Rights (Wiki) - are legal, social, or ethical principles of freedom or entitlement; that is, rights are the fundamental normative rules about what is allowed of people or owed to people, according to some legal system, social convention, or ethical theory.
To me, the value of a right or it’s function, is to allow one confidence in an act without fear of negative repercussion. If you have a right to breathe, you can breathe without someone retaliating against you.
Rights allow us to cooperate with mutual benefit. It’s a framework for equality.
By it’s design, one attributes rights to others by default. If one didn’t do this, it would render the invention useless because it’s intent is to allow people to cooperate. If I don’t respect your rights, you will ignore the concept all together of entitlement and fight against me, because I’ve treated you unfairly.
This is how we’ve survived. If we didn’t fight against abuse by others, we would perish. We don’t want that.
I often thought I had no rights. Why? Because that was the only way I could cope with the abuse of me. A sad reality. However, to deny one’s rights, is to condemn oneself to be the perpetual victim.
The hardest part, I think, is to acknowledge the wound. One must do this to stop the bleeding. The longer one ignores, the more the wound festers and the harder it is to heal.
The way to stop being the victim, is to admit what has happened - grieve for what has happened - forgive, and respect the source of the conflict - wipe the slate clear, and let go of the pain - learn from what went wrong, and how to best go forward - go forward.