I find it genuinely baffling when these leftist spaces, so concerned with maintaining their “anti-punitive” ideals in the name of inclusivity, protect bullies and misogynists from accountability while pushing their victims out of these spaces entirely. The groups end up being straight-up unsafe for women in the pursuit of this perfect non-carceral environment, and it sucks.
Personally, I’m going through this right now with my (former) grad worker union. There’s a pretty prominent person who’s been known to be just awful to people, such that those people – like me – end up leaving. IT’s so bad that there’s an entire group chat just for people who have had horrible run-ins with them. It has happened repeatedly, and I know it will happen again if they don’t face repercussions. My experience, though, has been trivialized, I’ve been gaslit, and essentially the message I’ve received has been to accept the abuse or leave.
There’s a total refusal on leadership’s part to do anything that might be perceived as punitive because of their “anti-carceral” stance, so that person has faced no accountability, no matter how many times they’ve done this. It’s an open secret that this person is awful, but they’re allowed to just continue on and all their victims are more or less told to shut up and accept it because calling them out for their bad behavior is “problematic”.
And then these same organizations just cannot wrap their heads around why people might perceive them as cliquey, hostile, or unsafe and not want to join up. People see this good ol’ boys style dodging of accountability that ultimately weakens the group, limits collective bargaining power, and brings down morale, and yeah. DUH. They’re (understandably) not interested in all that. And leadership has the audacity to act shocked???
It feels a bit like trying to drive with the parking brake on and complaining that the car can’t get up to speed, all the while knowing full well that the parking brake is on and actively refusing to take it off. Like… are you dumb? Stop being a known safe haven for abusers and maybe membership will increase. Maybe people will look at you fondly instead of as the weirdos who would rather protect one of their own at the cost of their actual stated mission and objectives.
I see this nonsense SO OFTEN, and it truly confuses and infuriates me.
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A great example of that happened recently in Seattle on an institutional scale. A repeat violent offender with multiple weapons charges who was being held on a $3k bail after punching a trans woman public transit employee in the face, and shouting transphobic insults at her. Hate crime charges. A community bail fund paid his bail. He then rounded up a group of his friends and violently beat a different trans woman, shouting transphobic insults at her, and is now again being held, but with a higher bail.
This bail fund states that they have a commitment to marginalized people, especially BIPoC and LGBTQ, with emphasis on trans, individuals.
Of course, this man was also a repeat domestic abuser of the women he dated, as is almost always the case for these types of men. The cops even recently visited him for a DV call, but let him go. A repeat violent offender with multiple weapons charges.
Yeah we need carceral reform. But that starts with doing the reforms. Not with selective immunity for people that violently attack other people, including targeted hate crime sprees.
Yes, Occupy Wall Street is a great example of this.
Read up on family systems theory (Virginia Satir and Murray Bowen). In toxic groups the group members will protect the toxic homeostasis over protecting targets and holding abusers accountable. The group devolves into normalized authoritarian abuse and practices group psycho-emotional abuse on their selected targets. (See Rejected, Shamed, and Blamed by Rebecca Mandeville. She discusses the group projective identification process observed in toxic groups. She has a sub stack as well.) Any group can devolve towards normalized authoritarian abuse if proper boundaries and accountability aren’t in place.
Amen sista
Oh god, I have so many thoughts and feelings on this, as a survivor, feminist and someone who has long been a fan of restorative Justice and therefore have seen how often the misapplication of that can severely harm survivors.
I’m entirely against any restorative Justice that attempts to rehabilitate rapists & abusers. This is reinforced by having discussed this with multiple PhD psychologists who agree that people who rape and abuse are most likely psychopaths which is not something that can be changed, except perhaps with very intense childhood intervention. There’s many other ways to do restorative Justice without this harmful BS, and I find it deeply frustrating that few even consider these alternatives because they’re so stuck on repeating what has failed for at least the past 15 years.
Even the restorative processes meant to reform rapists, no matter how victim centered they claim to be, will inevitably center the rapist, because intuitively everyone understands that to open someone’s psyche enough to get through to them means trying to avoid evoking defensiveness. Which inherently means catering to their ego, in the case of rapists. One result of this is that, even if survivors strongly request that rapists would be barred from local community spaces – coffee shops, hangouts etc – this is often a pretext to turn it down. It’s one thing to have unsafety because of a rapist. The ptsd from having your community chose not to do anything to allow for the most basic safety by excluding rapists from gatherings is more extreme and severe than I can put into words. Recovering from the betrayal of trust in one rapist is nothing compared to no longer trusting people in general, because people in general enable rapists and are against basic safety.
Another reason these restorative processes can be harmful is that rapists tend to be extremely manipulative and toxic to deal with. So the time and labor of numerous people that could be put towards millions of impactful causes not only goes down the drain, but they usually end up burned out and have a much lower capacity from dealing with this. Many restorative processes have resulted in the people running them explicitly saying the years they spent doing it were supremely unproductive, yet somehow that gets ignored. Also, a lot of activism doesn’t happen because people like myself, who know enough to avoid groups with rapists in them, avoid community involvement and activism. I also believe since women are more likely to be endangered by sexual violence, this also leads activist groups with bad policies around rapists etc to skew more male dominated, which can impact the culture and further alienate people who would be good allies.
One of the worst aspects is how rapists will use their very partial participation as a way of laundering their public image, to say they’re cured and are trustworthy, and therefore end up gaining access to victims they wouldn’t have otherwise been able to hurt. There was at least once instance of Mariambe Kaba herself running a process, followed by the rapist in question going on to rape again. I hope I’m misremembering, but I’m pretty sure it was also one of the cases where the subsequent victim was not believed nor supported, because people wanted to believe the restorative process cured the rapist, which can only have added unspeakably to her trauma.
One thing I witnessed personally is one of the most dangerous and institutionally powerful serial rapists in my old community (he was a landlord) ended up being the one teaching consent classes at a big yantra festival, despite being well known for routinely bulldozing boundaries left and right. Just like the way a trustworthy couples therapist will refuse to take an abuser as a client, because therapy is known to make the abuser more effectively abusive and manipulative. And in this same community, there sadly were at least some rapists who absolutely knew how to practice good consent, and had done so with previous partners, which led to people refusing to believe that a rapist would just disregard consent. When the whole definition of a rapist is someone who doesn’t care about violating consent when they rape. I still believe everyone should be educated about consent, but I’m not under any illusions it would stop rapists from being rapists, since the issue is they don’t care about consent, rather than them not understanding it.
Having personally suffered for MANY years with the unspeakable harm of a community that enabled rapists, including through restorative processes, it’s a joke that some people think that setting any boundaries against rapists is “punitive”, when the result is unimaginable suffering for all survivors who live in such a community. It’s torture, and survivors should not be punished so horrifically in order to coddle the feelings of serial rapists.
I learned from being in both online and live leftist organizing spaces that just because someone supports workers’ rights, universal healthcare, and other good policies doesn’t mean they’re a good person.
There was a guy that numerous women had stories about, and men would go out of their way to defend him because he was well-connected in certain circles.
These guys haven’t unpacked how they benefit from patriarchy and/or white supremacy. It’s why they got so gleeful over calling women they don’t like Karens, when that term used to have a specific context!, and realized they could get away with misogyny if they just put “white” in front of “woman”.
I’m a raging leftist, and can’t stand this shit. Like they don’t see the disconnect in going on about exploitative workplaces yet have zero problems exploiting their wives or girlfriends at home while women in their organizing spaces don’t feel safe!