My question, to use Noah Bradley as the example here, is basically this.
Noah Bradley admitted to sexual harassment and sexual assault pretty much openly, meaning that basically everybody who accused him was immediately believed without any chance to be demoralized, silenced, or attacked by a significant proportion of readers. Accusations at that time also alleged that Bradley had made extremely similar private apologies to people in the past, and that combined with his 48 rules to power shit means that the vast majority of the MTG community is not likely to believe any attempts at a comeback and WotC will certainly never work with him again. While obviously there are cascading failures that got us to this point, at this point the response is about as strong as it can reasonably be for an independently contracted artist primarily famous for work on a specific game.
And yet, even with all that, it is very likely that Noah Bradley continues to have a career, and that trajectory very likely has him working with the shittier parts of the MTG fan community by leaning on how he posted a big perfect apology and yet he's still cancelled years later and all that bullshit. And given he will still have a career and have a fanbase, he will still be capable of harassing, assaulting, or abusing women, and just because those women are like... associated with shitheads, or shitheads themselves, doesn't mean they deserve it.
So... what's the solution to that problem? Is there even a solution, or way to improve things? Like, even assuming we truly can't trust that he's rehabilitated and the wider community rejects him and keeps itself safe, that doesn't stop him from continuing to be a big fish in a now-smaller pond. It's tricky, since most of the mechanisms to prevent him from committing abuse are de facto rejected by the contrarian nature of the shitty side of the MTG community.
My question, to use Noah Bradley as the example here, is basically this.
Noah Bradley admitted to sexual harassment and sexual assault pretty much openly, meaning that basically everybody who accused him was immediately believed without any chance to be demoralized, silenced, or attacked by a significant proportion of readers. Accusations at that time also alleged that Bradley had made extremely similar private apologies to people in the past, and that combined with his 48 rules to power shit means that the vast majority of the MTG community is not likely to believe any attempts at a comeback and WotC will certainly never work with him again. While obviously there are cascading failures that got us to this point, at this point the response is about as strong as it can reasonably be for an independently contracted artist primarily famous for work on a specific game.
And yet, even with all that, it is very likely that Noah Bradley continues to have a career, and that trajectory very likely has him working with the shittier parts of the MTG fan community by leaning on how he posted a big perfect apology and yet he's still cancelled years later and all that bullshit. And given he will still have a career and have a fanbase, he will still be capable of harassing, assaulting, or abusing women, and just because those women are like... associated with shitheads, or shitheads themselves, doesn't mean they deserve it.
So... what's the solution to that problem? Is there even a solution, or way to improve things? Like, even assuming we truly can't trust that he's rehabilitated and the wider community rejects him and keeps itself safe, that doesn't stop him from continuing to be a big fish in a now-smaller pond. It's tricky, since most of the mechanisms to prevent him from committing abuse are de facto rejected by the contrarian nature of the shitty side of the MTG community.
Maybe there is no solution other than for society to slowly reform itself into a better one, selecting and promoting good people over toxic people. Keep calling people out on their toxicity, etc.
I mean there's a lot of ailments in society and they are all interrelated and reinforce each other. Toxicity begets toxicity. All we can do it is reject it along with these notions of tolerating intolerance and that ostracism of even toxic people is somehow bad.
I mean, I don't know other than to just work on persuading and converting people to the side of good and eventually overwhelm the bad. I'd love to be able to sit society down and give them a good talkin' to and convince them that this shit is just unacceptable but...well the only thing we absolutely know works is that individuals can wake up. Anything more than that, I'm honestly not sure is possible.
We need to be better to serve as examples to each other an expect better from others. Always call people out. Never laugh along with them. Drop them from your life. Etc. There's plenty of things we can do as individuals. I'm just not sure social ails have any collective panacea.
edit: In a sense, I'm actually suggesting we all get along less with each other. Because people just "getting along" with each other provides the atmosphere for people to hide their toxicity in. For example, BLM was like pulling the curtain back on social media. We can do the same to people that exhibit any kind of predatory behavior or any enablers of said behavior. Call people out every fucking time and support other people doing that too.
I like the theory of jail because you serve your time and then hypothetically (if not usually in reality), you get a second chance to try to get your life going again. There's something much more uncertain about the cycle of justice for someone like Noah Bradley. He loses his job (and I assume he can't do much else besides illustration) but there's never really time to serve. There's no sentence. At what point do we let people back into society and give them another chance? The internet never forgets. Or maybe it will in x years?
After seeing the absolute shit conditions prisoners suffer through, it's REALLY hard to say that just losing your job and social standing can compare, but there is something about an end up that at least gives the criminal a hope to better themselves. The ability to say "I served my time." I'd hire an ex-con at my business. I think a lot of people in here would approve of that. If I hired Noah tomorrow, people would be upset. If I hired him a year from now? 2? more?
