Series: Community accountability — how does it really work?

“How can we transform a violent world, call mighty governments to account and repair generations of injustice when we are still unable to stop activists committed to liberation movements from abusing their partners, sexually harassing their comrades, or otherwise harming people in our communities?” Connie Burk writes in one of the three articles that comprise Mada’s series on community accountability, released in conjunction with the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence Campaign.

All over the world, different kinds of communities have attempted to deal with sexual and gender based violence through community accountability processes. This usually occurs when going to the police is not seen as a viable option, because of a range of possible reasons. Interacting with the criminal justice system may be inherently traumatizing, especially for survivors of sexual violence. Additionally, survivors may be from marginalized communities, rendering them more susceptible to violence or other violations at the hands of law enforcement authorities. These violations may be the result of flaws inherent to the criminal justice system in general, or due to an absence of appropriate laws and structures addressing sexual violence.

Community accountability processes typically take a year to implement and tend to entail the involvement of several committed individuals working with both the survivor and the aggressor toward reaching a lofty aim: a survivor-centered approach that encourages the aggressor to recognize the harm they have caused and that also transforms communities. But, how does this actually work in practice?

Mada will publish three articles by people who have long been involved in community accountability processes. They are all shortened versions of articles that were originally published elsewhere.

In the piece, “In our hands,” Clarissa Rojas recounts how a university course on community accountability turned into a classroom process of community accountability, when one student admitted to the class that he had sexually assaulted another student at the university.

All members of the class were encouraged to ask themselves the following questions: How are each of us implicated? All of us are constituted by and in violence — how does our participation in the social fabric make us complicit? What is our commitment to the transformation of violence?

In over a decade of working with aggressors, Philly Stands Up has asked itself similar questions. Philly’s Pissed and Philly Stands Up were two groups that emerged in response to a series of sexual assaults that consumed the anarcho-punk community in Philadelphia in 2004, one group working with survivors and one with aggressors. In “Philly Stands Up,” Esteban Kelly, one of the founding members of that group describes its journey.

It was understood that all members of Philly Stands Up needed to have a solid grasp of the interconnectedness of various systems of oppression. Their work, which Kelly describes not as magical, but as poetic, seeks to be transformative, asking, for example, what did the community do to ensure social competence in communicating sexual needs, desires and boundaries?

Burk, who through the Northwest Network of Bisexual, Trans, Lesbian, Gay Survivors of Abuse (NW Network) has worked on community accountability for over 20 years, argues that activist communities often have a limited understanding of what accountability actually entails.

In “Think, rethink” she writes about some of the recurring limitations she has observed in attempts to apply community accountability. Key to these limitations is “the mistaken idea that accountability is at its most fundamental level an external process, rather than an internal skill.”  She encourages an approach centered on accountable communities, where the emphasis is less on holding individuals accountable than on building communities where robust accountability is actually possible.