Case Study: The Systemic Failure to...

 Recognize Racially Motivated Abuse as a Form of Relational Abuse

With regard to racially motivated: Domestic Violence, Sexual Violence and Emotional Abuse

Background

In the United States, frameworks for identifying and addressing abuse—particularly domestic and sexual abuse—have traditionally focused on intimate partner relationships, family dynamics, or identifiable social ties.

However, this scope has overlooked a critical and pervasive form of abuse rooted in systemic racism in other relationships such as housing relationships, employment relationships, medical relationships.

Dominant systems of abuse prevention and response have failed to acknowledge widespread domestic, emotional, and sexual violence motivated by systemic racism—violence that occurs within intimate, non-personal relationships in spaces such as housing relationships—where a person sleeps every night; employment relationships—where a person must engage in order to get money to eat; and healthcare—where permission is given to touch and even see persons naked. This is truly intimacy. The white-centric narrative doesn’t include these intimate relationships because they’re not experiencing domestic, emotional, and sexual violence in these relationships at the same rate that Black Americans are.

However, Black victims are experiencing domestic, sexual, and emotional abuse in these relationships. When they do experience them, they’re harder to end than white-centric abuse because the dominant narrative is dismissing them, since they’re not targeted in these spaces. Shame on everyone involved in the current infrastructure.

But we’re not here to have a racial debate about people’s beliefs and feelings as to whether these actions were right or wrong—we’re here to move forward.

It’s obvious that if we say that one motivator for identical abuse is not valid, then we’re saying the victim’s need for protection is not valid.

We can establish if that’s what we’re saying or not—without debate.

It’s simple: make the correction or don’t make the correction.

That will communicate our position.

It will be equally beneficial to victims who are not being protected to know that the existing infrastructure is for or against their protection based on the responsive actions taken—then these victims can create plans to begin protecting themselves from everything that is harmful to them if the current infrastructure won’t do that inclusive work.

We’re here to do the work, and that’s why we have created the case study. So, moving on. It’s pretty simple here: domestic violence is domestic violence, irrespective of how the relationship was established or maintained, when the acts are the same or similar. Emotional abuse is emotional abuse, irrespective of how the relationship was established or maintained, when the acts are the same or similar. Sexual violence, abuse, and harassment is sexual violence, abuse, and harassment, irrespective of how the relationship was established or maintained, when the acts are the same or similar.

These are environments where people are made vulnerable by necessity—not by choice—yet the abuse that occurs in these settings is often rendered invisible because it doesn’t align with the white-centric definitions of abuse that shape our laws, institutions, and social consciousness.

This failure is not a gap in tradition—it is the result of deliberate exclusion. The lived realities of Black people have been systematically erased from the frameworks that define what “counts” as violence or what “qualifies” as abuse. Meanwhile, the power imbalances in places where people live, work, or seek care are exploited daily by abusers who know that the system doesn’t recognize the harm they’re doing.

This case study is a call to end that erasure. The knowledge, language, and frameworks must change—and that change starts by centering education directly from the people who have always been excluded from the current centric conversation—irrespective of the discomfort that releasing total leadership control will likely pose for the current infrastructure.

Those who’ve never experienced these forms of violence must stop positioning themselves as the default authority. The education must come from those who live this reality—not because it’s comfortable, but because it’s the only way to achieve accuracy.

There is no room left for frameworks that only protect those whose experiences match the dominant narrative. That narrative has always been incomplete—and its incompleteness has always been deadly.

Millions of Black Americans experience daily abuse that does not mirror, but actually is, the tactics and psychological impacts of domestic violence, emotional abuse and sexual violence, yet receive no protection or acknowledgment due to the selfish, and racially narrow design of abuse prevention systems.

Problem Statement

Despite a wealth of historical, academic, and media-based documentation, American institutions have failed to formally include systemic racism as a recognized motivator of abuse. This omission has left significant gaps in the law, education, and victim advocacy systems. Racially motivated (exploitive) abuse, which frequently includes stalking, emotional degradation, physical violence, and sexual harassment, is often carried out by complete strangers or institutional actors in intimate professional relationships and proximity with the victims—individuals who have no legitimate reason or legal authorization to interact with the victim in any personal capacity.

Nonetheless, the behaviors mimic traditional domestic abuse dynamics in both severity and method, especially in the ways power is exploited and boundaries are violated—with some slight nuances such as using police officers to make physical contact rather than the abuser using their own hands.

Case Overview: Don Klyberg’s Property and Staff

The victim in this case study—who also authors this account—has endured sustained abuse while residing in a property owned by Don Klyberg. The abuse, carried out by Klyberg’s staff, reflects the exact patterns of control, harassment, and personal violation seen in domestic abuse and sexual violence cases. The key distinction is that these abuses were carried out without any personal relationship or consent, in the intimate relationship of personal residence and daily proximity of professional management, but allowed under the guise of racial and gender authority, as well as employment management, backed by systemic neglect under the guise of racial and gender authority.

The point, obviously, being: gender, race, and employment are moot factors—the abuser doesn’t have a right to abuse. They don’t even have the authority to “personally engage” the victim at all, irrespective of the intimate relationship created through proximity and housing contracts.

Furthermore, attempts to seek support were met with additional challenges, as law enforcement, advocates, and domestic violence professionals had no framework or training to recognize racially motivated abuse as valid or actionable. This lack of systemic support is not unique to this case, with this victim. In support of this argument, evidence of over 800 additional individuals have been identified as experiencing similar forms of racially motivated abuse from intimate non-personal, strangers and institutional actors who assert dominion rooted in racial hierarchy.

