"The Fear of Reality: How Victim Blaming Kills Community"

We Are The Reckoning

"What if I told you…
The real danger isn’t the violence—it’s what comes after.
It’s the silence.
The side-eyes.
The friends who vanish.
The family who turns cold.
The whispers of “she should’ve known better.”
What if I told you that every time someone says that, a piece of our humanity dies?

This episode isn’t comfortable.
It’s not easy.
But it will change the way you see everything.

Because victim blaming doesn’t just silence survivors—it destroys communities.
And sometimes, it destroys the very people we claim to love.

I know that because it happened to me.

When my son was murdered, my best friend’s mother crossed the street to avoid me.
My best friend—she didn’t come to the funeral.
Years later, after having children of her own, she finally apologised.
But the damage was already done.

Or when I was drugged, beaten, and raped—after years of clawing my way back to life, to connection, to trust—the new friends I made questioned whether it happened.
One friend, sat with a thinking face on and looked up at me looking me right in the eyes and said, “You know what Shannon, I believe you” even if it does sound like a movie
As if reality couldn’t be that cruel.
As if his conviction was a fluke—not because of what he did to me, but because he must’ve hurt someone else. Someone not connected to them.

I’m not friends with any of them now.
And here I am, still standing.
Not because it didn’t break me.
But because I refused to let their fear define me.

I refused to shrink into the shadows

So today, we’re going to talk about fear.
Not just the kind that comes with footsteps behind you or a locked door rattling—
But the kind that creeps into our institutions, our relationships, and our responses to trauma.
We’re going to talk about the way fear warps truth.
How it teaches people to protect themselves with cruelty.
How it turns communities against their own.

And how we—you and I—can burn that lie to the fucking ground.

This is We Are The Reckoning.
And today, we drag fear into the light."

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