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Title: Accounting for Ourselves
Author: CrimethInc., pfm
Language: en
Topics: community accountability, transformative justice, restorative justice, creative intervention, sex
Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20190802071258/https://crimethinc.com/2013/04/17/accounting-for-ourselves-breaking-the-impasse-around-assault-and-abuse-in-anarchist-scenes
Notes: PFM, Paul F. Maul

CrimethInc., pfm

Accounting for Ourselves

Sexual assault and abuse continue to plague anarchist circles and

spaces. In response, we’ve developed processes to hold each other

accountable outside of the state. But why can’t we seem to get them

right? This essay examines the context in which these community

accountability models emerged and analyzes the pitfalls we’ve

encountered in trying to apply them. To move beyond the impasse around

sexual violence within our scenes, we need to challenge the idea of

community itself and take our resistance in new directions.

Introduction

“I don’t believe in accountability anymore
 my anger and hopelessness

about the current model are proportional to how invested I’ve been in

the past. Accountability feels like a bitter ex-lover to me
 the past

ten years I really tried to make the relationship work, but you know

what?”

— Angustia Celeste,

“Safety is an Illusion: Reflections on Accountability”

Getting Started: Origins and Purpose

Sexual assault and abuse tear us apart. They fracture our communities,

ruin individual lives, sabotage projects and organizing, reveal nasty

contradictions between our supposed ideals and our actual practices, and

maintain a climate of fear and oppression, especially for women. Sexual

assault is political; it is a function of patriarchy, not just an

individual harm done by individual people (usually men) to others (most

often women). Sexual assault and abuse, partner violence, child abuse,

and sexual harassment are primary ways that men physically impose

domination over women. Sexualized violence helps to maintain patriarchy,

heterosexism, trans oppression, ageism and oppression of youth, racist

colonialism, and genocide. The struggle against sexual assault and abuse

is essential for revolutionary transformation.

The accountability process model has been one of the primary tools used

by anarchists to address assault and abuse in recent years. This essay

analyzes this model in hopes of provoking honest, self-critical

discussion about how we respond to assault and abuse within anarchist

scenes, and imagining directions to move forward.

This article is NOT intended to serve as an accessible introduction to

community accountability processes; it assumes that you have some

knowledge of what they are and how they work (or don’t work). It draws

specifically on North American anarchist, punk, and radical activist

subcultures and presumes that the reader understands their context and

language. If you don’t, try reading some of the sources cited below

before this one. If you’re an anarchist and you’ve had some experience

with efforts to respond to assault and abuse within your scene under the

label of “accountability,” this is intended for you.

Gender Frameworks

Gender is complicated; some folks we might perceive as male or female

don’t identify that way, and some don’t identify as either. In referring

to “men” or “women,” we mean folks who identify that way, whether

cisgender or transgender. Throughout this essay, both survivors and

people who’ve assaulted or abused others are referred to in general

using “they” as a gender-neutral pronoun. Assault and abuse can be

committed by anyone against anyone, across gender lines; sometimes cis

women, trans men and women, and genderqueer folk assault, and often cis

men are survivors as well. But this acknowledgment should not erase the

fact that the vast majority of folks who abuse and assault are cis men,

and the majority of folks they abuse and assault are women.

Sexual assault and abuse are neither gender-specific (i.e., they can

only happen by or to people of a certain gender) nor gender-neutral

(i.e., the gender of a person who assaults or is assaulted is irrelevant

to the conversation). We must understand the gendered patterns of

assault and abuse as an expression of patriarchal domination, without

making invisible experiences that fall outside of that gendered

framework.

Restorative and Transformative Justice

In speaking about accountability processes, we’re referring to

collective efforts to address harm—in this case, sexual assault and

abuse—that focus not on punishment or legal “justice” but on keeping

people safe and challenging the underlying social patterns and power

structures that support abusive behavior. In the loosest sense, this

might simply mean a few friends sticking up for someone who’s been hurt:

asking them what they need, and trying to negotiate for those needs with

the person who hurt them and among the community they share. Some

processes involve a group that mediates between an individual and the

person calling them out, or separate groups supporting each person and

facilitating communication between them. These processes usually involve

setting out conditions or “demands” for the person who’s been called out

as a means of restoring safety or trust and preventing the harm from

happening again, and some method for following up to ensure that these

demands are met. All of these different approaches share an intention to

address the harm done directly without relying on the state.

Community accountability appeals to anarchists as a critical alternative

to the adversarial framework of the criminal “justice” system. According

to this framework, two parties in conflict are assumed to have opposite

interests; the state considers itself the aggrieved party and thus acts

as mediator; and “justice” means deciding which person is correct and

which person suffers consequences—which are determined by the state, and

usually unrelated to the actual harm done or its root causes. In

contrast, restorative justice focuses on the needs of the ones harmed

and those who did harm, rather than the need to satisfy the abstract

principles of law or to exact punishment. Folks who’ve been harmed play

an active role in resolving a dispute, while those who harm are

encouraged to take responsibility for their actions and repair the harm

they’ve done. It is based on a theory of justice that sees “crime” and

wrongdoing as an offense against individuals or communities rather than

the state. Many of the current working models for restorative justice

originated in Maori and North American indigenous communities.

Building on that framework, the transformative justice model links

restorative justice’s focus on rectifying harm rather than strengthening

state power with a critique of systematic oppression. According to

Generation Five, an organization that grounds their work to end child

sexual abuse in this model, the goals of transformative justice are:

violence—systems of oppression and exploitation, domination, and state

violence

The anarchist practice of community accountability rests in theory on

these underlying principles, along with the DIY ethic and a focus on

direct action.

Where We’re At - Anarchist Community Accountability: Recent History

and the Current State of Things

How did this set of practices around responding to sexual assault and

abuse emerge? In the 1990s and early 2000s, women and other survivors

responded to assault and abuse in a variety of ways, including making

zines calling people out to distribute at shows, discussing their

experiences amongst themselves, warning people in other communities

about repeat assaulters, and in some cases physically confronting them.

The Hysteria Collective based in the Portland, OR area represented one

of the early structural attempts to respond to sexual assault, producing

and distributing literature, challenging the presence of abusive men in

the punk scene, and organizing a conference. In other towns, folks

formed girl gangs for self-defense and concerted confrontational action.

However, more often than not, such efforts were isolated, belief in rape

myths persisted amongst anarchists (especially men), and survivors who

attempted to speak out were ignored, shunned, dismissed for distracting

attention from more important issues, or blamed for COINTELPRO-style

divisiveness.

