There is a sentence that gets said to survivors of abuse, usually with the kindest of intentions, that I want to take apart. If you speak up, you could stop it happening to someone else. If you stay silent, the cycle continues. It is offered as encouragement, as a reason to find courage, as a way of turning private pain into public good.
It is also, underneath the good intentions, one of the heaviest and most misplaced burdens we routinely hand to people who have already carried far too much. Because what that sentence actually says is: the responsibility for stopping this person from harming others rests with you, the person they harmed. And that is not true. It was never true. I want to explain why, and where the responsibility actually belongs, because getting this wrong causes real damage to people who deserve the opposite.
The quiet transfer of responsibility
Look closely at what the encouragement to speak up does. It takes the responsibility for an abuser’s future behaviour and quietly transfers it onto the person who survived their past behaviour. If you do not report, and they harm someone else, some portion of that harm becomes yours. You could have stopped it. You chose not to. The next victim is, in some unspoken accounting, partly on you.
This is a remarkable thing to ask of someone, and we ask it constantly, usually without noticing we are doing it. We would not dream of telling someone who was burgled that they are responsible for the burglar’s next break-in unless they pursue a prosecution. We understand, in that case, that the responsibility for the crime sits entirely with the person who committed it, and that the victim’s only job is to recover and to make whatever choices are right for them. Somehow, with abuse, that clarity dissolves, and the victim inherits a duty to protect strangers from the person who harmed them.
The transfer is almost always invisible to the person making it, because it is dressed as empowerment. You have the power to make a difference. But strip away the framing and the structure is stark: we are making a survivor responsible for the actions of the person who abused them. The abuser gets to recede into the background while the survivor is handed the job of policing them.
Why this lands where it does the most harm
This burden does not fall on neutral ground. It lands on people whose relationship to shame and responsibility has already been systematically distorted by exactly what they went through.
One of the core mechanisms of coercive control and abuse is the transfer of shame from the person who should carry it to the person who should not. Abusers are remarkably consistent in this. It is your fault. You made me do this. If you were different, this would not happen. Over time, the survivor absorbs a sense that the abuse was somehow their responsibility, their failing, their shame to hold. They come out of the experience already carrying a weight of self-blame that does not belong to them.
And then, into that precise wound, we press the further suggestion that they are now also responsible for whether it happens to anyone else. We take a person who has been trained, deliberately and over a long period, to believe that other people’s harmful behaviour is their fault, and we confirm it. We say, in effect: yes, you are responsible for what this person does. The one thing this person most needs to unlearn, we reinforce, and we do it while believing we are helping.
That is why this matters so much, and why I am not willing to let the good intentions excuse it. We are handing the heaviest version of the exact burden that abuse installs, to the people least able to bear another ounce of it, at the precise moment they are trying to put it down.
Where the responsibility actually sits
So let me be as clear as I can be about where the responsibility for breaking the cycle belongs, because vagueness here is part of the problem.
It belongs to the person who did the harm. Entirely and without qualification. The abuser is responsible for the abuse, and for any future abuse, and nothing the survivor does or does not do alters that allocation by a single degree. That is the first and most important reassignment.
After that, responsibility belongs to those who have genuine power to act without endangering themselves. Institutions. Systems. Employers, when it happens at work. The police and the courts, whose job this actually is. Practitioners with the training and the safety to intervene. Bystanders who saw and could have said something at no real cost to themselves. These are the parties who can carry the work of stopping an abuser without paying the price the survivor would pay for it. The responsibility sits with those who can bear it safely, and the survivor is, almost by definition, not among them.
What this means in practice is that a survivor who chooses not to report, not to speak publicly, not to pursue the person who harmed them, has done nothing wrong. They have not failed a future victim. They have not let the cycle continue. They have made a legitimate choice to prioritise their own safety and recovery, which is the one thing that is genuinely theirs to be responsible for, and the cycle, if it continues, continues because of the abuser and the systems that failed to stop them, not because of the person who declined to sacrifice themselves for the attempt.
What to offer instead
If speaking up is genuinely right for a particular survivor, if it is part of their own recovery and their own reclaiming of power, then it can be a good and even liberating thing, and it should be supported. Some survivors find real meaning in it. The point is not that no one should ever speak. The point is that it must be their choice, made for their own reasons, and never a duty laid on them by the rest of us to do a job that is properly ours.
So the thing to offer a survivor is not the burden of protecting others. It is the permission to put down every burden that was never theirs, including this one. The shame that was transferred to them is not theirs to hold. The responsibility for the abuser’s behaviour is not theirs to carry. And the job of breaking the cycle is not theirs to perform, unless and until they decide, freely, that they want to be part of it.
Breaking the cycle was never your job. It was always the job of the person who started it, and of everyone with the power to stop it who was not the one being harmed. If you are a survivor and you have been carrying the quiet sense that you should have done more to protect the next person, I would like you to set that down. You were the one who needed protecting. The responsibility to protect belonged to others. It still does.
