Perpetrator Responsibility: Keep Accountability With the Person Using Violence
Stop making victims explain the choices of the person who harmed themQuestions about why someone stayed, returned, did not report, withdrew a complaint or remained in contact can be relevant to understanding risk and barriers to safety.
They should never become a way of transferring responsibility for violence onto the victim.
A victim is responsible for their own actions. They are not responsible for another person's decision to threaten, intimidate, control, assault, stalk, abuse or frighten them.
The responsibility for violence belongs with the person using it.
Violence is behaviour
Violence and abuse are behaviours.
A person who uses violence is responsible for the way they treat another person, including the decisions they make about intimidation, control, threats, humiliation, surveillance, sexual violence, financial abuse, physical violence or other forms of harm.
People who use violence may make decisions about what they do, who they target, what they conceal, what they deny and how they respond when their behaviour is challenged.
Keeping attention on those behaviours helps prevent responsibility from quietly shifting onto the person experiencing them.
Explanation is not exoneration
There can be circumstances surrounding a person's use of violence.
They may have experienced trauma. They may misuse alcohol or other drugs. They may struggle with anger, jealousy, insecurity, mental distress, relationship breakdown or significant stress.
Those circumstances may need to be understood as part of an effective response.
They do not make another person responsible for the violence.
Understanding why harmful behaviour occurs can help with prevention and intervention. It should not be confused with excusing that behaviour.
Excuses
Responsibility can be avoided in many ways
Responsibility can be avoided in many ways
A person using violence may attempt to minimise, deny or justify what happened.
“I only did it because they provoked me.”
Conflict does not require violence. Another person's words or behaviour do not transfer responsibility for a violent response.
“I was drunk.”
Alcohol or other drugs can affect behaviour and risk. They do not make the victim responsible for what happened.
“I just lost control.”
Describing violence as a momentary loss of control can hide a broader pattern of intimidation, entitlement or coercion.
“It wasn't that bad.”
The person causing harm does not get to determine its impact on someone else.
“They do things to me too.”
Relationship conflict and abuse are not automatically the same thing. Context, pattern, power, fear, intent and impact matter.
“I had a terrible childhood.”
Past trauma deserves support and may help explain a person's needs. It does not give someone permission to harm another person.
“They made me angry.”
Anger is an emotion. Violence is a behaviour.
Survival decisions are not consent to abuse
Victims and survivors often make decisions within circumstances outsiders cannot fully see.
They may stay.
They may leave and return.
They may continue communicating with the person harming them.
They may minimise what is happening.
They may deny abuse when somebody asks.
They may withdraw a complaint.
They may protect the person using violence.
They may appear calm.
They may continue a relationship.
They may tell different people different amounts of their story.
These decisions can be influenced by fear, coercion, financial dependence, children, housing, disability, immigration status, isolation, threats, love, hope, shame, community pressure, trauma or concern that leaving could make the situation more dangerous.
None of these decisions creates responsibility for the abuse.
Victim-blaming can make the person using violence disappear
Public conversations sometimes examine the victim's behaviour far more closely than the behaviour of the person causing harm.
Why didn't they leave?
Why did they go back?
Why didn't they tell anyone?
Why didn't they call police?
Why were they still communicating with them?
Why didn't they protect the children?
These questions may sometimes help us understand the barriers a person faced.
But when they become the centre of the conversation, something important happens:
The person using violence can disappear from view.
The victim becomes the person whose behaviour is investigated, questioned and judged.
Accountability moves in the wrong direction.
Leaving does not cause violence
A victim may decide to end a relationship.
That decision does not cause the other person's threats, stalking, intimidation, harassment or violence.
Separation may change the circumstances in which violence occurs, and in some situations risk can escalate around or after separation.
That is a reason to take the behaviour of the person using violence seriously.
It is not a reason to blame someone for leaving.
Do not make the non-abusive parent responsible for another person's violence
When children are living with domestic or family violence, attention can shift heavily towards the non-abusive parent's ability to protect them.
Questions about children's safety are essential.
But systems must also ask:
What is the person using violence doing?
How is their behaviour affecting the children's safety and wellbeing?
Are threats or coercive control limiting the other parent's ability to protect the children?
Is the person using violence undermining parenting, finances, housing or access to support?
What action is being taken to address the source of the danger?
Protecting children requires keeping the behaviour creating the risk visible.
Look beyond the individual incident
Accountability is harder when violence is treated only as a collection of isolated incidents.
One threat may appear minor.
A controlling message may seem insignificant.
Repeated phone calls may be dismissed as relationship conflict.
