i've noticed that, in discussions of how to handle grevious harm and abuse at a community level, victims of harm who want to preserve their relationships with perpetrators to some degree are... discarded?
there's an automatic assumption in left and abolitionist circles that all victims of harm either currently hate and want to cut off the perpetrators of that harm, or are temporarily confused due to being emotionally victimized and dependent on the perpetrators but will eventually come around to wanting to cut them out of their lives.
and i do think we need to provide unilateral structural support for people who want to entirely remove perpetrators of harm from their lives--there's already many legal and financial barriers to that in the case of legally recognized family members, and many other barriers in the forms of financial and housing entanglements, and those require work and support to untangle and remove as barriers on a broad, societal level. simultaneously, though, i don't think it's necessary to discard victims with other relationships to perpetrators in the process, nor to dismiss them as not capable of having that autonomy, nor to pathologize their decisions.
i've found that often in left and abolitionist circles, if someone wants to maintain a relationship with someone who's deeply harmed them, there's suddenly just... a total lack of community support, and even a tendency to lump them in with the perpetrator of harm and implicitly frame them as not being a ~real~ victim, or at the very least one who is suspect because they must have agreed with the premise of the harm or thought it was excusable in some way. and like... socially ostracizing victims is socially ostracizing victims regardless of why you're doing it!
and there's a tendency to reach a social consensus somewhere along the lines of like... "i'll help you, but only if it doesn't help the person who harmed you/is harming you." which is all well and good until you realize that shuts down the very possibility of external supports in healing the relationship in question and preventing further harm/abuse. it implicitly places the full responsibility of supporting the perpetrator's journey to accountability and improving their actions on the victim, which i shouldn't need to say is both unhealthy and doomed to fail. furthermore, it places the victim in a vulnerable place socially--if they live with the perpetrator, can they ask for rental support or help with groceries, or will that be seen as helping the perpetrator? if the perpetrator has some sort of health crisis, can the victim reach out for support through it (housecleaning, cooking, medical bills), or are they on their own because they chose to maintain this relationship?
thinking about how many of my friends were able to reconcile with abusive parents as adults, due to the shift in power dynamics, and were actually able to hold their parents accountable for their past actions and demand change that has actually progressed and improved their relationship... and thinking about how many of them are implicitly treated like helpless idiots that cannot be trusted to make their own life decisions because of this, by people who are supposed to be in community with them and talk a big game about restorative justice and abolition.