#accountability process

But what if the value of honesty is not determined by how it's received? What if vulnerably revealing myself, exposing my scars, speaking unspeakable pain, unearthing the depth of how my body and personhood have been violated are inherently rebellious acts that cannot be measured by their results? What if speaking the truth in all its messiness and nuances is an act that resists the ways of this world reguardless of whether people choose to listen or be transformed by the truth? What if saying no, even if it's ignored, is an instance that I am human, that I have autonomy, that my body is mine, that I refuse your unwelcome touch?

If my speaking up and facing those who dehumanize me has not changed hearts or minds, if my intentions or desires are not the fruits I get to harvest from my action, does that make silence or inaction better? I should know by now that the answer is fuck no. The arbitrators of my humanity become less arbitrating the moment I speak up and reveal their delusions. It's not their recognition or stamp of approval that makes me human. It's my insistance on my humanity and refusal to comply with their denial of my humanity that makes me human.

Just as the oppressed do not need their oppressors to recognize and codify our status as humans when we already are human and just as we do not beg our rulers to allow us the right to live, we simply do. We live, we exist, we build, we liberate ourselves first and foremost, without care for our enemies' incapacity to see us let alone their fucking permission. We fight anything that gets in the way of our ability to live as full human beings without waiting for our enemies to stop subjugating us. We stop becoming objects of domination the minute we begin to verb. That in and of itself is a liberatory act, no matter the result.

Some folks in my community are struggling. One is in a downward spiral and needs to work on himself and the way he shows up in community. Honestly, needs rehab too.

But something rubbed me the wrong way about one of the people in our community demanding accountability from him over an incident that has since been revealed to be falsified. There's more to the story and more complicated /problematic relationships involved but I won't digress. This (above) writer/educator helped me understand why I felt rubbed the wrong way.

We can't demand accountability processes from someone, it's impossible to force someone into accountability. That dude can't be held accountable until he is healing and ready. There was no point in weilding communal power and abuse over him to try and force him to do something he isn't ready for. The person demanding accountability is oftentimes an all-or-nothing thinker and I struggle with that way of thinking.

This is a tricky place to be. I am sad for my friends and my community that are suffering. I will stand by everyone involved who needs support. I'm not going to cancel or demonize anyone. Cause nobody deserves that. Nobody can heal in that.

Continuing on from this post, going into more detail about the devastating failures of accountability processes to adequately deal with SA, & this post with many forgotten voices from other activists expressing the same. Just to be clear, almost the entirety of the quotes & critiques in this series comes from activists who are vehemently opposed to the current justice/prison system. None of these difficult experiences leading to the critiques would have happened in the first place if the people writing them believed the current system was viable or just. I strongly believe that having the honesty & humility to face clear limitations which have arisen repeatedly over the many years of restorative justice can only ensure that the movement can build upon its sucesses rather than simply endlessly repeat the same dangerous failures. Just like many other programs, therapists & institutions have tried & failed for decades, so too have activists failed to rehabilitate very specific offenders like r*pists, p3dos & abusers. (A rehabilitative approach is still, of course, highly effective in other contexts.) The failure in this goal is not specific to activists, and needless to say the responsbility for each assault lies with the offender themselves. However, the insistence on continuing to gamble on such an unlikelihood of succeeding at this, in ways that have harmed so many for well over a decade, still remains a persistent problem in many activists spaces. Even in cases of SA, restorative justice that  recognizes these limitations can offer far superior options for supporting survivors' recovery than individual therapy alone. There is a very great need for more of these forms of restorative justice. As mentioned elsewhere, one especially damaging failure across many years has been the frequency in which these accountability processes result in r*pists receiving far more support than survivors (even in cases where support for the survivor is factored into the design of said process). From “If a Man in Newtown Commits Rape and no one knows how to deal with it, did it really even happen?”

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From On Patriarchal Violence and Rape Apologia in The Chicago Activist Scene: The Proletarian Feminist Response https://peoples-voice.org/2021/06/04/on-patriarchal-violence-and-rape-apologia-in-the-chicago-activist-scene-the-proletarian-feminist-response/

From Revolutionary Heartbreak: Why Every Single Rapist Has to Go, 2012

https://necessarymeansfight.blogspot.com/2012/12/revolutionary-heartbreak-why-every.html

From tumblr 2013

Excerpts from "Understanding the Predatory Nature of Sexual Violence (http://www.middlebury.edu/media/view/240951/original/PredatoryNature.pdf)" David Lisak, Ph.D.

Necessary means fight, 2013

On Standards of Feminist Conduct-CMLMS, Center for Marxist Leninist-Maoist Studies 16/8/2013 http://www.signalfire.org/2013/08/18/on-standards-of-feminist-conduct-cmlms/

This is specifically about restorative justice approaches that entail trying to rehabilitate the offender. Processes that simply seek to support survivors & create healing and safety in communities are far more fruitful and free of the dangerous pitfalls touched upon here & in other posts [1] [2]

As you can tell from the dates of citations, both Restorative Justice or the painful failures of it to adequately address SA are not new.

Many have seen these exact dysfunctional dynamics crop up over & over again in the many “accountability processes” that have taken before & the near-decade after these were written. I hope seeing these words is validating those many survivors who have painfully lost their beloved communities due to the failure of these processes.

Just to be perfectly clear, every survivor who has faced this additional trauma has done so because of believing, rightly, in the severe failures & injustices of the present “justice” system. They never would have agreed to participate in these experiments without deeply valuing an end to that type of carceral oppression, even in the depth of the trauma of SA. Despite the many quotes here, none captures the depth of heartbreak that is losing any semblance of trust or safety within the community you believed held the key to building a better world.

I’m sharing these in the spirit of learning from ways which have failed, so we can focus our efforts in ways that will achieve the goal of healing, & avoid further harm to survivors & communities.

From Betrayal zine, 2012:

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Accounting For Ourselves zine, 2013

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Is the Anarchist Man Our Comrade?

From Moving Beyond Critique: Creative Interventions and Reconstructions of Community Accountability, 2011

From Radical Women’s Kitchen

The Chicago Reader: A silence louder than words, by Taylor Moore

Excerpts from “Understanding the Predatory Nature of Sexual Violence” David Lisak, Ph.D., UMass Boston

The Limits of Restorative Justice_, Arlène Gaudreault, Proceedings of the Symposium of the École nationale de la magistrature, Paris: Édition Dalloz, 2005

“There is no such thing as a safe space under patriarchy or capitalism in light of all the sexist; hetero-normative, racist, classicist domination we live under.  An accountability process within -capitalist normative communities- is impossible because there is no such thing as community. Community in this context is a mythical, frequently invoked and much misused term.”—Angustia Celeste

‘ACCOUNTABILITY PROCESS’ New track from my #techno project #AnalogBloc