In response, anarchist women and others worked to encourage anarchist

scenes to take sexual assault and abuse seriously and promote a culture

of consent. Much of this spread through zine culture, particularly Cindy

Crabb’s Doris and Support zines; also, workshops began appearing at

radical conferences discussing survivor support, consent, and positive

sexuality. Men’s groups began to organize against sexual violence in

some radical scenes, such as the Dealing With Our Shit (DWOS) collective

founded in Minneapolis in 2002. A major turning point occurred at the

2004 Pointless Fest in Philadelphia, where concert organizers publicly

announced that three women had been raped at the event and established

collectives to support the survivors and figure out how to deal with the

rapists. These collectives became Philly’s Pissed and Philly Stands Up,

long-standing separate but collaborating collectives devoted

respectively to survivor support and assaulter intervention.

Assault, accountability, and consent became topics at nearly all

anarchist conferences and gatherings. Many distros began to carry zines

on the subject, touring bands spoke from stage about it, and anarchists

in many other cities formed support and accountability collectives.

Organizers of mass mobilizations began to develop plans for response,

culminating in a full-scale sexual assault response infrastructure at

the anti-G20 convergence in Pittsburgh in 2009.

So how do things stand today? Terms such as “consent,” being “called

out,” “accountability process,” and “perpetrator” are in wide use, to

the point of becoming the subject of jokes. A great many people have

been called out for abusive behavior, and dozens of accountability

processes are ongoing in various stages. An identity politics around the

labels “survivor” and “perpetrator” has emerged, with scenes polarizing

around them. In spite of efforts to caution against this and encourage

all participants in accountability processes to remain self-critical,

these labels have sometimes been used to leverage power, dispense or

deny legitimacy, and erase differences in experience.

Philly Stands Up continues their work, getting paid by colleges to lead

trainings on their model and functioning as a sort of semi-formal sexual

assaulter surveillance organization, with folks from around the country

contacting them for updates on different ongoing processes. They

networked with other groups doing transformative justice work at the US

Social Forum in Detroit and hosted a three-day training for community

accountability organizers in January 2011. Numerous other similar

collectives have been attempted among anarchists in other cities, though

few have had the longevity or prominence of PSU. As more and more

intra-scene communication moves onto the internet, a number of websites

(most prominently anarchistnews.org) have become major hubs for

shit-talking around the politics of assault and accountability. Websites

have also appeared giving information about specific individuals who

have assaulted or abused others.

Most anarchist gatherings now issue guidelines about consent and sexual

assault response, and often address the presence of people involved in

accountability processes. Based on the policies developed by sexual

assault response organizers at the 2009 Pittsburgh anti-G20

mobilization, organizers at the 2010 anti-IMF mobilizations in

Washington DC posted an announcement stating “No Perpetrators Welcome.”

It explained that in an effort to make the demos safe for survivors,

“people who have perpetrated in the past, people running away from

accountability processes, and people who refuse to respect the IMF

Resistance Network consent guidelines” were prohibited from all

organizing spaces and events. More recently, organizers for the 2012

Toronto Anarchist Book Fair echoed this language banning all

perpetrators, but added:

We understand and respect that communities have engaged in their own

processes around these incidents. If you have gone through an

accountability process and the survivor, joined by the community, feels

you have sufficiently dealt with your shit, this statement does not

include you.

Likewise, the organizers of the 2012 New York Anarchist Book Fairbanned:

People who have perpetrated inter-personal violence, assault and/or

harassment unless they are actively engaged in an accountability process

and currently in compliance with all the terms and/or demands of that

process (according to the facilitators, the survivor, and/or whomever’s

been designated to monitor the agreements emerging from the process).

A major source of controversy has been the pre-emptive banning of

individuals who’ve been called out for sexual assault or abuse from

anarchist gatherings. In recent years, survivors and their supporters

have increasingly requested for particular individuals who have sexually

assaulted others to be banned from upcoming events. Organizers have

struggled to prioritize believing survivors without pre-emptively

condemning people, and to balance transparency against privacy and

avoiding retraumatization. An internet brouhaha emerged when a person

online posted an email they had received from organizers of the New York

Anarchist Book Fair, asking them not to attend without specifying the

reason. Some interpreted the email as a Kafkaesque, authoritarian

presumption of guilt through anonymous rumor, while others defended it

as an effort to remain neutral while attempting to secure a sense of

safety for other attendees.

While controversies persist around our methods of response to sexual

assault, norms around sexuality have shifted significantly within

anarchist scenes in recent years. Discourses of consent have expanded,

while information about assault, survivor support, and options for

accountability has become increasingly available. This has noticeably

changed how we conduct sexual relationships, relate to our own bodies,

and respond to survivors. Compared to previous years, many anarchists

have become more conscious of sexual power dynamics and increasingly

empowered to communicate boundaries and desires.

However, sometimes abusers in anarchist communities “talk the talk” of

consent and support while doing the same old shit. As the author of “Is

the Anarchist Man Our Comrade?” challenges:

Accountability processes often do a lot of good but sometimes they just

teach men how to appear unabusive when nothing’s changed but the words

coming out of their mouth. Survivors and friends are left wondering if

said male is no longer a threat. Eventually the issue recedes from

peoples’ minds because they don’t want to seem overly reactionary and

don’t know what further steps to even take and the perpetrator is able

to continue on in their life without much changing.

How can we prevent these discourses from being appropriated by the

sensitive anarcha-feminist sexual assaulter? It seems that the

availability of community accountability processes hasn’t changed the

patterns of behavior they were developed to address. What isn’t working

here?

Ten Pitfalls of Community Accountability Processes

Two important qualifications: first, these are pitfalls of

accountability processes as they’re actually practiced, as we’ve

experienced them. Some of these pitfalls aren’t inherent to these

processes, but are simply mistakes commonly made by people who undertake

them. One might respond to many of these critiques by saying, “Well, if

people actually applied the model as it’s intended, that wouldn’t

happen.”

Fair enough; but for any such model to be widely relevant and

applicable, it has to be robust enough to be able to succeed even when

conditions aren’t optimal, or when folks don’t or can’t follow the model

perfectly. So bear in mind that these pitfalls don’t imply that our

accountability models are futile or doomed. On the contrary,

becausewe’re invested in figuring out how to end assault and abuse, we

have to be unflinchingly critical in examining efforts to do so.

Second, the things people frequently say to avoid responsibility should

not be mistaken for problems with accountability processes. For example:

“This stuff distracts us from the real revolutionary issues; it’s

divisive and hurts the movement; holding people accountable is

manipulative/coercive/overemphasized/a power grab,” and so forth. These

are not pitfalls of accountability processes; these are problems of

patriarchy and its supposedly anarchist apologists.

That said, here are some of the major difficulties we’ve encountered in

the processes we’ve developed to hold each other accountable for sexual

assault and abuse within anarchist scenes.

1) There is no clear sense of when it’s over, or what constitutes

success or failure. When can we say definitively that a certain person

has “worked on their shit”? What will allow a survivor and their

supporters to feel comfortable with someone continuing to participate in

a shared community? When expectations aren’t explicit, goals aren’t

concrete, or the time-line and means of assessment aren’t clear,

confusion and frustration can follow for everyone involved.

