"I suppose everyone lives like this."
The exact moment I confronted that sentence, a freezing agony pierced the deepest recesses of my heart. Indeed, when violence turns chronic and dissolves into the very air of existence, a human being ceases to even perceive that it is violence. Those who have matured or survived within an environment where they are beaten daily, gaslit daily, and have their personalities trampled daily accept this reality not as a "crime," but merely as an "everyday routine" and a "destiny" they must endure. They domesticate themselves, assuming the universe is inherently this cold and painful.
Yet, our judicial system possesses zero capacity to detect this devastating, sorrowful psychology of the vulnerable. Or rather, to be precise, it harbors no intention to do so. The law consistently reacts exclusively to conspicuous, spectacular cases and clamorous tears—while thoroughly turning a blind eye to the chronic silence of those whose lives are slowly capsizing.
The Arrogance of a Courtroom Enforcing a ‘Victim Persona’
The primary catalyst for why the law forfeits victims of chronic violence lies within the arrogant "victim frame" manufactured by the courtroom.
The court stubbornly believes that if one is a victim of a crime, they must naturally explode into instantaneous fury, resist, and request assistance by reporting the event to investigative organs. In essence, it has anchored a blueprint of so-called "behavior worthy of a victim" as a rigid guideline.
However, those whose brains and souls have been paralyzed through exposure to chronic violence cannot even summon the audacity to resist. Trapped inside a learned helplessness where no escape hatch exists, they concentrate their entire sensory network merely on surviving the day intact.
When they finally summon the courage to knock on the courtroom gates at a later juncture, the judiciary instead views them with skepticism, interrogating: "Why did you remain complacent for years, only to report it now?" or "Did you not fail to explicitly vocalize your dissent at the time?" Legal professionals who have memorized nothing but cold, rigid statutes can never comprehend that excruciating context of life—where the violence was so chronic it eluded perception itself.
Sorrow Transformed into Unreadable Data: The Frontier of the AI Courtroom
If the hyper-efficient "AI judicial system" we discussed previously reaches completion, the despair of these victims of chronic violence will be permanently, institutionally fossilized.
Artificial intelligence calculates strictly and exclusively based upon "inputted data." It recognizes an event as a "fact" only if it has been meticulously cataloged in a diary over years, preserved via hospital medical certificates, or documented through a lineage of police reports.
Yet, within the existence of those who swallowed their agony in solitude, whispering, "I suppose everyone lives like this," there remains not a single fragment of standardized data that a judicial AI can parse. In the eyes of the machine, their purgatory is nothing but a phantom act that simply does not exist. A tech-driven tribunal that worships exclusively efficiency and quantified proof will be the first to erase the most genuinely wronged victims of chronic violence from the map of the judicial system—executing it with the utmost neatness.
The Hypocrisy of a World Demanding Justice with a Broken Ruler
Ultimately, we come face-to-face with the grandest hypocrisy of the judiciary. While it grants exceptional salvation to specific offenses by snapping its own grand rule of evidence-centrism—simply because those crimes have the voice of the public square and gender politics at their back—it enforces a freezing judicial benchmark against the silence of the genuinely vulnerable who, due to years of chronic abuse, fail to even perceive themselves as victims, muttering, "There is no evidence, so nothing can be done."
The scales of the judiciary have already forfeited their equity. An elastic justice that sheds tears to calibrate the gradients of the scale for the narratives of the loud, while enforcing rigid metrics against the agony of the submerged who cannot even forge a voice. This is the raw, naked countenance of the law we cherished as righteous.
The law can never autonomously unearth the shadows of chronic violence. This is because the raw essence of the law is nothing more than a freezing administrative instrument and a post-processing machine.
Countless silences must be enduring a hellish routine this very day, murmuring, "I suppose everyone lives like this." Staring at those unrevealed agonies, I realize upon what a shallow mirage the judicial system and technological advancements we so aggressively praise truly stand. As the machine’s computations achieve perfection, and as the stone walls of the law tower higher, the human sorrow that truly necessitates salvation sinks ever deeper beneath the freezing thresholds of that courtroom.
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