Passing the Gravy: How Systems Perpetuate Violence Instead of Ending It

She was twelve the first time the bruises should have mattered. The teacher noticed. The nurse filed a report. A caseworker visited the home. But nothing stuck. Each institution touched her life just long enough to shuffle her along, like a plate passed around a crowded table. The bruises faded, the paperwork filed away, and the cycle resumed—because each system acted as though acknowledgment was enough.

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By fourteen, the abuse had become exploitation. Older men promised safety, then abused that promise. She disappeared from school, only to be criminalized for truancy. Courts scolded her for not showing up to class, while no one asked why she couldn’t stay there. Police ignored her when she reported assault, but arrested her for curfew violations. Providers looked at her survival sex work and saw delinquency, not desperation. Every system had its turn, and every system passed her off—never fixing, never listening.

This is where the cycle sharpens its teeth: one institution punishes what another ignored. Teachers flag concerns, but courts punish the outcome. Police fail to protect, but probation officers punish the response. Foster care offers instability, then blames her when she ages out without resources. Each handoff creates new trauma, each failure pushes her deeper into harm, and each punishment ensures the next system inherits her with more baggage than before.

It’s the same dynamic you see at a dysfunctional Thanksgiving dinner. The fight breaks out, someone storms off, a family secret explodes—and then, inevitably, someone sighs and says, “Could you pass the gravy?” As if ignoring the mess makes it go away. That’s how we handle survivors of abuse: by pretending the crisis is temporary, by passing the responsibility, by acting like silence is resolution. The mess doesn’t disappear—it multiplies.

By nineteen, she had aged out of foster care with no diploma, no stable housing, a juvenile record that was sealed but still carried the stigma of its existence, and no safety net. She carried not her own failure, but the failure multiplied: of teachers, caseworkers, courts, and policies that chose to look away. Each system congratulated itself for doing its part, while together they built a pipeline of neglect that funneled her straight into vulnerability.

This is where the story becomes bigger than her. Because she isn’t an outlier—she’s the rule. This is what happens when systems are designed to protect themselves from accountability instead of protecting people from harm. The cycle repeats generation after generation, each failure reinforcing the next. Survivors aren’t falling through the cracks; they are being pushed.

And that’s the conflict: we claim to protect children while building systems that punish them. We claim to fight trafficking while criminalizing survivors. We claim to invest in safety while pouring resources into arrests, stings, and incarceration. The very institutions that are supposed to break the cycle keep it alive—because punishment is easier to fund than prevention, and silence is easier to manage than accountability.

This is where policy must change. We cannot keep criminalizing survivors for their own exploitation. We cannot keep funding stings and lock-ups while starving shelters, education, and housing. We cannot keep treating exploitation as a game of hot potato passed between agencies until the survivor disappears.

We need trauma-informed, survivor-led solutions that recognize the patterns for what they are: systemic neglect. We need policies that shift resources away from punishment and toward housing, education, reentry, and real safety nets. We need accountability baked into every agency that touches a survivor’s life.

Because until we stop passing the gravy, the mess will only spread.