Who causes harm? — A sorting activity

Tap a label to pick it up, then tap a category to place it. Tap a placed label to send it back to the pool. When all twenty-five labels are sorted, reveal the lesson.

The same person can wear every one of these labels.

Most people who cause harm are known to those they hurt — partners, parents, siblings, friends, family, trusted authority figures. The labels on one side describe how the legal and clinical system names a person who has caused harm. The labels on the other are how the people around them, or who depended on them, knew them. They describe the same people.

The words we choose to describe someone who has caused harm shape how others see them, and how survivors see themselves. Clinical and legal labels like "perpetrator," "abuser," or "offender" categorize a person by a single act. They can flatten the relationships and trust that made the harm possible in the first place.

When a survivor describes the person who hurt them as "my dad" or "my husband," that is not a contradiction. It is the truth of how harm most often happens. Most violence is committed by someone the victim knows, loves, depends on, or trusts.

For clinicians and advocates, holding both vocabularies — the clinical and the relational — without collapsing one into the other supports survivors in telling their own stories on their own terms.

Which side did you start filling first? What did that reveal about your assumptions about who causes harm?
Were there any labels you weren't sure where to place? What made them feel ambiguous?
How might a survivor's healing be affected by clinicians who use only legal language? Only relational language?
What language do you currently use in case notes and conversations with clients? What does that language do, and what does it miss?
How do we hold both accountability and complexity when someone is described as both "dad" and someone who caused harm?
What does it mean for a survivor when others refuse to recognize the relational language they use for the person who harmed them?

This activity works best when participants are given time to sort in silence first, then asked to share what they noticed about their own sorting choices before the reveal. The aha moment is most powerful when people have already invested in their categories.

Some participants may resist the reveal, arguing that a "dad" is not the same as a "rapist." This is an important moment, not a failure of the exercise. The point is not that these categories are equivalent — it is that the same human being can occupy both at once, and survivors are often the ones who must hold that contradiction.

Consider pairing this activity with a discussion of how intake forms, court documents, and clinical notes shape what survivors can and cannot say about the people who harmed them.