This often happens because we have so little experience with alternative

modes of resolving conflict and addressing harm that we don’t know what

to look for. For instance, even if a person has “been accountable,” the

survivor may or may not necessarily feel better. Does this determine the

success or failure of a process? If someone has done all the things

asked of them, but others aren’t sure if the steps taken were effective,

what could confirm that real change has taken place? It may or may not

actually be possible to restore trust after harm has been done; if not,

this may not be the right type of process to undertake.

Likewise, past what point can we agree that someone has NOT worked on

their shit, and we shouldn’t bother wasting our time on it anymore? Some

accountability processes drag on for months and years, diverting

collective energy from other more fulfilling and useful ends. One

stubborn sexist can sour an entire scene on making good faith efforts to

hold folks accountable—which goes to show how important it is to know

when to end an attempted process before it drags everyone down with it.

If we’re going to invest so much time and energy in these processes, we

need a way to assess if it’s worthwhile, and when to admit failure. And

that requires determining what failure would mean: for instance, kicking

someone out of a scene, trying other modes of response, or admitting to

a survivor that we can’t enforce their demands.

2) Standards for success are unrealistic. For instance, the common

demand that someone work on their proverbial shit is either too vague to

be meaningful, or practically translates to a profound psychological

transformation beyond the bounds of what we can achieve. As the article

“Thinking Through Perpetrator Accountability” puts it:

Perpetrator accountability is not an easy or short process
 It takes a

lifelong commitment to change behaviors that are so deeply ingrained; it

requires consistent effort and support. When talking about follow-up, we

should be making schedules for weeks, but also talking about checking in

after months and years. It takes that kind of long-lasting support to

make real transformation possible.

Let’s be frank: if we expect people to remain involved in an

accountability process for some scumbag they don’t even like for

years,and we expect this as a norm for an increasing number of processes

for different people, who may or may not be cooperative—we are not

setting a realistic standard.

That’s not to say that the article is wrong; transformation of

patriarchal and abusive behavior patterns is a lifelong process. But is

it really a surprise that we fail to sustain these difficult,

unrewarding processes stretching over such lengths of time, when few

anarchists in our scene follow through on long-term commitments to even

our most fervent passions? What can we realistically commit to doing?

3) We lack the collective ability to realize many demands. We can say

we’re committed to meeting survivor demands, but that’s just empty

rhetoric when that would require resources we don’t have. Do we know of

suitably anti-authoritarian feminist counselors and therapy programs,

and can we pay for them when the person called out can’t? Can we enforce

our wishes on someone who isn’t cooperative—and as anarchists, should

we? What consequences can we enact that actually matter? In a transient

subculture, can we realistically commit to following up with someone for

years into the future, and establishing structures of support and

accountability that will last that long?

One phrase commonly used in survivor demands and support discourse is

“safe space,” that ever-elusive place in which survivors will be able to

feel comfortable and fully reintegrated into collective life. What does

safety mean? Is it something that we can promise? From reading the

policies of recent anarchist gatherings, it appears that the primary

method of securing safe space involves excluding people who have harmed

others. But safety means more than quarantining those who have ruptured

it for particular people, since rape culture and patriarchy suffuse all

of our lives—they’re not just the result of a few bad apples. While

exclusion can shield survivors from the stress of sharing space with

people who’ve harmed them, and help to protect folks in our community

from repeatedly abusive people, exclusion falls painfully short of

safety. In fact we may rely on banning others from spaces less because

it keeps people safe than because it’s one of the only safety-related

demands we can actually enforce.

In the essay “Safety is an Illusion,” Angustia Celeste condemns the

“false promises of safe space”:

We can’t provide survivors safe space; safe space in a general sense,

outside of close friendships, some family and the occasional affinity,

just doesn’t exist
 there is no such thing as safe space under

patriarchy or capitalism in light of all the sexist, hetero-normative,

racist, classist (etc.) domination that we live under. The more we try

and pretend safety can exist at a community level, the more disappointed

and betrayed our friends and lovers will be when they experience

violence and do not get supported.

What would genuine safety for survivors and for all of us look like? Are

there other strategies in that direction that we can enact beyond

exclusion and ostracism?[1]

4) We lack skills in counseling, mediation, and conflict

resolution.Often survivor demands include finding a counselor or

mediator. To be effective, this person should be willing to work for

free or on a sliding scale; hold anti-authoritarian politics and a

survivor-conscious feminist analysis; have the time and energy to take

an active role in working with someone over a long period of time; and

be close enough to the community to understand its norms, without being

directly involved in the situation. How many of these people are there?

How many of us even have basic active listening skills, let alone the

ability to navigate complex dynamics of consent and assault, patriarchal

conditioning, anti-authoritarian conflict resolution, and psychological

transformation? And for those few who do fit the bill, or at least come

close, how many aren’t already swamped and overwhelmed?

Perhaps this is everyone’s fault for not collectively prioritizing these

skill sets. Fine, but what do we do right now? And how do we avoid

creating a division of labor where folks with a certain set of skills or

lingo become akin to authorities within anarchist versions of judicial

processes?

5) This stuff depresses people and burns them out. It’s intense,

emotionally draining work to engage in community accountability, often

with little appreciation or compensation. It can be exhausting and

unrewarding, particularly when the processes rarely succeed in keeping a

community intact while satisfying all participants. The gravity of the

work scares people off, and understandably so.

This isn’t to say that we should try to make community accountability

for sexual assault and abuse fun and lighthearted. But we need to

acknowledge that this is a barrier to people stepping up and staying

committed for the long-term involvement we’re saying is necessary for

success. And these problems are magnified when we rely on skills and

experience that only a few people in our circles have.

6) Accountability processes suck up disproportionate time and energy.

None of us signed up for anarchy because we love participating in

exhausting, interminable processes to address the stupid ways people

hurt each other within our subcultural bubbles. We became anarchists

because we hate cops, because we love punk shows, because we want a

freer world, and for a million other reasons. When we spend so much time

and energy trying to resolve internal conflicts and convince

intransigent sexists to take responsibility for changing their behavior,

we risk cutting ourselves off from the passions that brought us together

in the first place.

It’s easy to get demoralized about anarchist politics when we can’t even

stop assaulting each other, let alone smash the state and abolish

capitalism. It’s not that working to end sexual assault and patriarchy

is not revolutionary—on the contrary! But if accountability

processes⎯particularly frustrating and unsuccessful ones⎯come to occupy

too much of our collective energy, we’re not likely to stay engaged and

bring new folks into our struggles.

We can’t sweep assault and abuse under the rug and silence survivors in

the name of false unity. This previous norm perpetuated oppression and

made us less effective all around, prompting community accountability

efforts to emerge in the first place. We have to find a way to deal with

our abusive behavior that doesn’t swallow up all of our energy and

demoralize us.