The core problem with this argument - the core problem with the rehabilitation narrative - is that the only obligations are put on society, not the individual in question. You ask at what point does such an individual get a second chance, but such a question ignores the obligation of the individual to demonstrate that they should be given that chance - this is the purpose of serving one's time, and tends to get particularly messy in the matter of sexual assault because of how our society treats it. As was pointed out above, Bradley has openly subscribed to a philosophy in which demonstrations of contrition are tools to gain breathing time - something that should bring greater scrutiny to his performing such acts, and which demands greater obligations on his part. At this point, the argument of "should he be allowed back into proper society" shouldn't even be on the table, because the prerequisites on his part to bring it there haven't been met yet.
And yes, this means that if he refuses to do that work, society is not obligated to turn a blind eye to that refusal. Nor is society obligated to accept whatever he presents as evidence, either. As I saw pointed out elsewhere in response to the argument of stigmatization:
Do you want to know who else besides rapists spend their entire lifetime wanting to avoid talking about an event in their past because it makes others give them dirty, disapproving looks?
Rape victims.
This is exactly the attitude that leaves people stuck in prison because they don't act sorry enough to please the parole board. And highlights the entire issue notya is talking about. The law has codified sentences and does not necessarily care if you are sorry for what you did. You serve your full time and you leave. Attempts at social and workplace ostracization, which is ultimately what this stuff all ends up being, has no defined sentence.
And we already know from the stigmas against ex-cons that these kind of persistent negative effects on peoples ability to function and support themselves in society.
Your entire framework here is very similar to the one used by "tough on crime" advocates when it comes to how incarceration and afterwards should function.
So, we instead get a culture where victims of sexual/gendered/domestic violence become more and more alienated, because we prioritize the "rehabilitation" of abusers and routinely push their victims (often to the point of outright gaslighting) to have to "accept" their abuser back into the community (which often forces those victims to have to leave for their own safety.) And since you brought it up, it's worth pointing out that sexual and domestic violence is a long-running weak point for the anti-carceral movement because of the nature of such acts of violence and why normal paths of rehabilitation don't really work (this was why the movement really showed their ass during the Persky recall drive.)
I'm a big believer in restorative justice - but as I've said before, the first step (and this goes triple in cases of sexual/gendered/domestic violence) must be contrition. Furthermore, victims must not be forced to be part of the rehabilitation process.
No, the first step is not contrition because that's exactly what I'm talking about above. In terms of actual function justice systems focused on rehabilitation, in the end you have a sentence and then you are done. There is no "indefinite sentence till we believe you when you say you feel bad about it".
"They have to show me they are sorry and make me believe it" is not a system that actually works anyway. Because it's entirely subjective. We've seen how this kind of thing works in the justice system already and about as useful as a cop "knowing a criminal when they see one". And you can see this kind of thing at work just last page, where there's a lot of comments to the effect of "X person said they were sorry, but I don't believe them". Apparently contrition sometimes doesn't count. That's not a system of restorative justice.
And we can see the problem notya was talking about again in the things you keep arguing, even in this post. Because you keep circling around trying to say these people can't be rehabilitated and brushing away what that actually means for where this system, either formal or informal, goes.
Second, contrition isn't "saying sorry". Contrition is accepting the ramifications of one's conduct - that one has harmed others, that the fault for those actions rests with oneself, and that it's on oneself to make amends -and that others are not obligated to accept. (And yeah, part of contrition is to accept that some bridges are well and truly burned due to one's actions.) You talk about people saying that they don't believe Bradley, while ignoring why people were saying that - he subscribed to a philosophy that has an outright precept of using false apologies to gain breathing room ("surrender to recover".) Yeah - it turns out that when you believe something like that, it's going to take more to demonstrate contrition to others, because you have shown that you are willing to lie about it.
Finally, I'm not saying that these people can't be rehabilitated. What I'm saying is that the responsibility of rehabilitation is on them - not on society, and definitely not on their victims. Because when we put the onus on society, what we wind up with is victims forced to have to make the choice between accepting abusers back into their lives when they're not willing, or having to leave communities to be safe.
Dude, this is the entire problem with your argument right here in the first paragraph. I've literally not suggested any system at all. So I've no idea what you are talking about here. You are the one pulling these systems out of your ass. The people you are responding to don't know what they are and are not suggesting them.
And the rest of your post is just illustrative again of the same problem I mentioned above. I'm not ignoring why people are saying they don't believe Bradley, I'm pointing out that the very fact of that means this is an entirely vague subjective assessment on what "counts". You want to claim this as some sort of "restorative justice" system but it's all just undefined and hand-wavey and dependent on whether you actually believe the person's contrition or not. It's one with no defined end in sight and in which you've even posted links seeming arguing against the very restorative justice system you seem to be bringing up on the issue of the very type of case this entire thread is about. There's no defined anything here. No defined criteria, no defined end, no defined idea of rehabilitation. That's the thing notya is talking about right from the start here. At the end of the day, people who go to prison for non-life sentences go home. Even if they don't feel sorry for what they did.
You are openly advocating a system - specifically, you are advocating a system built around "bright line" punishments, with an agreement that once those punishments are completed, the abuser is decreed "rehabilitated" by everyone. You've also argued that people should openly accept an abuser's apologies at face value regardless of any evidence that the apology is made in bad faith, because to act otherwise is to be "subjective".