Racism is the underlying force that emboldens abusers with internal permissions like: “I can do this,” “I’m entitled to do this,” and “I have the privilege to carry out this abuse without consequence.” The abuse may have happened regardless—but when the victim is Black, the likelihood of accountability decreases drastically, if not entirely. The abuser knows this. And so, they choose this space—this person—to harm.

What reinforces this abuse is not just the act itself, but the interventive infrastructure designed to protect victims, which fails at the very first step. Systems rooted in white-centric understanding begin their inquiries with questions like: “How do you know the perpetrator?” “What is your relationship to them?”—as if harm cannot occur without a personal or romantic tie. This approach instantly derails the complaint before it starts, because it’s based on a narrow and exclusionary definition of abuse—one that doesn’t include the reality of systemic, racialized violence.

When systemic racism is the context, it must be understood: racists often behave with a disturbing sense of ownership over Black bodies—as if they are entitled to the same liberties and access as a romantic partner. They violate boundaries with a delusional intimacy, acting as if they are sleeping with the victim, as if they are entitled to the victim’s body, space, or compliance—despite the reality that they may have never seen the victim before the attack. This is not coincidence; this is the operating logic of systemic racism.

Even worse, the legal system frequently refuses to even name or process these encounters. The message becomes clear: “We don’t want to know.” And that deliberate ignorance ensures that the public remains largely unaware of the actual, everyday experiences Black Americans are having—especially in common, shared spaces. The public is only given a sliver of the reality: viral clips of “Karens” attacking Black people they’ve never met, often escalating into police involvement, legal entanglements, and long-term trauma, including Legal Abuse Syndrome and PTSD.

But these visible incidents are just the surface symptoms. Beneath them are far more destructive, frequent, and dehumanizing encounters—most of which would be removed from public platforms if fully shared, because they are too violent, too disturbing, and too honest for public consumption. And what makes this even more dangerous is that there is often no path of escape for victims.

Except, perhaps, one: resolution through lethal force. If institutional failure continues to deny people protection and justice, victims may feel the only option left is to defend themselves through force—to begin forcibly removing their abusers. That is not a threat; it’s a warning rooted in history. When systems refuse to acknowledge and correct injustice, people will protect themselves by any means necessary. If this nation truly does not want that to be the outcome, then it must stop ignoring these problems and start enacting real corrections—urgently and seriously—before violence becomes the only protective option left for a targeted population that is 42 million bodies strong in the 50 U.S. States alone. We cannot continue to deprioritize the freedom of safety for every single American-It’s becoming too risky to carry on as selfishly as we have been.

The infrastructure for dealing with abuse needs to address this and it doesn’t need a segregated category from everyone else’s experience of abuse. It needs to be simply incorporated in the existing language so that it is complete and not white-centric.

Key Themes Identified

• Systemic Racism as a Motivator: Abuse driven by racial bias operates similarly to domestic abuse but is not formally acknowledged in legal or social service frameworks.
• Mischaracterization of Abuse: Institutions often reframe these incidents as isolated “racial disparities” or misunderstandings, avoiding meaningful intervention.
• Lack of Legal Recognition: The absence of legal mechanisms to address abuse by non-intimate perpetrators motivated by racism leaves victims without protection or justice.
• Institutional Complicity: In many cases, the offenders are themselves public servants, such as police officers or housing officials, creating additional layers of danger and inaccessibility to justice.
• Cultural Minimization: The cultural depiction of racially motivated actors—exemplified in the widespread meme of the “Karen”—trivializes real harm and deflects from serious policy discussion.

Implications

This case illustrates that racially motivated abuse is not only widespread but deeply under-addressed due to systemic gaps. When abusers exploit racial power structures to enact control or violence, and institutions fail to respond, the abuse is compounded and made more difficult to escape.

Moreover, failing to categorize this behavior as a form of domestic or interpersonal abuse allows abusers to operate with impunity, often under the protection of legal and bureaucratic systems.

Conclusion and Call to Action

To address these abuses effectively, a new category must be formally recognized based on the “Intimate Non-personal Offender”. This profile should be incorporated into existing frameworks for identifying and preventing abuse, alongside classifications like “controlling spouse” or “stalking ex-partner.”

America must stop segregating the concept of abuse. The systems meant to protect victims must evolve to include the full reality of who is committing abuse—and why in order to provide better protection and recourse for the victims. Racially motivated abusers exploit social, legal, and institutional blind spots, and as long as those remain uncorrected, victims will continue to suffer without recourse.

Law enforcement, policymakers, domestic violence advocates, and scholars must stop pretending this form of abuse doesn’t exist. It does. It is measurable, documentable, and fixable—if it is acknowledged.

Suggested Reading

SEXUAL VIOLENCE AGAINST SOULAANI WOMEN—THE SILENT EPIDEMIC

Additional Cases of Intimate Non-Personal relationship abuse:

The Case of "Intimate Non-Personal" Abuse in the Kentucky 8

The Case of “Intimate Non-Personal” Abuse Assistant Attorney General

The Case of “Intimate Non-Personal” Abuse in Minnesota

The Case of "Intimate Non-Personal" Abuse in Chicago, Illinois

The Case of "Intimate Non-Personal" Abuse In Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Case Study: The Systemic Failure to Recognize Racially Motivated Abuse as a Form of Relational Abuse

Introducing New Framework For Recognizing and Addressing Intimate Non-Personal Abuse