7) Subcultural bonds are weak enough that people just drop out.Bear in

mind that many of the less coercive models of restorative justice on

which community accountability frameworks are based originated in

smaller-scale indigenous societies, with stronger social and cultural

affinities than most any of us in the current United States can imagine.

The notion that we should attempt to preserve the community and allow

folks who’ve hurt others to remain integrated into it relies on the

assumption that all parties are invested enough in this “community” to

endure the scrutiny and difficult feelings that accompany going through

an accountability process. The affinities that draw people into punk and

anarchist scenes often aren’t strong enough to keep people rooted when

they feel threatened by what they’re asked to do. Folks who’ve been

called out often just pick up and leave town, sometimes even

preemptively before they’re called to account for their shitty behavior.

Short of communicating with similar social networks in the assaulter’s

new destination (which happens increasingly often), there’s not much we

can do to prevent that. When the primary consequences we can exact for

noncompliance with accountability demands involve forms of ostracism and

exclusion, people will avoid these by skipping town or dropping out.[2]

8) Collective norms encourage and excuse unaccountable behavior. Our

individual choices always occur in a social context, and some of the

collective norms of anarchist scenes facilitate, if not directly

justify, kinds of behavior that have often led to boundary-crossing and

calling out.

For example, in many anarchist scenes, a culture of intoxication

predominates and most social gatherings center around alcohol and drug

use. Few safeguards exist when folks drink or use to excess, and few

alternative spaces exist for those who want to stop or reduce their

drinking or using without losing their social lives. Humor and

conversation norms reinforce the notion that extreme drunkenness is

normal and funny, and that people are less responsible for their actions

while drunk then while sober. Weekend after weekend, we create highly

sexualized spaces with strong pressure to get intoxicated, resulting in

groups of people too drunk or high to give or receive solid consent.[3]

Then in the aftermath of the harm caused in those situations, we expect

individuals to deal with the consequences of their choices on their own,

rather than all of us taking responsibility for the collective context

that normalizes their behavior.

Of course, none of these dynamics excuse abuse. But sexual assault takes

place in a social context, and communities can take or avoid

responsibility for the kinds of behavior our social norms encourage.

Alcohol and drug use is just one example of a group norm that excuses

unaccountable behavior. Other entrenched dynamics that folks seeking

accountability have cited as hindering their efforts include the

idolization of scene celebrities (people in popular bands, renowned

activists, etc.); the notion that sexual and romantic relationships are

“private” and not the business of anyone outside of them; and the belief

that groups who face systematic oppression (such as queers and people of

color) shouldn’t “air the dirty laundry” of intra-community violence,

since it could be used to further demonize them.

Are we willing to examine and challenge our group norms on a collective

level, to see how they promote or discourage accountable behavior? Is it

possible to hold entire scenes collectively accountable for what we

condone or excuse? Attempting to hold a whole group of people

accountable in some structured way would likely multiply all of the

problems we experience with accountability processes oriented around a

single person. Yet without acknowledging and challenging our collective

responsibility, holding individuals accountable won’t be enough.

9) The residue of the adversarial justice system taints our application

of community accountability models. Some of the most vitriolic backlash

against accountability processes has been directed at their

pseudo-judicial nature. On the one hand, folks who’ve harmed others

rarely have experience being called to account for their behavior except

via authoritarian systems; attempts to do so often prompt accusations of

“witch-hunts,” “authoritarianism,” and cop/judge/lawyer/prison

guard-like behavior. Previously anti-state militants often do miraculous

turnarounds, suddenly becoming extremely interested in the US

government’s guarantees of “justice”: “Whatever happened to innocent

until proven guilty, man? Don’t I get a fair trial? Can’t I defend

myself? Listen to my character witnesses!”

On the other hand, folks pursuing accountability have received similar

conditioning into adversarial conflict resolution, so it can be very

easy to fall into that mode of framing the process—especially when faced

with an infuriatingly stubborn anarcho-rapist. Some participants have

used accountability processes as a way to threaten consequences or

leverage power over others. While this may be an understandable response

to the frustration and powerlessness often felt in the aftermath of

abuse and assault, it can undermine attempts to pursue non-adversarial

solutions.

A damning critique of the failure of anarchist accountability processes

to escape the logic of the legal system comes in a communiquéexplaining

why a group of women physically confronted a sexual assaulter:

We did what had to be done out of sheer necessity. As radicals, we know

the legal system is entrenched in bullshit—many laws and legal processes

are racist, classist, heterosexist and misogynist. Alternative

accountability processes, much like the traditional ones, often force

the survivor to relive the trauma of the assault and force her to put

her reputation—a problematic concept in itself—on the line as “proof” of

her credibility. They end up being an ineffective recreation of the

judicial process that leaves the perpetrator off the hook, while the

survivor has to live through the memory of the assault for the rest of

her life. The US legal system and the alternative community-based

accountability processes are simply not good enough for survivors, and

certainly not revolutionary.

10) Sexual assault accountability language and methods are used in

situations for which they were not intended. One example of this

misapplication involves the widespread use of the principle of rape

crisis survivor support specifying that supporters should “always

believe the survivor.” This makes perfect sense in a rape crisis

organization setting, solely focused on providing emotional support and

services to an individual who’s experienced a form of trauma that is

widely disbelieved, when being believed is instrumental to the healing

process. But this doesn’t make sense as a basis for conflict resolution.

In rape crisis counseling settings, or when someone discloses to you as

a trusted friend seeking support, the focus should remain on the needs

of the survivor. But transformative justice involves taking into account

the needs and thus the experiences and perspectives of all parties

involved, including the person who assaulted.

This does not mean that we have to figure out who’s telling the truth

and who’s lying; that’s the residue of the adversarial system again. Nor

does this mean that all perspectives are equally valid and no one is

right or wrong. It does mean that to encourage someone to be

accountable, we have to be willing to meet them where they’re at, which

means accepting that one person’s experience can vary significantly from

that of someone else. Being accountable requires being open to the

possibility that one is wrong, or at minimum that someone else could

experience the same event in a dramatically different, hurtful way. But

having the survivor entirely define the operating reality may not lend

itself to this mode of community accountability.

Another example of the overuse and misapplication of sexual assault

accountability discourse comes when people call others into

accountability processes for a wide range of behaviors that aren’t

sexual assault. For instance, if someone feels angry and hurt after the

breakup of a non-abusive relationship, it might be tempting to frame

their grievances through the lens of calling someone out and demanding

accountability. It could take the form of demanding that someone be

banned from certain spaces, drawing on the gravity this exerts as a

common accountability process demand. It’s understandable that folks who

feel angry or hurt for any number of reasons might want the kind of

instant validation of their feelings that can come (in some circles)

from framing one’s hurt and anger as a call-out requiring

“accountability”—whether or not that process and language makes sense

for the situation.[4]

This is dangerous not only because these terms and tactics were designed

for certain types of conflicts and not others, but also because their

overuse may trivialize them and lead others to treat dismissively the

very serious situations of assault and abuse for which they were

developed. It’s encouraging that issues of sexual assault and abuse have

entered so widely into the discourses of radical communities. But we

should be careful to avoid generalizing the methods developed for

responding to one specific set of conflicts and oppressive behaviors to

other situations for which they weren’t intended.

