, pain, and harm caused by Stroman. In 2010, he created a website group, “World Without Hate,” as part of a petition campaign to save Stroman’s life. Despite 12,000 signatures, Stroman was executed this past July 20. Bhuiyan sought to forgive him with the understanding that his violence came out of ignorance, and to make a stand that killing someone is not the way to end violence. When asked why, he responded,
“I was raised very well by my parents and teachers.… They taught me to put yourself in others’ shoes. Even if they hurt you, don’t take revenge. Forgive them. Move on. It will bring something good to you and them. My Islamic faith teaches me this too. … After it happened I was just simply struggling to survive in this country. I decided that forgiveness was not enough. That what he did was out of ignorance. I decided I had to do something to save this person’s life. That killing someone in Dallas is not an answer for what happened on Sept. 11.”
On his website, he writes, “hate only brings fear, misery, resentment and disaster into human lives. It creates obstacles to healthy human growth, which, in turn, diminishes society as a whole.”
This is one among many stories of people impacted by violence who, contrary to popular opinion, do not seek revenge. They recognize that more violence does not create peace, and that the roots of the violence are much deeper than the individual acts. Another story I found compelling is that of Marietta Jaeger-Lane who found herself with conflicted feelings of revenge and forgiveness in response to the man who kidnapped and murdered her daughter. Her shift from rage to forgiveness was one based on her faith and values; she reflects that “however I felt about this person, in the eyes of the God I believed in, he was just as precious as my little girl.” Interestingly, almost one year later, the man who kidnapped and killed her daughter called “to taunt her.” Because of the spiritual work she had done, she found herself responding to him from a feeling of “genuine concern and compassion.” As this “thwarted his intention to rile me up and then hang up. . . . . I asked him what I could do for him; he broke down and sobbed heavily. Our middle-of-the-night conversation lasted for 80 minutes. When the call finally ended, I was left hanging on to a silent phone.” She has since become a strong voice against the death penalty.
These stories remind me of a story that Thich Nhat Hanh tells in his book, Being Peace (1987), about the many boat people, refugees fleeing Vietnam, who die striving to arrive at the shores of Southeast Asia. Many young girls are raped by sea pirates in this context. After hearing about one story of a twelve-year-old girl who “jumped into the ocean and drowned herself” after being raped, Hanh reflects on our inclination to only take the side of the young girl, and to want to kill or take revenge on the sea pirate. He asks us to reconsider:
“If you take the side of the little girl, then it is easy. You only have to take a gun and shoot the pirate. But we cannot do that. In my meditation I saw that if I had been born in the village of the pirate and raised in the same conditions as he was, I am now the pirate. There is a great likelihood that I would become a pirate. I cannot condemn myself so easily. In my meditation, I saw that many babies are born along the Gulf of Siam, hundreds every day, and if we educators, social workers, politicians, and others do not do something about the situation, in 25 years a number of them will become sea pirates. That is certain. If you or I were born today in those fishing villages, we might become sea pirates in 25 years. If you take a gun and shoot the pirate, you shoot all of us, because all of us are to some extent responsible for this state of affairs.” (60-61)
Hanh reminds me that in creating a peaceful world, we must seek to stand in the shoes of those committing violence in the hopes that we might understand and change the conditions that underlie it. No one is born a rapist or a murderer. The question we must consider, then, is what are the social conditions and structures that underlie the violence in this society? And how can we contribute to changing these conditions. Bhuiyan, for instance, felt that Stroman’s violence came out of ignorance about Muslims and Arab peoples connected to the broader post 9/11 social context. What is needed, then, is to address this ignorance through relationship-building and education, not more violence. This does not mean taking away responsibility from the person(s) who commit violent acts; it does mean, asking why this violence happens, examining the conditions that perpetuate it, reflecting on how we ourselves might be contributing to these conditions, and then participating in transforming the roots of violence so that rape and violence are no longer imaginable.
Reflecting on these issues takes me back to a class I taught on violence against women in the late 1980s. I had a young white man in my class who was relentless in his critique of feminism for not considering men’s perspectives, and who expressed venomous blame against women survivors of sexual assault. As an adjunct teacher with little experience, I didn’t know what to do. I was afraid to kick him out because of my precarious status at the university, and yet his behavior felt like its own form of violence against women. At the last session of the class, after he berated me and the other members of the class for the final time, I asked him to stay after class with the plan to confront him.
He stayed after the class and began to pour out his anger. I decided to listen first without interruption, rather than engage in a back and forth. Within just a few minutes, we found ourselves sitting down as he began to tell me about being sexually abused when he was a child, the impact on him, his anger at himself, and his inability to talk about it. He talked of the desire to commit suicide, of his self hatred and of his painful despair. I cannot remember the full conversation, but at the end, we talked about strategies to cope with these feelings and I offered a few resources in the area for male survivors of sexual abuse.
I’m not excusing his behavior, and yet, through listening, an opportunity opened for a shift in the dynamics governing our relationship. I was able to hear more about the locus of his anger and hostility – the isolation, the pain, the self-blame he was carrying and for which he was seeking some relief, and he was able to see that I was not his enemy. I also came to realize that I had also played a part in contributing to his isolation, pain, and anger, given the lack of attention in my class and in the broader antiviolence movement to the realities and devastating harms of sexualized violence against boys and men and its impact on all of our lives. This experience taught me the importance of listening to anger and hostility to see what underlies it. Refusing the compulsion to seek retribution requires each of us to understand the roots of violence in the social conditions of our lives, rather than solely in individuals; from Bhuiyan’s perspective, to “hate the sin, but not the sinner” and then to go further to address what underlies these acts. With such an understanding we have a better chance of ending violence, rather than simply perpetuating and fueling it.
Dr. Ann Russo is a professor in the gender and women’s studies program at Depaul University. She was formerly the director of that program and has now founded a new project called “Building Communities, Ending Violence” at Depaul. “Building Communities” uses peacemaking circles and safety labs to address violence.