There is a word and a claim I have thought about repeatedly over the past couple of years, and which stirred again in the comment thread under the post about the recent rape leaflets in England.
Several comments suggested that the English leaflets should also be distributed to "white men". As if violence and rape have anything whatsoever to do with skin colour. They don't - they have to do with norm systems - but that's another post.
No, what kept working in me was the reasoning that followed. It came in several versions, but the core was the same - that most women have experienced sexual assault.
Said as something self-evident, as something everyone knows. I have read and heard it many times, and each time I had the sense of living in a parallel world.
Not because assaults don't exist, they do, and they should be taken deadly seriously. And in my eyes punished far more severely than they are today. But because the claim didn't resemble the world I can see with my own eyes, and yet was stated with a certainty as if it had been measured.
And in a way it has been. The number behind it exists. It comes from the EU's large 2024 survey, which finds that one-third of Danish women have experienced sexual violence in adulthood.
One-third.
Read that number again, and feel what it does to you. Because you're meant to feel something. One-third. Every third woman you pass on the street, every third mother at the school table, every third of your colleagues. The number isn't just information, it's a blow, and it's constructed as one.
There is, however, a footnote to the number. And almost no one reads it, because you're not meant to. In the footnote stands the definition - sexual violence here covers everything from rape to unwanted touching, self-reported, without requirement of a report, without a case, without a conviction.
So. The entire spectrum, from the absolute worst a Human Being can be subjected to, to a creepy hand from a drunk idiot at a bar on a Friday night, collected in one column, under one word.
And it's the word I want to write about here. Because something has happened to that word, and it hasn't happened by itself.
The word violence has its weight from one specific place. A child doesn't learn it from a dictionary. It learns it from the fist, from the body that is violated, from the moment when another person breaks through one's skin and one's will at the same time.
All the seriousness the word carries was earned there.
That's why it can stop a conversation. That's why a headline with that word in it draws the breath out of the reader. The word has backing, like a banknote has backing, because there is gold behind it, and the gold is real people's real suffering.
And precisely therefore it is worth stealing.
At some point people discovered that the charge could be borrowed. That whoever could get their concern under the word inherited all the seriousness without having to deliver what the seriousness came from. And it actually didn't start as sloppiness.
It started as a decision - in 1969 peace researcher Johan Galtung invented the concept of 'structural violence', expressly to be able to call social arrangements violence without anyone having raised a hand. It was a conquest of a word's savings. And since then, the account has been drawn on again and again.
Psychological violence. Economic violence. Digital violence. Verbal violence. Some of these phenomena are real and serious - control and coercion can crush a person more slowly and more thoroughly than any blow, and some of it belongs in criminal law, where it has indeed entered. It's not the phenomena that are false. It's the movement of them under the word that is the move.
Each time there is borrowing from the same capital. And no one deposits anything.
But that was only one half of the movement, and it's the other that reveals what is happening.
Because in the same decades when words and looks and structures became violence, the opposite happened with violence itself when it had the "wrong" sender.
Then it became incidents.
Anxiety-creating behaviour.
Episodes in nightlife.
Challenges in certain residential areas.
Conflicts between young people.
Boys being boys.
The language that expanded greedily in one direction suddenly became conspicuously poor in the other. Words became violence, and violence became incidents. It's the same hand moving both weights, and it moves them the same way -
Away from those who strike - towards those who speak.
And now see who the bill is sent to.
The bill is not sent to those who printed the new notes. It's sent to the woman who owned the gold. The woman who was raped by a stranger, and who now stands in the same statistical column as the hand on the bar.
Her experience was the backing behind the word, it was her suffering that gave it its weight, and now so many notes have been printed on it that her own can no longer be distinguished from the crowd. Debasement of currency always hits those who own the genuine currency.
When everything is violence, she can no longer say what happened to her with a word that still means it.
The inflation didn't take anything from the perpetrator. It took something from her. It took her witness.
And the bill is sent to one more - to all of us, to society's ability to see. Because a society navigates by its language as a captain on a ship navigates by his chart, and a chart where everything is called the same thing shows nothing.