In some cases, folks frustrated by someone’s problematic behavior have

even felt reluctant to call the person out on it for fear of that person

being labeled a “perpetrator,” or of others presuming the hurtful but

mild form of non-consensual behavior to have been sexual assault, and

thus the person addressing it to be a “survivor.” When this overuse of

sexual assault accountability language dovetails with the identity

politics around survivor/perpetrator and policies such as the “no perps

allowed” statement, this effort to promote accountability could end up

discouraging people from speaking out against other forms of crummy

behavior, for fear of someone being permanently tarred with the “perp”

brush rather than having a few conversations, apologizing, and reading a

zine.

New Directions and Further Questions

So where do we go from here? The widespread disillusionment with

accountability processes suggests that we’ve reached an impasse. We’re

proposing four possible paths to explore—not as solutions to these

pitfalls so much as directions for experimenting to see if they can lead

to something new.

Direction 1: Survivor-Led Vigilantism

“I wanted revenge. I wanted to make him feel as out of control, scared

and vulnerable as he had made me feel. There is no safety really after a

sexual assault, but there can be consequences.” -Angustia Celeste,

“Safety is an Illusion: Reflections on Accountability”

Two situations in which prominent anarchist men were confronted and

attacked by groups of women in New York and Santa Cruz made waves in

anarchist circles in 2010. The debates that unfolded across our scenes

in response to the actions revealed a widespread sense of frustration

with existing methods of addressing sexual assault in anarchist scenes.

Physical confrontation isn’t a new strategy; it was one of the ways

survivors responded to their abusers before community accountability

discourse became widespread in anarchist circles. As accountability

strategies developed, many rejected physical confrontation because it

hadn’t worked to stop rape or keep people safe. The trend of

survivor-led vigilantism accompanied by communiquéscritiquing

accountability process models reflects the powerlessness and desperation

felt by survivors, who are searching for alternatives in the face of the

futility of the other available options.

However, survivor-led vigilantism can be a valid response to sexual

assault regardless of the existence of alternatives. One doesn’t need to

feel powerless or sense the futility of other options to take decisive

physical action against one’s abuser. This approach offers several

advantages. For one, in stark contrast to many accountability processes,

it sets realistic goals and succeeds at them. It can feel more

empowering and fulfilling than a long, frequently triggering, overly

abstract process. Women can use confrontations to build collective power

towards other concerted anti-patriarchal action. Physical confrontation

sends an unambiguous message that sexual assault is unacceptable. If

sexual violence imprints patriarchy on the bodies of women, taking

revenge embodies female resistance. Above all, it’s unmediated; as the

author of the article “Notes on Survivor Autonomy and Violence” wrote:

A common criticism of accountability processes of all varieties is their

tendency to mirror some sort of judicial system—structured mediation

toward rehabilitation or punishment of one kind or another. While an

outcome dictated by the survivor is certainly not akin to one dictated

by the state, the process remains a mediation. Conversely, to move away

from this judiciary is to reject mediation, a remnant of the idea that

our interactions must be somehow guided by third parties, even third

parties we choose ourselves. To that end, an attack on one’s rapist is

unmediated and direct, precisely that which any judicial system forbids;

the line between desire and action is erased.

Of course, there are plenty of disadvantages to vigilantism, too.

Choosing to escalate the situation brings serious risks, both legally

and physically. Cops are more likely to bring charges for a group

physical assault on a man than an “alleged” sexual assault. And, as

advocates for battered women know, partner violence has a very real

possibility to turn deadly; more women are killed by their partners than

by any other type of attacker. Beyond the immediate risks, you can’t

beat up a social relationship, as they say; throttling an individual

scumbag doesn’t do much to make anyone safer or end systematic rape

culture, however satisfying it may feel to a vindicated survivor. As

mentioned above, the desire to address the roots of rape culture in

responding to individual assaults helped give rise to community

accountability efforts in the first place.

There’s also a legacy of non-survivor-accountable vigilantism, a type of

male violence that has been widely identified by survivors and anarchist

women as being more about masculine ego trips than promoting healing and

safety. A critique of this phenomenon comes from Supporting a Survivor

of Sexual Assault, a zine oriented towards male allies of survivors, in

its discussion of the principle “No More Violence”:

Is kicking a rapist’s ass going to make the rape not have happened? Will

his pain make the survivor’s go away? Does the survivor need to be

trying to chill out another out-of-control, violent man? Probably not.

Since non-trans men commit the overwhelming majority (some say over 99%)

of sexual assaults, men who are supporting a survivor need to be

especially conscious of the impact of male violence. It is male violence

that causes rape, not what ends it. Your actions must be those of ending

male violence.

We cannot speak for the responses that survivors, women in particular,

may make to rape. If women, as a majority of survivors, decide to

collectively respond in a way that involves violence or asking male

supporters to participate in violence; that is something for women and

survivors to work out for themselves. For men who are supporting a

survivor, however, it is absolutely essential that you put aside your

desires for masculine retribution and interrupt the cycle of male

violence
 It is not your responsibility, or right, to come in

vigilante-style and take matters into your own hands.

This critique influenced the decision of groups like DWOS in Minneapolis

to adopt “non-violence” as a principle. Notice, however, that this

critique intentionally does not apply to survivor-led vigilantism, but

to unaccountable non-survivor responses.

Apologists for anarchist men attacked by survivor-led groupsclaim that

vigilantism is authoritarian: “Accountability cannot be a one-way street

or else it becomes a synonym for punitive and policing power.” But as

the survivor communiqués make clear, vigilantism is not a form of

“accountability,” at least not community accountability based on

transformative justice as it’s generally conceived within anarchist

circles; it’s an explicit rejection of it. It’s not a pseudo-judicial

process; it declines both state-based and non-state methods of conflict

resolution in favor of a direct, unmediated response to harm. Whether or

not we think it’s appropriate, it shouldn’t be mistaken for a form of

accountability gone wrong. On the contrary, it’s an intentional response

to the perceived failure of accountability methods.

So long as our practices around accountability for sexual assault and

abuse don’t successfully meet folks’ needs, vigilantism will continue,

challenging anarchist advocates of transformative justice to make their

ideals a reality. Should we be trying to develop sufficiently effective

accountability responses so that vigilantism isn’t necessary? Or should

we be developing and extending our practices of survivor-led physical

confrontation?