Financial restrictions may not initially look like violence.
But together, behaviours can form a pattern that creates fear, restricts independence and makes everyday decisions increasingly difficult.
Understanding the pattern helps shift the question from:
“Why didn't the victim do something different?”
to:
“What was being done to restrict their choices?”
Systems can reinforce accountability - or accidentally shift it
Police, courts, health services, child protection, family law, housing services, workplaces, schools and community organisations may all encounter parts of a person's experience.
Responses should examine the behaviour creating the risk rather than placing the entire burden of safety management on the person experiencing violence.
A victim should not have to become the sole project manager for another person's dangerous behaviour.
Systems can ask:
- What behaviour is creating the risk?
- Is there a pattern across incidents or services?
- Who is responsible for that behaviour?
- What steps can reduce the person's ability to continue causing harm?
- What support does the victim need to increase safety and choice?
- What information should be shared appropriately so patterns are not missed?
- Is the victim being expected to carry responsibilities that belong with the person using violence or with the system?
Survivor safety and perpetrator accountability should reinforce each other.
Accountability
What meaningful accountability can involve
Accountability is more than punishment.
Depending on the circumstances, it can include:
Acknowledging the behaviour
Recognising what happened without minimising, denying or blaming the victim.
Accepting responsibility
Stopping explanations from becoming excuses.
Recognising impact
Understanding that violence can affect safety, trust, housing, finances, children, relationships, employment and a person's sense of freedom.
Stopping the behaviour
Accountability requires behavioural change, not simply expressions of regret.
Respecting boundaries
Separation, legal orders or requests for no contact are not invitations for negotiation or retaliation.
Engaging with intervention
Appropriate specialist programs and professional support may form part of efforts to change abusive behaviour.
Accepting consequences
Accountability may involve legal, relational, financial, professional or personal consequences.
Demonstrating change over time
Promises are not the same as sustained behavioural change.
Change requires responsibility
People who use violence are not helped by pretending their behaviour is beyond their control.
Accountability does not require us to believe that people are incapable of change.
It requires the opposite.
If behaviour can change, the person using it must be expected to participate in that change.
That begins with recognising the behaviour, accepting responsibility for it and taking meaningful steps to stop causing harm.
A victim should not have to become more compliant, more forgiving, quieter, easier to live with or better at avoiding someone's anger in order for the violence to stop.
The person using violence must change the behaviour.
Accountability belongs beyond the individual relationship
Friends, families, workplaces, sporting clubs, institutions, professionals and communities can all influence whether violence is challenged or quietly tolerated.
Accountability becomes harder when people:
- excuse violence because they know or like the person responsible
- describe abuse as a private relationship problem
- pressure victims to forgive
- minimise controlling behaviour
- protect someone's reputation
- blame alcohol, stress or relationship problems
- expect the victim to change their behaviour to prevent further violence
- treat intervention as more damaging than the violence itself.
Supporting accountability does not require becoming judge and jury.
It means refusing to make the victim responsible for managing another person's abusive behaviour.
Language can keep responsibility visible
The way violence is described matters.
Compare:
“A woman was assaulted.”
with:
“A person assaulted her.”
Or:
“A child was exposed to domestic violence.”
with:
“A person used violence in the child's home.”
Passive language can unintentionally remove the person responsible from the sentence.
Where it is safe and appropriate to do so, language should identify the behaviour and keep the person using it visible.
This does not mean making assumptions before facts are established.
It means avoiding language that makes violence sound as though it simply happened by itself.
Change the question
Instead of only asking:
Why did the victim stay?
Ask:
What did the person using violence do that made leaving dangerous, difficult or costly?
Instead of:
Why didn't they report it?
Ask:
What made reporting feel unsafe, inaccessible or unlikely to help?
Instead of:
Why did they go back?
Ask:
What financial, emotional, practical or safety barriers limited their options?
Instead of:
Why didn't they protect the children?
Ask:
Who created the danger to the children, and what was done to stop that behaviour?
Instead of:
What did they do to provoke it?
Ask:
Why did the person causing harm respond with violence or abuse?
And instead of asking only what the victim should have done differently, ask:
What opportunities did families, communities, professionals and systems have to intervene?
The victim's choices do not transfer responsibility for the violence
We can examine barriers to leaving.
We can understand trauma responses.
We can improve safety planning.
We can ask why reporting was difficult.
We can examine system failures.
We can recognise the complexity of relationships.
We can do all of those things without losing sight of the central point:
The person experiencing violence did not cause another person's abusive behaviour.
Accountability belongs with the person using violence.