“It is one thing to hear the rumors, but I think when people actually saw the tweets, and the vile things that were said with their own eyes, it really drove home just how disgusting the behavior of these kids was that night.”
Something about this seeing allows a particular kind of action (or perhaps more honestly a particular kind of inaction), frequently a distant, detached judgment, one that inspires indignation toward the wrongdoer and pity toward the victim. One thing I'm concerned with is how (and whether) we can move from indignation to action, from pity to compassion. Hannah Arendt wrote that not only can pity not be moved to compassion, but that they may even be unrelated. Luc Boltanski wrote an entire book on this problem of the viewing of suffering from a distance (called Distant Suffering). I think Arendt and Boltanski are onto something. I'm as inclined to see indignation and action as detached, even unrelated, or sharing the same relationship as between pity and compassion.
One thing that seems unique about the feminist challenge to rape culture is that it often subordinates calls for retribution to demands for transformation. This is an interesting contrast to my case. With police brutality, the interest is with accountability, and often transformation is not even a consideration. Ending rape culture is not about changing a particular behavior (here, the coerced and violent sexual assault, in my case the "inappropriate" use of "excessive" or deadly force by police); it is about transforming a culture, changing institutions, etc. What could we who are interested in fighting police brutality learn from this?
