Language Matters: When Words Drift from Description to Dehumanization
- R.E. Hengsterman
- Jan 28
- 5 min read
Updated: Feb 7
“Language does more than reflect reality; it defines how we perceive danger, assign accountability, and justify harm.” - R.E. Hengsterman
Over the years, we've seen a gradual shift in language. A linguistic drift.
Extremes have come to define groups, shaping narratives rather than mirroring reality.
In public discussions of politics, health, economics, and science, language is not a luxury; it's a civic responsibility.
As criminal acts are carried out by people, not categories, words meant to describe specific behavior are being applied to the masses. When this happens, language no longer clarifies; it starts laying blame on the community.
“Illegals, rapists, criminals, and murderers.”
We have heard this mantra repeated, as if the White House has assumed the role of a town crier, warning citizens that the barbarians are at the gates. Take shelter. Hide your young. Protect your children.
This is the power of language when it is stripped of evidence and repeated until fear feels like fact. Language matters, and we have allowed its drift not only to persist, but to become weaponized.
This progression is significant, gaining force when echoed by official voices, including White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt.
“Illegals, rapists, criminals, and murderers.”
There is no credible evidence that any racial or ethnic group is inherently more prone to criminal behavior. When crimes or acts of sexual violence occur, they must be examined in context—considering individual circumstances, opportunity, environmental conditions, and how incidents are reported and recorded, if they are reported at all.
Because immigration accounts for only one part of a much larger picture.
Reduction strategies are much more successful if they aim to prevent crime, hold people accountable, and reduce systemic risks rather than labelling entire ethnic communities. Now I hear the response already - we just want the illegals out - the Rapists, Criminals, Murderers.
Have you looked in your own backyard?
Serious harm is often found within the home, schools, religious communities, and the workplace. The likelihood of getting hurt is way higher within a community than by a gang of lawless marauders.
According to the U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights (OCR), 13,799 incidents of sexual violence were reported during the 2017–2018 academic year.
In 2025 alone, more than 150 teachers across the United States were charged with sex-related crimes, most often involving minors, based on local reporting.
Yes, they are legal; that distinction is acknowledged. But when someone you love is sexually assaulted by a trusted authority figure, such as a white teacher from Oklahoma, does that distinction meaningfully alter the narrative you have been taught to fear?
When such language is used broadly, does it imply that institutions like schools and professions like teaching are among the “rapists, criminals, and murderers” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt warns us about?
Or consider the church.
From their personnel files, 1670 persons belonging to the Catholic clergy were accused of sexual abuse of minors, corresponding to 4.4% of the clergy overall. 3677 victims of sexual abuse could be linked to the accused persons; 66.7% were under 14 years old when the abuse took place, and 62.8% of them were male. The figures reported here should be considered a lower bound to the actual frequency of sexual abuse.
In a closed system such as the Catholic Church, asymmetrical power relationships can facilitate sexual abuse.
They are legal yet equally problematic, demonstrating how selectively we apply concern, scrutiny, and accountability depending on who is being discussed.
31% are committed by strangers
28.3% by well-known or casual acquaintances
21.4% by intimate partners
13.1% by other relatives
3.7% involve an unknown number of perpetrators
2.5% involve a perpetrator with an unknown relationship to the victim
When we zoom in on external threats, we blur the real distribution of risks and distract ourselves from the places where the most harm is done.
Well-known effects of labelling a group as dangerous include homogenizing individual differences, replacing reality with assumptions, taking fear away from the real culprits, weakening our moral resistance, and making it easier to justify exclusion or neglect.
This is not a theoretical problem; it affects how we formulate policies, shake our faith in the system, and decide how we live our lives.
“Illegals, rapists, criminals, and murderers.”
When public figures and media conflate, diminish, or group together extreme crimes such as murder, rape, and sexual violence, the result is a jarring loss of precision in our minds. We start to blur the lines between individuals who've committed such crimes and the larger groups to which they're referred.
This linguistic drift takes our attention away from the things that cause the most harm, such as our own families, institutions, and relationships, and sends us on a wild goose chase for the less concrete threats, and as a result, we become less vigilant when we should be.
When Language Undermines Science: Vaccines and Linguistic Drift
Vaccines can undergo a similar erosion through linguistic drift, in which terms like “jab” replace scientific language and subtly diminish the rigor and complexity of the science involved.
Vaccines have done a great deal of good and, by any historical and epidemiological measures, have prevented hundreds of millions of deaths and reduced suffering around the world. They are not flawless and have had adverse effects, but that does not mean they are responsible for a conspiracy.
When nuance goes out the window, the results can be damaging, too.
The most damaging events in human history originated from internal problems rather than external ones when we reflect on them. Risks and threats can be normalized and under-analyzed, which is dangerous in itself. Coming to terms with our problems is made even more difficult by a philosophy that rules out the idea that critical reflection is an impediment to progress and that science is sacred.
Consider how modern capitalism developed into a global system.
The same linguistic mechanisms that normalize violence today were refined during these earlier expansions of power.
Something that did not arise from voluntary exchanges or moral principles, but was heavily dependent on colonial control, imperial looting, and decades of anti-communist wars, and justified with cautious wording.
The idea of exploitation was wrapped up in the mantle of "civilization", imperial control was presented as stability, and the anti-communist wars were packaged as a crusade to defend freedom, even though they involved massacres, regime overthrows, and plundering of resources, and in each case made a lot of the ugly realities disappear.
It's not that any one economic system is uniquely cruel.
All economic systems can cause damage when combined with power.
What distinguishes periods of greatest destruction is how tightly language can constrain accountability, as seen in the anti-communist wars across Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Africa.
Violence is repeatedly reframed as necessary, opposition to it is branded as a threat, and those who are killed are reduced to statistics. This is violence perpetrated by those in power.
Every new incident adds to social unrest; the fatal shootings of Renée Good, a 37-year-old mother, and Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, at the hands of federal immigration enforcement agents (ICE) are stark reminders of how these patterns fuel ongoing tension and debate.
In any such high-stakes tragedy, you'll see the story unfold as official statements are issued before the facts are fully confirmed.
Violence results when words take precedence over evidence.
Violence persists because of a lack of accountability, when those in power fuel the linguistic drift, when repetition normalizes harm, and when decisions about who belongs and who is excluded go unchecked.
“Illegals, rapists, criminals, and murderers.”
Author: R.E. Hengsterman, MSN, MA, M.E., RN
Registered nurse, night-shift administrator, and author of The Shift Worker’s Paradox
For educational purposes only. Not medical advice.
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