Again, this describes Amish shunning almost to a T, and as we've seen, this sort of system pretty much hangs victims out to dry, as they are routinely forced to either "accept" their abuser back when they don't feel safe in doing so or leave the community to protect themselves.
And yes, traditional models of restorative justice don't really work when we're talking about sexual, gendered, and domestic violence, because of their nature. As the article I posted earlier points out:
Restorative justice is centered on a victim's needs, without turning perpetrators into pariahs. That's good and important. But in a society that sees domestic violence as an interpersonal dispute, and in a community and family that sees an abuser as a good guy and an abusive relationship as one worth fixing, does a victim like Ann stand a chance at getting justice?
Does she have the support to get what she really needs – which is to get away from her abuser, and to have her community and her society take seriously acts of violence against her?
I don't think so: not in the situation the Times article illustrated, and not in many domestic violence cases. As someone who believes in prison reform, social justice and human rights, I believe deeply and strongly that people are capable of radical, transformative change. I believe restorative justice can, in many circumstances, help to set that kind of change in motion.
But radical, transformative change can't come on the backs of victims of violence; it can't come at the expense of their safety or their mental health or their sense of security in their own communities. The radical, transformative change that makes a formerly violent person – especially a person who was repeatedly violent toward someone they claimed to love – nonviolent is a long process that requires accountability from the perpetrator and an understanding that some things may be unforgivable, and that true change does not hinge on or require forgiveness from others.
Transformative change is more than an apology, and it's more than taking steps to repair the damage done. It's a recognition that some damage is irreparable, that one must be be contrite even if forgiveness never comes, and that one's change is only real so long as one makes it so for the rest of one's days.
That's a tall order. In some ways, jail is easier.
If you steal someone's bike or sell drugs on someone's block, there are ways to repay them for your offense. Certainly, feelings of safety and security are violated, but the damage is usually fixable. But if you take the most intimate of all relationships and you pervert love into violence, you damage a person's physical body in addition to their sense of trust and their right to believe that love shouldn't come with a fist to the face.
This also shows why your argument of "this has no end" doesn't really work here either. Being an abuser is in some ways like being an alcoholic - and as an alcoholic has to move forward without drinking, an abuser has to move forward without abusing. The process is indefinite because it's not acceptable to be abusive, so one has to not be abusive moving forward. And again, people get to make their decisions on how much they trust that change, and they can choose to not accept it.
My question, to use Noah Bradley as the example here, is basically this.
Noah Bradley admitted to sexual harassment and sexual assault pretty much openly, meaning that basically everybody who accused him was immediately believed without any chance to be demoralized, silenced, or attacked by a significant proportion of readers. Accusations at that time also alleged that Bradley had made extremely similar private apologies to people in the past, and that combined with his 48 rules to power shit means that the vast majority of the MTG community is not likely to believe any attempts at a comeback and WotC will certainly never work with him again. While obviously there are cascading failures that got us to this point, at this point the response is about as strong as it can reasonably be for an independently contracted artist primarily famous for work on a specific game.
And yet, even with all that, it is very likely that Noah Bradley continues to have a career, and that trajectory very likely has him working with the shittier parts of the MTG fan community by leaning on how he posted a big perfect apology and yet he's still cancelled years later and all that bullshit. And given he will still have a career and have a fanbase, he will still be capable of harassing, assaulting, or abusing women, and just because those women are like... associated with shitheads, or shitheads themselves, doesn't mean they deserve it.
So... what's the solution to that problem? Is there even a solution, or way to improve things? Like, even assuming we truly can't trust that he's rehabilitated and the wider community rejects him and keeps itself safe, that doesn't stop him from continuing to be a big fish in a now-smaller pond. It's tricky, since most of the mechanisms to prevent him from committing abuse are de facto rejected by the contrarian nature of the shitty side of the MTG community.
As the saying goes, "we have a word for those who support Nazis for profit. That word is Nazi."
We need to treat communities that support abusers as abusive as well, because in a very real way they are. The problem is that we're often told that it's somehow unfair to do so, even though the community is enabling abuse to continue. Also, we need to provide support for victims looking to leave, as well as providing resources for rehabilitation ("an open door", so to speak) for those from that community who want to leave because they're no longer willing to tolerate abuse.
I think I gravitate a lot more toward systems that emotionlessly judge people (ideally at least) not only because it gives everything a sense of fairness, but also because it's a strong way to educate society about what is acceptable/right and what's not. At first people might not agree with a new law (see integration in public schools), but eventually it sinks in and becomes a society's moral fabric.
But I also don't want "being a jerk" to be illegal. To me the question is, what's the line where we consider people's actions so upsetting that they should be illegal? People are extremely upset with many of these stories. Have we crossed the threshold yet?
I think I gravitate a lot more toward systems that emotionlessly judge people (ideally at least) not only because it gives everything a sense of fairness, but also because it's a strong way to educate society about what is acceptable/right and what's not. At first people might not agree with a new law (see integration in public schools), but eventually it sinks in and becomes a society's moral fabric.
But I also don't want "being a jerk" to be illegal. To me the question is, what's the line where we consider people's actions so upsetting that they should be illegal? People are extremely upset with many of these stories. Have we crossed the threshold yet?
