I think that, for the most part, the idea of community accountability is wonderful in theory. It draws us away from our “unidirectional” (78) approach to dealing with criminality and attacks the “root causes of violence” (78), a key objective Durazo identifies as missing from the prison and punishment approach. I agree that incarceration misses the mark by individualizing sexual assault and labelling perpetrators as the “others” that are “deviant” from “most men” or “most people”. This individualization of incidents of sexual assault and perpetrators hinder the necessary “transformative” (77) aspect to successful social reformation that Durazo emphasizes.
However, I feel a strong need to critique community accountability model for, perhaps misguidedly, swinging the pendulum too far in the opposite direction. Personally, I believe that conversations surrounding sexual assault must be shaped by an equal attention to the systematic roots of oppression and the individual emotional realities. Although I know that this is a personal opinion, I cannot look at the community accountability model without perceiving a decentralization of blame. Although I can acknowledge systematic factors that may encourage or enable sexual violence (and that we as a society take part in this enablement), I don’t think it’s right to shift blame away from the perpetrator. Even if this is not what community accountability is meant to do, I believe that listening and considering perpetrators explanations can easily have this effect. I also question whether when applied, this model provides enough space and visibility for the needs of survivors or if it shrinks as the need for perpetrator understanding takes over.
Durazo and her class’ attempt to put the community accountability model into practice shed light on the problems that I have with it. While I understand the value in unpacking the motivations of rapists in order to help with the furthering of social reformation, I felt that the line between explanations and excuses can be dangerously crossed over and blurred. Durazo describes the systematic violence put onto Gerado at a young age through colonial force. It reminded me of a discussion in another class of mine, WGS 260: Women and War. We worked through rape as a weapon of war and discussed how the emasculation through colonial violence on men in the Congo acts as a trigger for a chain reaction that results in these same men raping their women in order to regain a sense of masculine power. Although it was only an explanation, I couldn’t help but hear it as a form of excuse.
Explanations and excuses are tricky in that it is difficult, at least for me, to distinguish between the two at times, especially in the context of sexual assault. By entertaining the explanations of perpetrators, we are at risk of potentially taking away from the emotional realities of the survivor. As mentioned in class, it is never okay to put the visibility of the perpetrator above the needs of the survivor. And this is where the community accountability model fails most obviously for me.
Although slightly on a tangent, I really love this spoken work piece called “People You May Know” by Kevin Kantor.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoyfunmYIpU
I think that it really embodies a huge practical problem we need to think about that would arise within a move away from incarceration and into the community accountability model. In the first half of the video, Kevin describes encountering his rapist on his “People You May Know” list on Facebook. By leaving the prison model and allowing for the visibility of perpetrators and for them to be seen as “regular” people within society, many survivors’ assaulters would be penetrating their social spaces. I think that there’s validity to some survivors not wanting their rapists to be “people they may know” or people they may run into or people who’s “explanations” have visibility. How would we negotiate this?
The “People You May Know” video and your accompanying analysis sum up a lot of the frustrations I have with the community accountability mode in ways I didn’t exactly know how to express. Seeing your perpetrator, or even knowing that they walk around the same school, neighbourhood or even city is incredibly distressing for survivors. As great as it is to “rehabilitate” a perpetrator, what does that do for the survivor, who may still grapple with the terror of them reoffending?
ReplyDeleteI have some faith that there are ways of ensuring survivor’s safety without incarceration. For example, if someone was sexually assaulted by someone through “a direct link to campus” the University of Alberta Protection Services may trespass the offender from certain buildings or campus altogether, or even suspend or expel the offender to help with the survivor’s security. Of course, this outcome is never guaranteed if someone reports to UAPS and is a far from perfect situation. But, it gives me some hope that there are some legitimate means for survivors to feel safe without going through the entire criminal justice system.
Two thoughts.
ReplyDeleteThe first thought is in response to the thought that community accountability models shift too much blame away from the assailant and transfer it to systemic issues. I would like to think that the implementation we witnessed through the Gerardo case was victim to growing pains from a predominantly sympathetic group. If the model had been implemented by a different social group than a WGS class, or if that class had more experience with the model itself than I doubt that Gerardo would have been as easy to shift blame to the legacy of colonialism or his personal history. Groups unwilling to accept such deferrals of blame are the community he is attempting to reintegrate into, so whatever their demands are become what Gerardo must overcome in order to achieve reacceptance.
Second thought is about the video. We are touching upon in later in the course with our talk on trigger warnings but the fact is that we cannot hide and distance survivors from the trauma they have endured. Similarly to hiding criminals in distant prisons, hiding from perpetrators does not change the situations that led up to the crimes or the people who have perpetrated or survived them. It is a reality that most assault is perpetrated by “people you may know”, and denying that furthers a narrative which perpetuates racial stereotypes as would-be rapist, and contributes to other damaging myths. I know that I will never have to deal with the trauma of seeing my perpetrator but I believe that the denial of their existence though symbolic annihilation is not a healthy answer.