📚 Language Is Power. Categories Shape Policy and Perception.

Oppression is not only carried out with fists, laws, and locked doors.
It is carried out with words.

Words that erase.
Words that confuse.
Words that sanitize violence.
Words that make it easier to ignore the people most harmed.

That’s why they fight so hard over language.
Because language determines what becomes real in the eyes of power.

🏛️ If we are unnamed, we are unfunded.

If we are uncategorized, we are uncounted.
If we are not visible in data, policy, or headlines, we are treated as if we don’t exist—until it’s time to blame us for our own harm.

Categories are not just boxes.
They are gates—to protection, to justice, to survival.

🔍 “Neutral” language is not neutral.

• When data says “victims,” but doesn’t break down race, disability, or sexuality, it is not neutral—it is deceptive.

• When a policy helps “all women” but excludes those in rural areas, migrant communities, or prison cells, it is not neutral—it is neglectful.

• When we say “people of color” but ignore how anti-Blackness operates uniquely, that’s not unity—it’s erasure.

🌱 Naming is a sacred act.

When we create specific language for who we are and what we’ve survived,
we break the spell of silence that oppression depends on.

• Black disabled women Survivors.

• Deaf Indigenous mothers fleeing domestic violence.

• Immigrant girls targeted by grooming disguised as “mentorship.”

These are not “too specific.”
These are truths that have been waiting to be heard.

🔊 Language creates culture. Language directs funding. Language opens doors.

If a community doesn’t exist in the paperwork,
they don’t exist in the protection.
If a harm doesn’t have a name,
it won’t be investigated.
If a Survivor’s reality is always lumped into someone else’s category,
they will be left behind again.

We name to build altars.
We name to make room for healing.
We name to make it harder for them to deny what they’ve done—and what they’ve ignored.

🕯️ Language is not just a tool—it is our weapon and our witness.

—WeSurviveAbuse.com
With love for every Survivor who had to name herself when the world would not.

🧠 Critical Thinking + Reflection Questions:

1. What categories have I seen used to erase or oversimplify people’s stories?

2. Have I ever been told I didn’t “fit” a category, even though I was harmed?

3. Who in my community is being left out of policies and protections because they’re unnamed?

4. How can I use my voice, platform, or power to make sure their names are included?

5. What new language might need to be created so the full truth can finally be spoken?