Except that they don't give things a sense of fairness, and oftentimes reinforce injustice. Minorities have legitimate reasons to be angry with how society has treated them, but "emotionless" justice systems routinely punish them for showing that anger - what part of that is even remotely fair?
Also, abuse is not "being a jerk", victims responding to abuse with justifiable anger are not "upset", and this framing is how abusers routinely avoid consequences for their abuse.
The only thing I ever saw that felt something like victim centered justice in a sexual assault case was the week of victim impact statements in the Nassar case. It definitely felt like allowing all of those statements was cathartic for the women and made them feel like their voice mattered.
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
I think I gravitate a lot more toward systems that emotionlessly judge people (ideally at least) not only because it gives everything a sense of fairness, but also because it's a strong way to educate society about what is acceptable/right and what's not. At first people might not agree with a new law (see integration in public schools), but eventually it sinks in and becomes a society's moral fabric.
But I also don't want "being a jerk" to be illegal. To me the question is, what's the line where we consider people's actions so upsetting that they should be illegal? People are extremely upset with many of these stories. Have we crossed the threshold yet?
Let's be careful with the word illegal. I don't want "being a jerk" to be illegal. But society should continue to frown on "being a jerk."
That's not emotional. I don't think being a jerk is necessarily all that subjective. Society has a pretty clear concept of "jerk." And even if that concept moves around a bit, society can autocorrect as it already does.
All I'm saying is, let's collectively push society toward being nicer and better and caring for each other as opposed to selfishness and xenophobia. We don't have to and should not rely on law alone to guide society. Just because the law allows a large range of legally acceptable behaviors, that doesn't mean society has to follow suit 1x1. I mean, it never has. Social mores have always existed. Let's guide society to be a more productive, better, collaborative one.
Either do that or resign to live in the dark ages for ever because I don't think the right solution is to make everything that hurts society illegal but rather to make it untenable. It's an evolution.
I think I gravitate a lot more toward systems that emotionlessly judge people (ideally at least) not only because it gives everything a sense of fairness, but also because it's a strong way to educate society about what is acceptable/right and what's not. At first people might not agree with a new law (see integration in public schools), but eventually it sinks in and becomes a society's moral fabric.
But I also don't want "being a jerk" to be illegal. To me the question is, what's the line where we consider people's actions so upsetting that they should be illegal? People are extremely upset with many of these stories. Have we crossed the threshold yet?
Except that they don't give things a sense of fairness, and oftentimes reinforce injustice. Minorities have legitimate reasons to be angry with how society has treated them, but "emotionless" justice systems routinely punish them for showing that anger - what part of that is even remotely fair?
Also, abuse is not "being a jerk", victims responding to abuse with justifiable anger are not "upset", and this framing is how abusers routinely avoid consequences for their abuse.
To your first point. Yes, the system is absolutely wildly unfair right now. And I'd like to think it's slowly becoming better. But I'm not sure what point you're making. I like that we have a system of laws.
"Also, abuse is not "being a jerk"
Sorry if that's the impression I gave. That's not what I meant. There's a sliding scale of bad things a person can do that are not illegal. Being a jerk is the low end. D'Elia's grooming of teens is way on the other end. I'm trying to figure out where I want the line to be before it becomes illegal.
I think I gravitate a lot more toward systems that emotionlessly judge people (ideally at least) not only because it gives everything a sense of fairness, but also because it's a strong way to educate society about what is acceptable/right and what's not. At first people might not agree with a new law (see integration in public schools), but eventually it sinks in and becomes a society's moral fabric.
But I also don't want "being a jerk" to be illegal. To me the question is, what's the line where we consider people's actions so upsetting that they should be illegal? People are extremely upset with many of these stories. Have we crossed the threshold yet?
Except that they don't give things a sense of fairness, and oftentimes reinforce injustice. Minorities have legitimate reasons to be angry with how society has treated them, but "emotionless" justice systems routinely punish them for showing that anger - what part of that is even remotely fair?
Also, abuse is not "being a jerk", victims responding to abuse with justifiable anger are not "upset", and this framing is how abusers routinely avoid consequences for their abuse.
To your first point. Yes, the system is absolutely wildly unfair right now. And I'd like to think it's slowly becoming better. But I'm not sure what point you're making. I like that we have a system of laws.
"Also, abuse is not "being a jerk"
Sorry if that's the impression I gave. That's not what I meant. There's a sliding scale of bad things a person can do that are not illegal. Being a jerk is the low end. D'Elia's grooming of teens is way on the other end. I'm trying to figure out where I want the line to be before it becomes illegal.
The point is that the law is not meant to be emotionless. For example, part of the reason we have juries (both petit and grand) is to incorporate emotion into our legal system. Furthermore, when we make "emotionlessness" a virtue, we wind up punishing the rightfully angry, and empowering those who can hide their hate with casual disdain - this was the strategy of Richard Spencer.
