Saw tweets saying AOC’s statement, “My parents did not raise me to accept abuse from men” Is an example of victim blaming.

Some parents DO raise daughters to accept abuse from men. Normalizing violence against women in our childhoods is a huge facet of machismo/patriarchy......

There are a lot of muxeres who don’t fully come into the realization that they never deserve to be harmed by the men in their lives until well into adulthood. The socialization into abuse starts young and for many muxeres it is very deeply cemented. It is a process of unlearning

I have had to go through MY OWN unlearning process - I was raised by loving parents who are also very old school and Catholic and “traditional” in many ways. Which means some forms of violence against women were EXTREMELY minimized. Victim blaming wrt sexual assault was standard

I remember getting calls on the LA Rape & Battery Hotline from adult Latinas about what constituted assault or abuse from their husbands & boyfriends. It is a sad reality that muxeres are OFTEN raised without the basic knowledge about consent, boundaries & abuse dynamics

In our families, many are still taught that a husband or boyfriend can basically do whatever they want to you. It is still a concept we are learning that there are boundaries in marriages & partnerships & your husband can’t force you to have 6 kids back to back against your will

Be mad at the broader culture of machismo & literal femicides globally before getting mad at AOC for standing up for herself & holding that violent white man accountable on the record for the entire world to see. It’s something that needs to happen in our communities AS WELL!!!!

I can tell you this much - abuse *flourishes* in plenty of Latinx households because our families, our elders, our parents, often excuse, enable, or deny it is even happening. It’s fucked up and it’s real.

I know mothers who have denied, blamed, and abandoned their own daughters after daughter disclosed being abused as a child. I know muxeres whose mothers literally *allowed* their husbands to assault them as kids. A lot of muxeres are trying to survive their own parents / families

There is also a huge difference between protective mothers doing the best they can to shield children and themselves from abuse (what is often wrongly labeled as enabling or complicity) and mothers who do in fact permit and perpetuate abuse (see Gabriel Fernandez)

To be clear I don’t think AOC’s statement was victim blaming. She is literally holding a perpetrator accountable for harm done to her. Some ppl were raised in homes where abuse is normalized. Some ppl were NOT. It is not a victim blame for her to reference her OWN upbringing here

And context matters - she is calling out workplace sexual harassment and a verbal assault from what is essentially her co-worker. I think it’s important to keep the specific type of harm she is calling out in mind before applying blanket statements about every form of *abuse*