In the collaborations I’ve been working in we’ve been doing a lot of thinking about accountability and the links between accountability and justice. What does it mean to hold perpetrators of sexual harm to account? What does it mean to hold institutions to account? What does it mean to hold tech billionaires and their platforms to account? And what does it mean to hold each other to account? What about traumatised perpetrators? What about men we like? What about each other? What then?
These are all complex questions with no one size fits all answer, and I don’t pretend to have any answers at all. But what I do have is one big question- what does accountability and justice mean if we do it with care?
If you’re reading this, maybe you’re grappling with this question too, maybe how you understand justice is about courts, the police, the community, maybe it’s about retribution, maybe it’s about healing, or violence, maybe it’s about all the above.
Many of us can agree that whether we’re working in systems around youth mental health, housing, poverty, substance use, domestic abuse, education, however we understand justice and accountability, what is often missing is care. An ethic of care tells us that relationships are the fundamental glue that holds us all together and our ability to empathise and care is what moves us to action.
The criminal punishment system is not built on care. It is based on retribution. It is based on what is deemed unacceptable within political and social norms and how we punish those transgressions. These social norms are not ones that often protect women or people of colour, or poor people, or trans people, or disabled people,or migrants, and especially not people who exist across multiple groups.. and yet we continue to look to this system to tell us what justice is.
Russell Brand is imprisoned today, is this justice? Is this accountability?
I don’t know. But what I do know is that I am heart sore for the women who told people for 25 years who this man is, and that he was rewarded. I am grieving for the those of us who grew up around rape culture and misogyny and I am angry at how that lad culture elevated men to positions of power who told us again and again who they were. I am frustrated that those of us who knew, who said, who argued and fought were greeted with eye rolls and distancing.
I am hopeful though that the women involved will feel a sense of justice, and I am glad that the me too movement and survivors from all over the world planted these seeds in the histories of feminist activism, and that it was picked up by the hard work and dedication of investigative journalists and survivors.
I am wondering how we understand justice and accountability if we understand it as grounded in care. I am too angry to care for serial rapists right now- even as I type this I cannot bring myself to find sympathy for a man who has caused so much pain- but I do not relish memes about rape in prison and what violence he might face there. That is not the world I am working for.
I want to practice and understand and build justice as healing for survivors, because if the criminal punishment system is the only avenue for accountability, where does that leave us? Where does that leave women who are ostracised for speaking out? Women who are deeply traumatised, not only from the harms that they’ve experienced, but from the responses they’ve received. Being disbelieved, being turned away, made shameful, and how these women and other survivors have coped and managed and navigated those consequences. What that does to their minds, bodies and spirits.
The criminal punishment system cannot be the only way we hold perpetrators to account. Cannot be the only pathway to justice for healing.
We know that what supports healing is being believed, being validated, listened to, to have a space to share, to move, to talk, to be taken care of. Taken seriously. It contains multitudes.
As Sara Ahmed tells us
“Feeling better might be about having the room left to think and feel, or to dance on the ground; it might be about having space and time apart from others. Feeling better might be about having sufficient materials to sustain life in one’s body; it might be about having energy, shelter, warmth, light, or air to breathe. We cannot know in advance what makes others (or even ourselves) feel better about the injustices that have shaped lives and worlds. Indeed, feeling better for some might involve expressing feelings of anger, rage and shame as feelings in the present about a past that persists in the present. The emotions that have often been described as negative or even destructive can also be enabling or creative, often in their very refusal of the promise of the social bond.”
If you are reading this and wondering how do you, right now bring about different forms of accountability and justice into our worlds, forms that don’t wait for the courts or for the police, but bed in care and healing; I would offer you this.
How do you believe women? How do you challenge harm? What status quo are you willing to unsettle in order to support true justice?
Currently reading:
We do this til we free us: Mariame Kaba.