Direction 2: Prevention Through Gender-Based Organizing

It’s an obvious point, but worth making: instead of spending all this

energy trying to figure out how to support people who’ve been assaulted

and respond to those who assault, wouldn’t it make more sense to focus

on preventing all this assaulting in the first place? Easier said than

done, of course. But so far, we’ve only discussed reactive,

after-the-fact responses to forms of harm that we’re assuming will

continue, even as we figure out better ways to react.

To borrow the language of the nonprofit rape crisis center world,

responding to assaults and working with assaulters through

accountability processes falls under intervention, or tertiary

prevention. Primary prevention entails preventing first-time assault and

abuse through education and by shifting social, cultural, and

institutional norms, while secondary prevention involves identifying

risk factors associated with assault and abuse and intervening to

prevent them from escalating. So we shouldn’t necessarily deem responses

such as accountability processes failures if sexual assaults continue in

anarchist communities. Instead, we should broaden the kinds of

preventative work we’re doing alongside them. What might we be doing to

stop all this from happening in the first place?

Outside of anarchist circles, prevention work around gender violence

usually centers on education: for women, around self-defense and harm

reduction; for men, around combating rape myths and taking

responsibility for ending male violence; and for all, healthy

communication and relationship skills. In anarchist circles, some women

have mobilized around sharing self-defense skills, and a great deal of

popular education (mostly led and conducted by women) has taken place

around consent, communication with partners, and positive sexuality. As

noted above, while this has noticeably shifted the sexual discourses

used by anarchists, we need more extensive engagement with gender

oppression to break entrenched patterns.

One pathway towards this deeper transformation has come through

gender-based collectives, specifically men’s groups focusing on changing

attitudes towards sexuality and consent among men. However, with a few

exceptions such as DWOS in Minneapolis, the Philly Dudes Collective, and

the Social Detox zine, there has not been much visible presence in

recent years of anti-sexist men’s organizing among anarchists.

Previously in certain scenes, anti-sexist men’s groups allied with

autonomous women’s organizing. These formations are currently out of

fashion for a number of reasons, including anti-feminist backlash, a

certain understanding of trans and genderqueer politics that labels all

gender-based organizing as essentialist and problematic, and the

absorption of so many committed anti-patriarchy militants of many

genders into sexual assault response and accountability work. Could

forming anti-sexist men’s groups to do assault and abuse prevention work

in tandem with autonomous women’s organizing prove fruitful as another

direction in which to experiment?

This approach could offer several advantages. Creating structures to

share skills for dismantling patriarchy and self-transformation might

reduce problematic behaviors among participants while also providing an

infrastructure for accountability responses when folks did harm others.

Pre-existing men’s groups allow folks to take responsibility for

self-education and action against patriarchy that doesn’t have to be

contingent on a “perpetrator” label or “demands.” And folks could be

referred to groups for a wide range of behaviors that might not raise

eyebrows on their own but could be warning signs of underlying

patriarchal patterns, so that others can intervene before those patterns

manifest in more harmful ways (i.e., secondary prevention). For once,

we’d have a place to offer folks who, whether by community compulsion or

self-motivation, want to “work on their shit.”

But beyond just dealing with problematic behaviors, men’s groups provide

space for deeper relationship building, learning, political

clarification, emotional intimacy, even fun. This should provide

incentive for folks to get involved and stay engaged, since it’s not

centered solely on debilitatingly intense crisis-mode accountability

work. The kinds of study, reflection, and relationship-building that

take place in these groups can strengthen the other radical organizing

folks are doing in anarchist scenes, leaving us with more options,

skills, and people able to respond in crisis situations. And unlike many

internally-focused community accountability strategies, men’s groups can

interact with non-anarchist individuals and groups to spread

anti-patriarchal messages and practices while learning from other

feminist organizing, making our efforts relevant to broader social

struggles against gender violence and patriarchy.

But wait
 what about this whole gender thing? Amid the current gender

politics of North American anarchist scenes, it’s common to view any

gender-specific organizing as suspect. Isn’t this just a remnant of

tired identity politics, vestiges of leftist guilt, outdated

essentialism, and suspiciously authoritarian practices? Don’t we want to

destroy the gender binary, the real root of patriarchy and gender

oppression? And doesn’t organizing based on gender (or assigned gender

or whatever) just reinforce the patriarchal and transphobic framework

we’re trying to destroy?

Certainly there are difficult questions to address in determining who

“counts” as a man, whether we base our understanding on

self-identification or social recognition or birth assignation, where

different genderqueer and trans folks fit, and figuring out who was

“socialized” how. And ending hierarchy and alienation in all their forms

will require strategies more liberating than identity politics. But

let’s be realistic: distinct patterns of oppressive behavior and power

still fall pretty predictably along gender lines. If gender-based

organizing can help dislodge those patterns, perhaps we must embrace

that contradiction and do our best to engage with it in all its messy

complexity.

Beyond the question of gendered organizing in principle, there are other

possible problems with this approach. Without subscribing to the notion

that there are “good” anarchist men who’re not the sexual assaulters we

need to worry about, we can acknowledge that the folks who might benefit

most from examining their sexist behavior will likely be least inclined

to participate. Also, participating in a formal men’s group could be a

way for sexists to gain legitimacy, diverting attention from their

crappy behavior by waving their feminist ally membership cards at people

who call them out. And if the focus on gender-based organizing

privileges men’s groups, even anti-sexist ones, over autonomous women’s

and/or trans organizing, that could stabilize rather than challenge

patriarchal power relations in a scene.

Direction 3: Not Accountability, But Conflict Resolution

Our struggles for accountability suffer because we have so few models,

methods, or skills for resolving conflicts amongst ourselves. While it’s

admirable that we’ve put so much energy into figuring out strategies for

responding to assault and abuse, there are innumerable other kinds of

conflict and problematic behaviors that we also need tools to

address—and as we’ve seen, the sexual assault-specific accountability

methodologies aren’t appropriate in dissimilar situations. What if we

prioritized building our conflict resolution and mediation skills?

Of course, there are specific issues relevant to sexual assault and

abuse, and these shouldn’t be eclipsed in a general focus on conflict

resolution. But if there’s a precedent, language, and skill set for

addressing a wide range of conflicts and harm, and being asked to

participate in a conflict resolution process becomes common and less

threatening, perhaps we’ll be able to respond less defensively when we

learn that our actions have hurt others. Rather than extending the

identity politics of survivor and perpetrator, we could create more

nuanced language that neither idealizes nor demonizes people, but asks

all of us to remain engaged in lifelong processes of

self-transformation. This requires empathy towards folks who have done

harm, to create space for them to own up to their behaviors and heal.[5]

What are the advantages of framing sexual assault accountability

processes within a broader emphasis on conflict resolution? There would

be no need for a definitional hierarchy or litmus test to determine what

“counts” as serious assault or abuse. By setting a precedent of

collective engagement with less intense conflict, we would gain valuable

experience to serve us in crisis situations. Framing conflict resolution

as a collective responsibility could prevent the emergence of a

specialized class of people who always facilitate these processes, and

make it easier to find supporters with sufficient distance from a

situation to be able to mediate neutrally.[6]

One cautionary point needs to be made very clearly: mediation is not

appropriate for many cases of partner abuse. The article “Thinking

Through Perpetrator Accountability” lays it out:

Mediation should not be used as a substitution for an accountability

process. Mediation is for two people having a conflict that needs to be

resolved; abuse is not mutual. Abuse is not simply about two people

needing to come to the table to work things out. Mediators may certainly

be useful for helping to facilitate some of the concrete negotiations

within an accountability process, but please do not suggest a session

with a mediator as an option instead of a long-term commitment to an

accountability process.

