When I do my morning run I generally listen to an Audible book, or a podcast. My podcast subscriptions run the gamut from geek culture chats (mostly Star Wars) to self help and relationship discussions, to author interviews and perspectives. One of the podcasts that crosses over many of these motifs is the Sarah Silverman Podcast.

If you’ve ever heard her show, the majority of it serves as a kind of “call in” program where regular listeners leave recorded messages with questions for her to answer. I’m constantly shocked by how personal and serious some of these questions are, and how quickly she admits to being out of her depth.

On the most recent episode a man was seeking her advice about what to do with a relationship where his friend was recently arrested for raping a woman on an airplane.

“Should I stay friends with him? Should I keep my distance? I’m not sure what to do,” he asked this with genuine anguish in his voice.

After a lengthy pause Sarah said something I’d heard many times before, but in this instance it genuinely hurt me to hear:

Hurt people hurt people

The lie of the wounded villain

This isn’t a new phrase, nor is it one that Sarah invented. In fact, the first time I heard this phrase (I think from my mother in law,) it was attributed to Oprah Winfrey.

I’m certain that Oprah’s goal in coining the phrase, if she did, was to interject a kind of compassion into the conversation around the cycle of abuse in many human relationships. The phrase is meant to quell anger with sympathy, and allow the wounded party in an interpersonal conflict to see some kind of humanity in the person who harmed them.

I’m saying here and now that the opposite is true. This simple phrase harms more than it helps, and I’ll explain why.

One, “The Joker made me do it.”

In the 2008 film, The Dark Knight, Heath Ledger gave us a version of the famous villain known as the Joker that audiences had never seen. Rather than his permanent smile being some type of affectation, or perpetual madness, or even some sort of chemical accident, THIS version of the character’s face was bisected with a cruel and jagged scar in the rough shape of a grin. That wicked wound inspired the ongoing question about its origin, and the screenwriters inexorably tied it to the deep-seated roots of the character himself.

Several times in the film the Joker tells the tale of the scar’s origin, and every time he tells a different story, leaving the audience to draw their own conclusion about if any of what he says could be considered “truth.” But it is one of these origin stories I want to draw attention to:

Do you wanna know how I got these scars? My father was a drinker…and a fiend. And one night, he goes off crazier than usual. Mommy gets the kitchen knife to defend herself. He doesn’t like that. Not…one…bit. So, me watching, he takes the knife to her, laughing while he does it. He turns to me, and he says, “Why so serious?” He comes at me with the knife – “Why so serious?” He sticks the blade in my mouth – “Let’s put a smile on that face!”

This moment in the story evokes momentary sympathy from the Joker’s hostage, just for a beat, before he turns on them with a knife in his hand and a cruel snarling sound.

In 2016 M. Knight Shyamalan released a film called “Split,” in which the hero faces a character who has multiple personalities, each of whom appears to have a different powers and abilities. As the film progresses, certain childlike personalities emerge and begin to tell the origin story behind Kevin, the film’s antagonist, and how his mental schism arose as a protection from childhood abuse.

In recent years we have learned that the Incredible Hulk, the super powered behemoth, owes the true origin of his incredible strength to the emergence of a personality in response to extreme child abuse.

Comics are full of dozens of characters, both heroic and villainous, whose powers essentially arose as a response to an abusive childhood (or a childhood trauma, like Batman,) and most of them are villains or antiheroes.

So, if the comic tales are true, wouldn’t we be able to look at history’s worst real-life villains, such as Adolph Hitler or Joseph Stalin and place the origins of their megalomaniacal behavior in the child abuse or trauma that should’ve inspired it? While we know that Stalin was likely abused, we have little historical record tracing Hitler’s behavior to his abuse, and so abuse seems to be a poor predictor of historical villainy.

There’s something more pernicious in the narrative here, in that millions of children are abused every year. By the logic presented to us in comics and movies, our society should be crawling with powerful violent criminals murdering civilians in the millions. So if that’s not the case, what do statistics actually tell us about the violent tendencies of survivors of childhood abuse?

Two, Truth is a superpower

A British study conducted in England in 2016 found out that those who survived abuse as children were 51% more likely to experience domestic assault as adults, regardless of gender. Read that again. Abuse survivors, rather than being more likely to perpetrate violence as adults, are more likely to EXPERIENCE violence.

This reality makes the narrative that somehow having survived violence as a child can create a criminal truly bizarre. This is not a narrative we have about the survivors of any other kind of crime. Sure, as a society we happily say “hurt people hurt people,” but we never say “people who’ve been stolen from turn into thieves,” or “most murderers survived a murder attempt.” In fact, just typing that seems ludicrous and irresponsible.  So where does this particular narrative, about the survivors of one kind of crime stem from?

Ask yourself this question: who stands to benefit the most from a societal stereotype that paints the survivors of abuse as potential criminals? Why would we make the survivors of this one specific kind of crime into presumed criminals themselves? Why reduce their credibility? Why make it harder for them to find jobs, have families, succeed in capitalism? What are we trying to scare them into? Or out of?

Three, All it takes for evil to triumph…

Finish the quote for me: “…is for good men to do nothing.”

So, if a society terrorizes the victims of a crime into silence, the main benefit that occurs is for those who plan to perpetrate more of that kind of crime. Think of it: if we demonized attempted murder victims from speaking out about the murder perpetrated on them, then murderers could operate with far more societal freedom. As long as they could “get away” with the crime, who would dare to say anything?

The narrative that all rapists, child abusers, and other forms of human predators were themselves once the victims of the exact crimes they perpetrate also removes personal responsibility from those who plan to enact these crimes. After all, “it’s not their fault,” can be the default defense for what they do. Never mind that millions of people who survived those very same crimes live their lives with the conviction of never perpetuating the same interpersonal violence they have endured. Let’s not make heroes of them for that particular decision, and instead let’s leave our societal support structure for the actual people committing the crimes.

I hope I’ve planted the kind of doubt about these blithely regurgitated stereotypes that might make you think twice about repeating them. They don’t serve any purpose in my opinion other than to maintain a culture that empowers abusers and silences survivors from speaking out and being believed. Sure, “hurt people hurt people,” may be true; but there’s far more truth in the idea that “hurt people become heroes.” So many of us do, as part of a conscious choice, and we make the world a better place every day.