I think I gravitate a lot more toward systems that emotionlessly judge people (ideally at least) not only because it gives everything a sense of fairness, but also because it's a strong way to educate society about what is acceptable/right and what's not. At first people might not agree with a new law (see integration in public schools), but eventually it sinks in and becomes a society's moral fabric.
But I also don't want "being a jerk" to be illegal. To me the question is, what's the line where we consider people's actions so upsetting that they should be illegal? People are extremely upset with many of these stories. Have we crossed the threshold yet?
Except that they don't give things a sense of fairness, and oftentimes reinforce injustice. Minorities have legitimate reasons to be angry with how society has treated them, but "emotionless" justice systems routinely punish them for showing that anger - what part of that is even remotely fair?
Also, abuse is not "being a jerk", victims responding to abuse with justifiable anger are not "upset", and this framing is how abusers routinely avoid consequences for their abuse.
To your first point. Yes, the system is absolutely wildly unfair right now. And I'd like to think it's slowly becoming better. But I'm not sure what point you're making. I like that we have a system of laws.
"Also, abuse is not "being a jerk"
Sorry if that's the impression I gave. That's not what I meant. There's a sliding scale of bad things a person can do that are not illegal. Being a jerk is the low end. D'Elia's grooming of teens is way on the other end. I'm trying to figure out where I want the line to be before it becomes illegal.
The point is that the law is not meant to be emotionless. For example, part of the reason we have juries (both petit and grand) is to incorporate emotion into our legal system. Furthermore, when we make "emotionlessness" a virtue, we wind up punishing the rightfully angry, and empowering those who can hide their hate with casual disdain - this was the strategy of Richard Spencer.
I think juries exist to allow nuance to exist in our legal system that a strictly written text can't provide. I don't think they exist to add emotion. In fact, juries are often instructed to act dispassionately. The very fact that we select juries that are strangers, rather than the victims is proof that they're meant to be objective and detached.
Richard Spencer is objectively evil. Emotion doesn't need to be a factor to know that.
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WhiteZinfandelYour insidesLet me show you themRegistered Userregular
Maybe we should worry more about the victims. Because when we get past the fantasy of the abuser forever shunned, what you see is that a huge percentage return to their careers quietly while the accusers see their careers wither and die.
I mean, this is like round three for Mel Gibson. Brian Wood still gets work. I imagine I’ll see Avellone’s name pop up in credits again in a year or two.
in what way would worrying about the victims change the fact that Mel Gibson and Brian Wood still get work? What does "worry more about the victims" actually even mean here? Believing them? Ok no prob. But for anyone just following along on twitter that's a very "thoughts and prayers" kind of thing.
Arguing with those who don't believe the victim? Sure ok maybe but I don't know how much good it is trying to convince twitter randos but it's something.
Not buying or consuming media they have created? Probably a good idea but gets tricky in cases where the media was the product of many innocent peoples' labor as well as the abuser. Have to figure that out on a case by case basis.
If you happen to be in a position where it is possible, refusing to work with the absuer / cut them off etc... ? Now that seems like a positive thing to do for the few people in a position to do so (compared to the number of spectators on social media). But that is what you are saying is "the fantasy of the abuser forever shunned" and that we should be worrying more about the victims instead.
So how does that work?
The first step is to show more concern over the welfare of victims than the welfare of their abusers. Too often, victims find themselves isolated from the communities they belong to because the community gets more concerned about what will happen to the abuser rather than what is happening to their victims.
again, you seem to be quoting posts and then typing things that sound nice but are not related to the thing you are quoting.
Your posts illustrate the problem, because you're more concerned about where the abuser winds up than what happens with the victims. If an abuser can no longer get high status work, why exactly is that a problem that demands our attention? Again, this is one of the major flaws of the "rehabilitation narrative", that the abuser is now somehow society's problem, and as such society is somehow obligated to work with them for their rehabilitation. Society does need to provide the tools for rehabilitation, but beyond that, the onus of improvement is on the abuser. Meanwhile, no concern is shown for the victims - as I pointed out, they are too often pressured into being co-opted into the "rehabilitation" of their abuser.
So before we start spitballing about the plight of the poor starving abuser, how about we first address the very real problems that their victims routinely suffer after everything comes out.
I see "what do we do with abusers?" as a question directly related to victim welfare, because, well... what do we do with abusers? Abusive personalities are incredibly common, as we're finding out. I'd love to see more research into how much of that is nature vs nurture, and thus how much can be done to identify abusers and intervene early; but in the meantime, what do we do with the frankly huge percent of men in power (edit: and some women) who have abusive personalities?* Ideally, I'd isolate them until and unless they can demonstrate a sincere desire to change, and then monitor them for life to make sure they follow through - but that's neither practical nor plausible, especially considering very few abusers are 1) interested in changing and 2) capable of it. So how do we keep past, current, and potential future victims safe when abusers are a dime a dozen?
* When I say "abusive personality," I'm not trying to recast abuse as the result of a mental illness and thus absolve abusers (though I think making "abusive personality disorder" a thing might be an effective way of directing resources to the problem, as well as hopefully making its scope visible to the general public). I'm saying that because abusive behavior is rooted in entitlement, you can't treat abuse as a one-time misdeed or abusers as good people who made mistakes. You have to look at it as the result of a moral compass that is fucked up enough to think the behavior was acceptable, and you have to deal with the whole person as someone with a fucked-up moral compass. You can't just attempt to address the specific behavior, because that only teaches them how to abuse in more subtle ways.
