Academic versus Reality

I found Daruzo's article "In our Hands: Community Accountability as Pedagogical Strategy" to be a very interesting article in the academic sense.  It made sense to take academic ideas and discourse and apply it to real life situations "This approach marks the university classroom as a community space where phenomena are not only studied, but also actively made; this space is imbued with the possibility of violence and the potential of healing and transformation"(Daruzo 77).  This makes sense, what is the point of learning if we cannot apply these solutions to our lives.  We hear the survivors of sexual assault speak and recount their stories.  It would be interesting for the perpetrator to also speak in a forum where he can see how his actions have effected survivors.  If it is in a controlled environment, it would be interesting to see what his story is and why he did what he did.  Obviously this is not a means of justification or a way of garnering sympathy for the perpetrator but to hear him speak and somehow explain why he did what he did because of CARA's first principle "Recognize the humanity of everyone involved"(Daruzo 83).  What this class and professor tried is an attempt to take the academic into the practical.
On an academic level, this made sense to me when I read the article and listened to the class discussion initially.  Gerardo had suffered abuse himself and we understand how abuse is a cyclical process and there was also intersections of race, because he was a Latino man.  The class saw that this was Gerardo's way of trying to minimize his act of violence because he had suffered violence himself(85).  This is what I initially became uncomfortable with, we can understand that he suffered abuse, but does this make it understandable that he abused someone else.  Should we expect that to be the reality and then not hold him fully accountable for his actions.  Is no one then accountable for their actions? Are we to forgive the perpetrators? More importantly are the survivors supposed to forgive their perpetrators considering "To expect survivors to forgive is to heap yet another burden on them"(Daruzo 85).  Gerardo does come off as a somewhat sympathetic character especially when we hear about his background in Guatemala.
Before coming to class, I could see how easy we could start making excuses in another direction when talking about sexual assaults with survivors and perpetrators.  We've had the narrative where we talk about how the survivor could have done things differently to protect herself.  Are we going to start another narrative where we try to find ways to make the perpetrator look more sympathetic; because for some people they definitely could.
However today's class changed my viewpoint from the academic: this article portrays a different way to deal with sexual assault situations, to reality when my classmate talked about her personal feelings. After hearing the emotion in her voice and how she felt if she had to talk to her abuser, I don't know know how I feel about Daruzo's article and her attempt to talk and hear from the abuser.  Reality is very different.