I don’t have any answers, but I agree it should be talked about more. Specifically, the two main answers I’ve seen people in leftist spaces come up with that aren’t prison or TJ/RJ are:
- one group of people agrees to socially shun a rapist or sex creep and stop allowing them in shared spaces. however, this can mean the person just finds a new social group who aren’t aware of their history and begins sexually predatory behavior within that new group. (this is basically the one situation I can think of where I approve of call out posts— a means by which it is in fact possible to make life a little more difficult for people who have a history and repeating pattern of abusing others, moving on to new scenes and new victims whenever they’re caught, threatened, shunned, etc).
- If not shunning, then people tend to go for “string em up!!!” & to clarify, I have no problem with that as, like, an emotional attitude someone might have towards a person who abused them or a loved one. but I really don’t think I need to explain why “random vigilantes go around jumping and murdering anyone who’s been accused of rape (or other ‘sufficiently bad’ abuses)” would be an extremely poor system. Even if this could somehow be limited only to people who definitely actually did what they were accused of doing, it puts many survivors in a shitty position not terribly different from today’s— I don’t WANT my rapists to get murdered (or raped themselves, or put in prison for decades), and never have, but I do want them to face consequences. Given the choice between someone facing cruelly disproportionate punishment or not experiencing any real consequences, I’ll almost always choose the latter. But that doesn’t mean I like it or am happy about it, and I think people who have a more emotionally complicated relationship with their assailant or abuser, or who just aren’t very bloodthirsty, deserve a satisfying outcome to their situation just as much as your Inigo Montoya types.
also, if it were the case that rapists &c typically got murdered by a mob of angry townsfolk upon the revelation of what they’d done, we’d start seeing so, so, so many more rape-murders (&c) in cases where previously the offender wouldn’t have ever killed anybody. if you think someone will, effectively, kill you by telling on you, it makes sense to shut them up first, and we’re talking here about people who have already shown they can be violent and cavalier about other people’s lives.
- returning to the first bullet point, in cases where someone is not habitually predatory or violent or abusive, and seems genuinely remorseful or clueless that they did anything wrong, I think shaming and the loss of valued personal relationships ARE pretty good tools for making sure the offender experiences consequences that dissuade them from rationalizing their behavior as okay or ever behaving in a similar way again. I think ideally this is paired with some kind of support in addressing the issues that led to whatever it was they did— maybe this guy needs to learn that women are actual autonomous humans and there’s no situation on Earth in which he’s entitled to a girl’s affection, maybe this girl needs to learn that sexual harassment a woman does to a man isn’t cute/funny/harmless/girlboss behavior, maybe this person needs to refrain from close relationships and sex with others until they unpack the twisted lessons about consent they learned as a child, maybe that person needs to quit drinking and doing drugs. But then that of course also raises the question of “how should that support be given, and by whom.” Which: again, I don’t know. Ideally, that’s meant to be a function of TJ, but I’m not sure anyone has ever agreed on the how/by whom question.
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