(I am not a psychologist; this is my personal opinion as someone who has survived intimate partner abuse.)
What do you mean when you say "isolate them"? I'm guessing you don't mean solitary confinement on account of that being torture. Isolate them from their previous victims? Isolate them from all potential future victims?
I think I gravitate a lot more toward systems that emotionlessly judge people (ideally at least) not only because it gives everything a sense of fairness, but also because it's a strong way to educate society about what is acceptable/right and what's not. At first people might not agree with a new law (see integration in public schools), but eventually it sinks in and becomes a society's moral fabric.
But I also don't want "being a jerk" to be illegal. To me the question is, what's the line where we consider people's actions so upsetting that they should be illegal? People are extremely upset with many of these stories. Have we crossed the threshold yet?
Except that they don't give things a sense of fairness, and oftentimes reinforce injustice. Minorities have legitimate reasons to be angry with how society has treated them, but "emotionless" justice systems routinely punish them for showing that anger - what part of that is even remotely fair?
Also, abuse is not "being a jerk", victims responding to abuse with justifiable anger are not "upset", and this framing is how abusers routinely avoid consequences for their abuse.
To your first point. Yes, the system is absolutely wildly unfair right now. And I'd like to think it's slowly becoming better. But I'm not sure what point you're making. I like that we have a system of laws.
"Also, abuse is not "being a jerk"
Sorry if that's the impression I gave. That's not what I meant. There's a sliding scale of bad things a person can do that are not illegal. Being a jerk is the low end. D'Elia's grooming of teens is way on the other end. I'm trying to figure out where I want the line to be before it becomes illegal.
The point is that the law is not meant to be emotionless. For example, part of the reason we have juries (both petit and grand) is to incorporate emotion into our legal system. Furthermore, when we make "emotionlessness" a virtue, we wind up punishing the rightfully angry, and empowering those who can hide their hate with casual disdain - this was the strategy of Richard Spencer.
That's not true, is it?
Juries aren't supposed to be "well, we don't really have any evidence, but we're really angry, so, to the chair he goes"
The whole point of a jury is to find facts, not to judge someone.
And we've seen time and time again in the past that "rightfully angry" is incredibly damaging to minorities. As people are always rightfully angry at minorities.
I like the theory of jail because you serve your time and then hypothetically (if not usually in reality), you get a second chance to try to get your life going again. There's something much more uncertain about the cycle of justice for someone like Noah Bradley. He loses his job (and I assume he can't do much else besides illustration) but there's never really time to serve. There's no sentence. At what point do we let people back into society and give them another chance? The internet never forgets. Or maybe it will in x years?
After seeing the absolute shit conditions prisoners suffer through, it's REALLY hard to say that just losing your job and social standing can compare, but there is something about an end up that at least gives the criminal a hope to better themselves. The ability to say "I served my time." I'd hire an ex-con at my business. I think a lot of people in here would approve of that. If I hired Noah tomorrow, people would be upset. If I hired him a year from now? 2? more?
The core problem with this argument - the core problem with the rehabilitation narrative - is that the only obligations are put on society, not the individual in question. You ask at what point does such an individual get a second chance, but such a question ignores the obligation of the individual to demonstrate that they should be given that chance - this is the purpose of serving one's time, and tends to get particularly messy in the matter of sexual assault because of how our society treats it. As was pointed out above, Bradley has openly subscribed to a philosophy in which demonstrations of contrition are tools to gain breathing time - something that should bring greater scrutiny to his performing such acts, and which demands greater obligations on his part. At this point, the argument of "should he be allowed back into proper society" shouldn't even be on the table, because the prerequisites on his part to bring it there haven't been met yet.
And yes, this means that if he refuses to do that work, society is not obligated to turn a blind eye to that refusal. Nor is society obligated to accept whatever he presents as evidence, either. As I saw pointed out elsewhere in response to the argument of stigmatization:
Do you want to know who else besides rapists spend their entire lifetime wanting to avoid talking about an event in their past because it makes others give them dirty, disapproving looks?
Rape victims.
This is exactly the attitude that leaves people stuck in prison because they don't act sorry enough to please the parole board. And highlights the entire issue notya is talking about. The law has codified sentences and does not necessarily care if you are sorry for what you did. You serve your full time and you leave. Attempts at social and workplace ostracization, which is ultimately what this stuff all ends up being, has no defined sentence.
And we already know from the stigmas against ex-cons that these kind of persistent negative effects on peoples ability to function and support themselves in society.
Your entire framework here is very similar to the one used by "tough on crime" advocates when it comes to how incarceration and afterwards should function.