Counselors for domestic violence survivors learn that “couples

counseling” should not be undertaken in a clear situation of partner

abuse, because abusers will usually manipulate the process, leaving the

abusive and unequal dynamics underlying the relationship unaddressed.

This is important to bear in mind so that a shift to a conflict

resolution framework isn’t applied to situations of abusive

relationships.

What about other disadvantages? Well, there’s still the problem of

responding to existing problems by prescribing solutions that demand

skills or resources we don’t have. What can we do in the meantime, while

undertaking the long-term work of learning how to resolve our conflicts?

Survivors might feel frustrated to see assault and abuse lumped in with

less intense or politically significant conflicts, minimizing the harm

they’ve experienced. Asking survivors to use less forceful language when

addressing perpetrators could reinforce the survivor-blaming messages

that they are overreacting, that sexual assault is not a significant

issue worth naming strongly. Also, male “experts” in conflict resolution

could hijack survivor support work and divert its feminist focus. We

must acknowledge the specific context of sexual assault and abuse, honor

the pain and rage of survivors, and account for oppressive power while

broadening the range of conflicts we can address.

Direction 4: Concentric Circles of Affinity

There is no such thing as accountability within radical communities

because there is no such thing as community—not when it comes to sexual

assault and abuse. Take an honest survey sometime and you will find that

we don’t agree. There is no consensus. Community in this context is a

mythical, frequently invoked and much misused term. I don’t want to be

invested in it anymore.

— Angustia Celeste, “Safety is an Illusion: Reflections on

Accountability”

At the heart of all of these questions lies one unresolved problem: what

is “community?” Are we in one together as anarchists? As punks? As

people in a certain local scene? Because we’re at the same protest,

show, or mass mobilization? Do we choose to be in it, or are we in it

whether we like it or not, regardless of how we identify? And who

decides all of this?

You can’t have community accountability without community. The entire

transformative justice framework falls apart without some coherent sense

of what community means. But unfortunately, no one seems to be able to

answer this question for our milieu. And without an answer, we find

ourselves banging our heads against the wall again and again, when a

slimy assaulter just skips town or drops out of the scene after being

called out, or when someone wields enough power in a scene to

gerrymander the boundaries of community to exclude survivors and allies.

This is not an abstract question: it’s fundamental to what we do and how

power operates in our scenes.

Community becomes concrete through specific institutions, such as the

websites, gatherings, social centers, and collective houses that

comprise the North American anarchist scene. Although no one is taking

attendance (except possibly the FBI), and many of us quarrel about who

counts as a real anarchist, those of us who move through these spaces

have a sense of being a part of something. We weave together this sense

through shared practices that mark us as teammates: dress and body

modification, quirks of diet and hygiene, conversation with specialized

lingo and points of reference.

But is being a part of an anarchist “milieu” enough of a basis for the

kind of community demanded by these accountability strategies? Can we

realistically apply these models to our diffuse, fragmented, mostly

unstructured associations of misfits?

As we move through our lives navigating connections with friends,

neighbors, and comrades, we’re not just part of a single unitary

community, or even a web of multiple communities. Rather, our

relationships with others take the form of concentric circles of

affinity.From these, we can trace a tentative model to imagine how to

apply community accountability models to anarchist scenes.

One of the major flaws in our notion of anarchist community lies in its

nature as implicit and assumed, rather than explicit and articulated. We

don’t often directly state our commitments to and expectations of the

other people with whom we share various kinds of “community,” except in

specific projects or collectives; for instance, by living together,

housemates agree to pay bills on time, wash the dishes, and respect each

other’s space. What if we extended that degree of explicit intention to

all of our relationships of affinity? Impossible: we’re supposed to sit

down with every anarchist in North America—or even just in our town—and

spell out explicit standards for how we relate and what we expect from

each other?

No, of course not
 and that’s exactly the point. We can’t do that, so we

have to figure out how to collectively determine these things within the

different webs of relationships in our lives. Rather than presuming a

“community” and attempting to hold people accountable based on that

fiction, we should define our expectations of and commitments to the

others in our various circles of affinity, and use them as the basis for

our responses to conflict and harm.

For example, let’s say that as my innermost concentric circle I have my

affinity group. These are the folks I trust the most, with whom I take

risks and for whom I’ll do whatever it takes. I’d be willing to give

these people the benefit of the doubt in resolving conflict and

addressing harm far more than any other people. Under this model, I

would sit down with my affinity group and preemptively discuss how to

address conflicts with each other when they come up, ranging from the

most minor to the most serious disputes and forms of harm. Think of it

as a sort of pre-nuptial agreement for friends and comrades, covering

the bases in case things should go wrong. That way, I have a clear sense

of how to respond when one of my crew does me wrong, and a shared basis

of trust for working with them in a potentially long-term process of

transformation. While I wouldn’t extend that trust to most people,

within this group we share a deep and explicit affinity, so I’ll be open

to criticism, calling out, and transformation with the trust that my

comrades will be, too. Other examples of this innermost circle of

affinity might be families (birth or chosen), houses and land projects,

various types of collectives, or tight-knit groups of friends.

The next circle outwards might be a shared community space, such as an

infoshop or social center. It’s a fairly consistent group of people,

some of whom I’m closer with than others, but also an open space, so

folks may come that I don’t know. Since it’s not a totally fixed group

and not every single person can or would settle on direct agreements

with one another, there can be collective agreements around respect,

consent, anti-oppression, use of resources, and such. These don’t have

to be authoritarian; they can be collectively determined, revised at any

time by the consent of those most affected, and no one is compelled to

abide by them; folks who can’t or won’t can choose not to participate in

the space. As a result, I would be willing to go along with trying to

hold someone accountable insofar as they wanted to continue to

participate in the space. Since what defines our “community”—the terms

of our affinity with each other—is our shared experience of

participation in the space, then if one of us ceases to participate in

it, we’re no longer in community with one another, thus shouldn’t expect

to be held or hold others accountable through it. And accordingly, if

someone violates or refuses to abide by the collective standards,

there’s a procedure in place by which someone can held accountable for

their actions; and if they refuse, others can exclude them from the

space in good conscience. Other examples of this second circle of

affinity could include specific events, larger organizing projects, and

folks who hang out loosely in shared social spaces.

