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Title: Restorative Justice is not Abolition Author: feralumbreon Language: en Topics: restorative justice, abuse, abolition
Almost every time I have heard about a “restorative/transformative
justice” process, I have become more and more disillusioned with the
supposed comrades pushing the process. I have never seen a process work
like promised. I have never seen either of those terms used for a
productive accountability process. I have only ever seen them weaponized
and deployed against victims. From sweeping death threats under the rug
to doubting rape victims to armchair psychiatry, every single process
has failed in a unique and horrific way. At this point I believe that
most of the people pushing for them (mostly white, mostly radlibs, and
mostly tenderqueers) have a fundamental misunderstanding of what justice
means, and therefore have no hope in helping to set up a post-carceral
world.
How can one be an abolitionist, if you cannot even hold someone
accountable for issuing death threats? Is your vision a world where
anyone can murder with impunity? Isn’t that why we are fighting against
the cops? How can one be an abolitionist, if you shield sexual assault
allegations from a transparent accountability process and armchair
diagnose someone with mental illnesses that they later use to avoid
accountability? If you ask a victim if they were harmed to the extent
that they say they were, how are you for abolition? Is your vision of
the world one where we do not listen to victims? Are you that
susceptible to DARVO? If your post-abolition vision has no mechanism to
right wrongs, provide healing to victims and teach people who cause harm
to be better, what is it other than a utopia for abusers?
Many of the people who posture about alternative justice have clearly
been coddled by the current state of the justice system. They have found
the correct “woke” verbiage to trot out to defend their repackaged
version of carceral justice. This is evident when they protest and
complain when victims (and their advocates) request that perpetrators be
removed from spaces. They often complain that these requests are
“cancelations.” Meanwhile ignoring that the request is extremely limited
in scope and solely asks that someone face some repercussions, these
calls never have included total social ostracism. Materially these
people are making setting boundaries a bargaining process, in which the
victim always loses.
Another symptom of this societal brainwashing is the concept amongst the
alt-justice crowd that time is justice. Time being synonymous with
justice is one of the very core tenets of carceral justice. The entire
premise is that by just waiting for a period of time, justice will be
obtained. Far too often allegations are dismissed with “that was so long
ago.” My only response to this form of concern trolling is, to ask if
the person harmed has gotten justice. The answer is usually the same as
if I asked that question about someone who just finished a lengthy
prison sentence, a hefty no. Both systems of justice use the passage of
time as an excuse for giving the harmed justice and the harmer an
opportunity to transform.
The end goal of these people is unclear. They do not have it in them to
help enforce boundaries. In a way they are showing that they cannot
manage justice because they fear getting their hands dirty. I fear that
if we include their beliefs of justice in our vision of a post-abolition
world, we are setting ourselves up to fail. A power vacuum will only
lead to armed opportunists recreating the very systems we want to
dismantle, and if our concept of justice is tainted by radlibs who are
afraid of getting things done we will inevitably replace the police
state with a power vacuum.
Not only can they not help with boundary enforcement, in addition they
almost universally and callously ignore others’. They needle and
interrogate anyone who makes allegations. Instead of listening to
victims’ experiences they feel the need to interrogate them. Often it
seems like the goal of these processes manifest more to be a jerk to
victims under the shield of accountability, while generating a laundry
list of items for abusers to publicly apologize for and never confront.
At its worst extreme this means the mediators hand over the names of
victims to their abusers, enabling abusers to continue to harass their
victims. This harassment is not only allowed to continue, but even
encouraged by alt-justice mediators as good information gathering and a
conversation.
Nothing I have said here should discourage future efforts into
transformative or restorative justice, but the people who have made it
their role to mediate have done a thoroughly shitty job. They have
tarnished the meanings of both terms, they have hit the same levels of
concern trolling about “cancel culture” as neoconservatives, they have
caused harm and created an environment where people are scared to speak
about their abuse. We need to reevaluate the place that these concepts
have in our community and reevaluate whether we can use them
effectively. We also need to remove the judge in our heads, and make
sure that people who self-choose mediator roles can fulfill them. As it
stands now, the terms are just used to shield abusers from
accountability, we need to grow and do better.
Addendum: the title of this piece is provocative. The point I tried to
get across with it is that this form of restorative justice is not
abolitionist. Restorative justice can and should be part of a
post-abolition society, but it by itself is not a form of abolition.