So, we instead get a culture where victims of sexual/gendered/domestic violence become more and more alienated, because we prioritize the "rehabilitation" of abusers and routinely push their victims (often to the point of outright gaslighting) to have to "accept" their abuser back into the community (which often forces those victims to have to leave for their own safety.) And since you brought it up, it's worth pointing out that sexual and domestic violence is a long-running weak point for the anti-carceral movement because of the nature of such acts of violence and why normal paths of rehabilitation don't really work (this was why the movement really showed their ass during the Persky recall drive.)
I'm a big believer in restorative justice - but as I've said before, the first step (and this goes triple in cases of sexual/gendered/domestic violence) must be contrition. Furthermore, victims must not be forced to be part of the rehabilitation process.
No, the first step is not contrition because that's exactly what I'm talking about above. In terms of actual function justice systems focused on rehabilitation, in the end you have a sentence and then you are done. There is no "indefinite sentence till we believe you when you say you feel bad about it".
"They have to show me they are sorry and make me believe it" is not a system that actually works anyway. Because it's entirely subjective. We've seen how this kind of thing works in the justice system already and about as useful as a cop "knowing a criminal when they see one". And you can see this kind of thing at work just last page, where there's a lot of comments to the effect of "X person said they were sorry, but I don't believe them". Apparently contrition sometimes doesn't count. That's not a system of restorative justice.
And we can see the problem notya was talking about again in the things you keep arguing, even in this post. Because you keep circling around trying to say these people can't be rehabilitated and brushing away what that actually means for where this system, either formal or informal, goes.
Second, contrition isn't "saying sorry". Contrition is accepting the ramifications of one's conduct - that one has harmed others, that the fault for those actions rests with oneself, and that it's on oneself to make amends -and that others are not obligated to accept. (And yeah, part of contrition is to accept that some bridges are well and truly burned due to one's actions.) You talk about people saying that they don't believe Bradley, while ignoring why people were saying that - he subscribed to a philosophy that has an outright precept of using false apologies to gain breathing room ("surrender to recover".) Yeah - it turns out that when you believe something like that, it's going to take more to demonstrate contrition to others, because you have shown that you are willing to lie about it.
Finally, I'm not saying that these people can't be rehabilitated. What I'm saying is that the responsibility of rehabilitation is on them - not on society, and definitely not on their victims. Because when we put the onus on society, what we wind up with is victims forced to have to make the choice between accepting abusers back into their lives when they're not willing, or having to leave communities to be safe.
Dude, this is the entire problem with your argument right here in the first paragraph. I've literally not suggested any system at all. So I've no idea what you are talking about here. You are the one pulling these systems out of your ass. The people you are responding to don't know what they are and are not suggesting them.
And the rest of your post is just illustrative again of the same problem I mentioned above. I'm not ignoring why people are saying they don't believe Bradley, I'm pointing out that the very fact of that means this is an entirely vague subjective assessment on what "counts". You want to claim this as some sort of "restorative justice" system but it's all just undefined and hand-wavey and dependent on whether you actually believe the person's contrition or not. It's one with no defined end in sight and in which you've even posted links seeming arguing against the very restorative justice system you seem to be bringing up on the issue of the very type of case this entire thread is about. There's no defined anything here. No defined criteria, no defined end, no defined idea of rehabilitation. That's the thing notya is talking about right from the start here. At the end of the day, people who go to prison for non-life sentences go home. Even if they don't feel sorry for what they did.
You are openly advocating a system - specifically, you are advocating a system built around "bright line" punishments, with an agreement that once those punishments are completed, the abuser is decreed "rehabilitated" by everyone. You've also argued that people should openly accept an abuser's apologies at face value regardless of any evidence that the apology is made in bad faith, because to act otherwise is to be "subjective".
Again, this describes Amish shunning almost to a T, and as we've seen, this sort of system pretty much hangs victims out to dry, as they are routinely forced to either "accept" their abuser back when they don't feel safe in doing so or leave the community to protect themselves.
And yes, traditional models of restorative justice don't really work when we're talking about sexual, gendered, and domestic violence, because of their nature. As the article I posted earlier points out:
Restorative justice is centered on a victim's needs, without turning perpetrators into pariahs. That's good and important. But in a society that sees domestic violence as an interpersonal dispute, and in a community and family that sees an abuser as a good guy and an abusive relationship as one worth fixing, does a victim like Ann stand a chance at getting justice?
Does she have the support to get what she really needs – which is to get away from her abuser, and to have her community and her society take seriously acts of violence against her?
I don't think so: not in the situation the Times article illustrated, and not in many domestic violence cases. As someone who believes in prison reform, social justice and human rights, I believe deeply and strongly that people are capable of radical, transformative change. I believe restorative justice can, in many circumstances, help to set that kind of change in motion.
But radical, transformative change can't come on the backs of victims of violence; it can't come at the expense of their safety or their mental health or their sense of security in their own communities. The radical, transformative change that makes a formerly violent person – especially a person who was repeatedly violent toward someone they claimed to love – nonviolent is a long process that requires accountability from the perpetrator and an understanding that some things may be unforgivable, and that true change does not hinge on or require forgiveness from others.
Transformative change is more than an apology, and it's more than taking steps to repair the damage done. It's a recognition that some damage is irreparable, that one must be be contrite even if forgiveness never comes, and that one's change is only real so long as one makes it so for the rest of one's days.