When one-third stands in the column, you can no longer see where the actual assaults happen, who commits them, and where forces should be deployed. The imprecision feels like compassion, but it works as blindness. And the blindness is not evenly distributed. It falls heaviest on the victims who had the most need to be seen sharply.
Finally the bottom layer, because the word's seriousness came from somewhere, and it's worth remembering where.
Violence is not absolutely wrong in all stories people have lived by. In honour cultures it's a tool, in conquest orders it's a virtue. With us - in the Western world - it's a violation of something Holy, and it is that because the body it strikes bears an Image no hand has the right to touch.
It's that great surrounding Story - the one our faith, culture and civilisation are erected within - that charged the word.
So when the word violence is used today about all sorts of other things, it's not just sloppiness with language. It's yet another loan from the Christian inheritance, taken by people who don't believe in it.
The seriousness in the word was built up over two thousand years by one specific story about Man being inviolable. That story has been discarded by disturbingly many. The seriousness they have kept. And they use its full weight every time they call something violence - they just refuse to acknowledge where the weight came from.
It's inheriting a house and heating it with the floorboards.
There is only one way out, and it's uncomfortably simple.
Insist on the word. Call rape rape, call control control, call a creepy hand a creepy hand, and carry each of them with the seriousness that fits it, because they each have their own.
It's not coldness. It's the opposite. Precision is the last loyalty language can show a victim.
Because a word is a witness. And a witness who says everything is no longer believed.
That's what I felt in the comment thread. The sense of parallel world was never about the women - it was about the word. It wasn't the women who had stopped speaking truly. It was the language they had been issued to speak with.
So who does it? That's the natural question, and here there are again only uncomfortable answers - it needs no conductor. It only needs that in each individual case it is cheaper to borrow a word's weight than to earn one's own.
One researcher who wants to give their concept gravity. One headline that must hit harder than the neighbouring one's. One movement that must get its concern up to seriousness class. None of them need to know each other. They just all have to pull the same way, and they do, because the notes are free as long as there is gold left.
And let me give you the newest example of the mechanism, because it stands in my own comment thread, and in comment threads all over the internet, while you're reading this - and I see it more and more often, both in writing and in conversations between men when no one else is listening.
The word "men". That too has become a note.
"Men are the problem" - the ENTIRE sex in ONE column, the perpetrator and his absolute opposite under the same word, just like the rape and the hand on the bar. Same grip, new address.
And then notice what it does to a particular kind of man. Not to the violator. He is completely indifferent, he has always been indifferent, no column, leaflet or reprimand in the entire world has ever stopped him. But to the man who would have stood up.
He sits in the conversation where "men" is said as an accusation, and he feels that there is no distinction. That his willingness to stand between is counted on the same side as what it was meant to stand between. And then he doesn't stand up. He says nothing. He quietly withdraws from a task he was otherwise raised into - because why stand guard for someone who just said that he is what should be guarded against?
And who pays that bill then? Not those who said "men are the problem". No. The woman on the night bus pays it. And here one must understand what is at stake, because it's not a harm among other harms. It's the very worst harm that exists in this area, for one reason -
Women's safety has in the end never rested on paragraphs, it is conditional on good men who are willing to stand between. It has been that throughout human history, and it hasn't ceased because we got it good.
Remove the will in the good, and there stands nothing left between her and the evil - only a language that can no longer distinguish the two from each other. You cannot for years lump an entire sex together and simultaneously count on the best of them remaining at their post. That inflation too is paid by the one who owns the genuine currency.
So. Try to notice it now, when you've seen it.
The words that become heavier while the things behind them become lighter. And the words that become lighter while the things behind them become heavier. Where have you yourself seen it happen?
❤️🔥🪽
Yes, I perhaps look too serious in the picture. But that's because it's serious. We only have one shared language to describe reality with, friends. It's the lowest sounding board between us - everything else stands on top. And someone is tampering with it, to be right instead of to find out what is true. That won't do.
