The Brutal Hypocrisy of “Protection”

We are told the system exists to protect us. To uphold justice. To intervene when harm is done. To defend the vulnerable. To keep society safe.

We see its banners, its press releases, its carefully staged public celebrations – swift action when a business is robbed, property is damaged, or profit is lost. There are photos. Hashtags. Community accolades. The machinery roars into motion. Cameras flash, statements are issued, and justice is counted, measured, documented, and applauded. The world sees the gears grind, the checklists ticked, the boxes checked. Everything appears precise, efficient, righteous.

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But what about people?

When the crime involves a person – someone we trusted, someone close, someone alive with a name and a history – everything slows down. The gears creak. The flash of cameras fades. The applause disappears. Evidence can be meticulously gathered. Threats can be documented. Witnesses can be named. Yet, in a sterile interview room, behind fluorescent lights and plastic chairs, eyes meet yours and the refrain is the same:

“There’s nothing we can do. We can’t act on what you’ve shown us.”

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Property is sacred. People are expendable.

The paradox is cruel and deliberate. The system moves with alarming speed for stolen merchandise but sleeps through the theft of life’s security, trust, dignity, and emotional safety. Policies exist. Protocols exist. Forms exist. Checklists exist. Yet enforcement is selective, discretionary, and often performative. Public celebrations of minor crimes are contrasted against silent suffering. Virtue signaling about “swift justice” is loud, glittering, and public. But for documented abuse, theft, and threats against real people? Silence is deafening. The system hides behind bureaucracy, delays, excuses, and indifference.

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A bitter truth: Protection is conditional. Justice is transactional. Safety is performative. Human suffering is invisible unless it fits a template of public spectacle, measurable loss, or PR-friendly narrative. Survivors navigate the rubble of their lives while their abuser remains unscathed. Every interaction with the system is a reminder that their pain is secondary. Every form, every interview, every unanswered call underscores a reality that is cruel in its simplicity: property has a voice; people do not.

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And yet, speak anyway. Document anyway. Refuse invisibility. Record the threats, preserve the proof, name the injustices, and share the truths. Expose the duality: speed and care for property, lethargy and dismissal for human lives. Demand that humanity, not profit, not statistics, not optics, be the metric of justice. This is not just about accountability – it is about declaring that real lives, bodies, hearts, and souls matter. That violence, coercion, abuse, and theft of autonomy cannot be rendered invisible because they do not produce a press release or a hashtag.

We must challenge the machinery. We must speak, write, testify, and persist. We must refuse the lie that our suffering is secondary. We must demand systems that recognize that justice is not a performance, and protection is not for sale.

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Because every time a survivor is silenced, every time a case is dismissed, every time a life is treated as less than property, the hypocrisy becomes clearer, sharper, and more cruel. We see it. We feel it. And we refuse to normalize it. Systems exist to protect people, not profit. Justice must serve humanity, not spectacle.

And we, the survivors, the witnesses, the ones who will not vanish quietly, are here to insist on that truth.

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