This framework of concentric circles of affinity helps us imagine where

we can best apply the accountability practices with which we’ve been

experimenting these past few years among anarchists. As the circles move

outwards to mass mobilizations, “anarchists,” “punks,” and our broader

radical “community,” it’s harder to imagine how we could concretely

define community and navigate accountability within it. There’s no

reason to expect anyone to be “accountable” to us based on whatever

abstraction we claim to share with them. Without a concrete basis, our

“community” has neither carrot nor stick; we can’t reward people for

going along with our demands and we can’t coerce them into doing so. So

if some random person who’s supposedly an anarchist sexually assaults

someone, it might not be realistic to approach our response to the

situation in terms of community accountability.

So then what do we do? Call the cops, beat them up, kick them out of all

the institutions controlled by folks with whom we share affinity? And

how do we deal with the recurrent problem of people who leave one scene

only to resume abusive behavior in another? We don’t have any clear

answers. But we have to start having discussions in every circle of

affinity about our terms of engagement and how to address harm and

resolve conflict, before we’re in crisis and forced to figure it out as

we go. Until we’ve done that thoroughly in every collective, space,

social group, and other anarchist formation, we can’t realistically

aspire to formal community accountability as a strategy for dealing with

our shit.

Forming affinity groups is a crucial part of anarchist organizing. It

can be as simple as pulling together a crew of friends to do an action,

or as formal and structured as you can imagine. Crucially, it preserves

the basic principle of voluntary association at the heart of anarchy,

the idea that we can do what we want with whomever we want without

coercion or bureaucracy. This simple process has formed the core of our

actions at demos and mobilizations, but perhaps we can use it to

conceptualize our entire anarchist community and milieu. If we can

create stronger ties with each other and understand our affinities more

concretely, perhaps we’ll have the basis to make community

accountability something more than a vague and contentious dream.

We hope this essay will contribute to self-reflection among anarchists

about where our affinities really are. Perhaps we can address many of

the pitfalls of our experiments with accountability processes thus far

by making our expectations of and commitments to one another as explicit

as possible. We also can consider extending survivor-led vigilantism,

pursuing anti-sexist men’s groups and gender-based organizing to

undermine rape culture, or broadening our focus on conflict resolution

and mediation. Whatever paths we choose, anarchists must continue trying

whatever we can to break this impasse around abuse and assault in our

scenes. Our liberation depends on it.

Appendix

Works Cited

Feminist Struggle

Dealing With Our Shit

Celeste, in It’s Down To This: Reflections, Stories, Critiques,

Experiences, and Ideas on Community and Collective Response to Sexual

Violence, Abuse and Accountability

Collective

Resource List

Groups and Organizations

Books

Color Against Violence

Communities, edited by Ching-In Chen, Jai Dulani, Leah Lakshmi

Piepzna-Samarasinha and Andrea Smith

Education Action

Zines

Collective Response to Sexual Violence and Accountability

Justice

Transformative Justice

Transforming Conflict and Harm

Other Resources

Transforming Violence

PDF Downloads

[1] Challenging banning and exclusion as primary accountability tactics

raises more thorny questions about how to evaluate survivor demands, not

just in terms of our ability to enact them but our willingness to do so.

Is our role as proponents of anarchist accountability simply to adhere

to the demands set forth by a survivor, even if we disagree with them

strategically or ethically? Being an ally can be defined as doing what

the survivor wants, no matter what; but we believe that no liberation

can result from suspending our autonomy and uncritically following

demands, no matter whose. Yet when is it our place as supporters to

criticize what a survivor claims they need to heal or feel safe?

[2] At times, people honestly trying to be accountable have left

anarchist scenes entirely in order to give space to a survivor. While

better than not cooperating, this subverts the transformative justice

ideal of keeping folks part of a community.

[3] One common challenge occurs when someone doesn’t clearly remember

what happened in an encounter for which they’ve been called out, or

remembers the experience differently from how the person calling them

out remembers it. A survivor may assume that this is simply a ploy to

avoid responsibility, which is possible; but often, people’s memories

simply don’t line up. If accountability processes are not

pseudo-judicial attempts to determine “the truth” of what “really

happened” as confirmed by some authority, how can we reconcile these

differences? Do the memories of all parties have to match in order for

demands to be legitimate? Can someone take responsibility for doing

things they don’t remember?

From our experience intervening with people who’ve been called out,

acknowledging that someone may experience reality differently from them

forms an important first step. For example, we can ask them to admit

that something they experienced as consensual may not have been

experienced that way by someone else. The sincere apology a survivor

seeks may not be forthcoming if the person they’re calling out doesn’t

remember an interaction in the same way. Still, accepting that the

other(s) may have felt violated by something that they did can open

someone towards examining and changing some of their behaviors, if not

taking full responsibility.

[4] It’s difficult to acknowledge this without slipping into the kind of

minimizing and denying language that’s so often used to silence

survivors. We don’t want reactionaries to pick up on it and use it as

another weapon in their arsenal of denial: “They’re just power-tripping

on this ‘accountability’ trend when that doesn’t even apply to this

situation,” and so forth. Still, we need to be able to talk openly about

this to learn how to respond more effectively to assault and abuse.

[5] As a self-described perpetrator explains in a comment on “Notes on

Survivor Autonomy and Violence”: “I’m not saying that survivors have to

feel empathy for people who did them violence. But if we’re going to

build communities that can actually outsurvive patriarchy, instead of

being atomized and pummeled to dust by it, I think somebody will need to

have empathy for perpetrators. Speaking from my personal experience, I

know that I never would have had the courage to actually own up to my

shit and deal if I hadn’t found a couple folks that actually cared about

me and found a way to show me empathy
 And I don’t think empathy means

making excuses for someone. In fact, in this context, I think it means

not letting someone make excuses, not letting them escape their

responsibility and their history, and making sure they own up to the

consequences that come from the actions they’ve taken. It also means

listening to them, sincerely, even while doing this, and seeking

understanding. And I believe it means making sure that perpetrators do

feel consequences for their actions, but not punishments. It also means

finding resources so that the perpetrator can first learn and then

practice a different pattern of habits and actions
 I think what is

required for accountability processes is empathy. Empathy and anger, at

the same time.”

[6] It’s worth asking whether or not “neutrality” is possible or

desirable in conflict mediation. In many conflicts, one party wields

greater power than the other, and if effort isn’t made to intervene in

that power dynamic, neutrality can often amount to collusion with power.

An alternative model of a mediator’s orientation towards parties in a

conflict is “bipartiality” rather than neutrality. According to this

framework, a mediator advocates for both parties, but also challenges

them when they leverage their access to power within the conflict,

asking them to consider the ways that their power blind them to the

experiences of those lacking that power.