Innocence Is Not Immunity

There is a dangerous narrative woven deeply into our culture: if someone harmed you badly enough, you must have done something to deserve it.

You must have provoked them.

You must have ignored something.

You must have said the wrong thing, worn the wrong thing, trusted too much, trusted too little, stayed too long, left too soon.

There must be a cause.

Because people desperately want to believe that harm operates according to a fair equation.

Do this, and this will happen.

Avoid this, and you will be safe.

Be good, and good things will happen to you.

Be careful, and you will evade danger.

But that is not how the world works.

Sometimes innocence meets malice.

Sometimes kindness meets exploitation.

Sometimes a person approaches another human being with a genuine heart, believing they are entering a relationship, a friendship, a business arrangement, or simply an ordinary interaction between two people.

Meanwhile, the other person is playing an entirely different game.

And this possibility is terrifying because it destroys the comforting belief that we can always prevent harm through perfect behaviour.

I never believed love was supposed to be a war zone.

I understood that relationships could fail. People could discover they were incompatible. Feelings could change. Two people could eventually realize they wanted different lives and go their separate ways.

That seemed reasonable.

What never occurred to me was that someone might enter an intimate relationship with the long-term intention of extracting, manipulating, undermining, deceiving, and eventually destroying the person beside them.

I was not in a competition.

I did not know there was a game being played.

I thought we were simply living life.

That is the part people fail to understand about predation.

The prey does not have to agree to participate.

A predator does not require provocation.

A thief does not need you to insult them before deciding your money belongs to them. A rapist does not require a woman’s wrongdoing before committing rape. An abuser does not need to be criticized before deciding to terrorize their partner.

Human beings are capable of malicious behaviour that exists independently of anything their victim has done.

That should not be controversial.

And yet we continue asking victims what they did.

What did you miss?

Why did you trust them?

Why didn’t you leave?

Why did you sign that?

Why were you there?

Why did you marry them?

As though the victim’s behaviour is the missing ingredient required to explain someone else’s capacity for cruelty.

Sometimes there is no missing ingredient.

Sometimes the explanation is simply that one person was acting in good faith while another was not.

The person who believes they are innocent and therefore safe is not stupid. They are operating from a worldview in which other people possess a similar baseline of humanity. They assume generosity will be met with generosity. Cooperation will be met with cooperation. Love will not be secretly converted into a battlefield.

They do not know they are standing beside someone who sees vulnerability as opportunity.

And perhaps that is the hardest lesson.

Being good does not make you immune from evil.

Being kind does not make you invisible to predators.

Being innocent does not guarantee that no one will choose to harm you.

Sometimes innocence itself makes someone vulnerable because they cannot imagine another person constructing an elaborate deception around them. They cannot conceive of spending years pretending to love someone in order to exploit them later.

They are not stupid for failing to imagine it.

They simply were not predators themselves.

But we need to stop teaching people that victimization is always evidence of poor choices, bad character, or hidden culpability.

Yes, some people provoke fights.

Some people poke bears.

Some people deliberately antagonize others and seek reactions.

But those people are often demonstrating predatory behaviour themselves.

And the existence of reckless behaviour does not erase the existence of innocent victims.

I was never in a boxing ring.

I did not put on gloves.

I did not agree to fight.

I did not even know there was a fight happening.

And yet someone came swinging.

That is the truth we need to make room for.

Sometimes you did nothing.

Sometimes you were simply there.

Sometimes you loved someone who was pretending.

Sometimes you trusted someone who was hunting.

And sometimes the most important thing a survivor can finally understand is this:

**Their innocence did not fail them.

Someone else failed to recognize it as something sacred.**