They say two-tier policing.

Two-tier courts.

But this is two-tier language operating in plain sight.

There is the respected language learned through education,

and the not-so-respected language learned through survival.

One speaks in policy.

One speaks in procedure.

One speaks in files, meetings, assessments and evidence.

The other speaks in panic.

In body memory.

In trauma.

In survival.

This first arrow is aimed at the lie that survivors have nothing to say.

Maybe the problem was never that we had no language.

Maybe the problem was that the spaces meant to hear us never learned how to speak it.

Until the language of survival is spoken fluently in the rooms, systems and spaces that claim to offer care and protection,

not judgement and deflection based on observation, not experience,

it will always be two-tier.

Because the words lost in translation

are the ones that most need to be heard.

One arrow at a time.