That's a tall order. In some ways, jail is easier.
If you steal someone's bike or sell drugs on someone's block, there are ways to repay them for your offense. Certainly, feelings of safety and security are violated, but the damage is usually fixable. But if you take the most intimate of all relationships and you pervert love into violence, you damage a person's physical body in addition to their sense of trust and their right to believe that love shouldn't come with a fist to the face.
This also shows why your argument of "this has no end" doesn't really work here either. Being an abuser is in some ways like being an alcoholic - and as an alcoholic has to move forward without drinking, an abuser has to move forward without abusing. The process is indefinite because it's not acceptable to be abusive, so one has to not be abusive moving forward. And again, people get to make their decisions on how much they trust that change, and they can choose to not accept it.
I know you are extremely passionate about this, but I really cannot connect your posts to the quotes at all. Shryke has emphatically *not* advocated a "bright-line" system, and a "you must believe all apologies" approach. They just pointed out that you can't dismiss apologies as insincere, with rightful comparisons to parole boards. They never advocated a different system, just pointed out the flaws with your statements.
What do you propose for people who have been cancelled out of a high-profile industry into a low-profile one? Chances are they will still abuse, but no-one will notice. How do you think we should solve abusers, long term?
In this moment, I am euphoric. Not because of any phony god’s blessing. But because, I am enlightened by my intelligence.
Linespider5ALL HAIL KING KILLMONGERRegistered Userregular
The lines do get weird. After all, everything in this thread is more or less discussion of the behaviors of a public figure. Maybe not the MTG art guy, but still, people in elevated positions in unique careers. Although it’s not the thread for it, there does seem to be...a complication to the discussion when it’s someone that’s probably otherwise an aspirational figure, or someone we wanted to believe was fighting the good fight. Someone who was in some way a hero, someone who an audience might feel emotionally indebted to. People end up in weird philosophical quagmires where someone inevitablely wants to argue that elevating an art form might be world changing enough to excuse a certain amount of abuse. Or that in some way the abuse has already been accepted by the public based on how the popularity of a given piece of entertainment.
Which is to say nothing of the pre-existing systematic abuse that can be found in many entertainment industries generalized across various tiers of workers, artists and fans. Shit goes deep.
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
"If you steal someone's bike or sell drugs on someone's block, there are ways to repay them for your offense. Certainly, feelings of safety and security are violated, but the damage is usually fixable. But if you take the most intimate of all relationships and you pervert love into violence, you damage a person's physical body in addition to their sense of trust and their right to believe that love shouldn't come with a fist to the face."
This seems like a pretty unbalanced comparison, insofar as it contrasts extremely mild nonviolent drug offenses and property crimes against severe intimate partner violence. I mean, many people don't even think that nonviolent drug offenses should be illegal in the first place. Rather, if we really want to think about how "tough on crime" vs. restorative approaches to criminal justice would/should play out when applied to #metoo offenses, it would make more sense to hold severity fixed and compare like-against-like. In that case, a better analogy to severe intimate partner violence is probably something like a botched robbery in which a person is shot/stabbed in their home and suffers serious trauma; a DUI in which a person is crippled and/or loses a spouse or child; or so on. How do/should we handle offenders who commit crimes which incur those very serious/irreperable harms? This is not to say what we would learn from that more accurate comparison, but just to say that I think the one being made in the quoted section of the article is not helpful.
It's also worth noting that, in that Guardian article, Jill Filopovic is opposing a certain restorative justice approach to domestic violence, one which involves bringing the victim into communication with the offender and potentially repairing their relationship. It seems sensible to point out that this may be inappropriate for domestic violence cases where the victim already faces inappropriate social pressure to forgive their abuser and to assume blame themselves, and where the priority may be isolating them from the offender rather than reuniting them. But that's a point about the use of a specific restorative justice model for domestic violence. It doesn't show that the system shouldn't aim to rehabilitate those abusers (just while doing so far away from their victims), and it certainly doesn't show that rehabilitation is a bad goal for the full range of social and legal offenses that fall under the general #metoo umbrella. When it comes to thinking through how to treat those offenders, the usual mix of considerations about retributive punishment, deterrence of future offenders, neutralization of the present offender, and potential for rehabilitation seem like they all apply.
When it comes to thinking through how those considerations should be balanced across a variety of different cases, I think people are often pretty inconsistent, with the obvious diagnosis being that people tend to favor retributive approaches to offenders who they don't sympathize with who inflict harm on victims they do, whereas they favor rehabilitative approaches for offenders they do sympathize with against victims with whom they don't. Ymmv.
I like the theory of jail because you serve your time and then hypothetically (if not usually in reality), you get a second chance to try to get your life going again. There's something much more uncertain about the cycle of justice for someone like Noah Bradley. He loses his job (and I assume he can't do much else besides illustration) but there's never really time to serve. There's no sentence. At what point do we let people back into society and give them another chance? The internet never forgets. Or maybe it will in x years?
After seeing the absolute shit conditions prisoners suffer through, it's REALLY hard to say that just losing your job and social standing can compare, but there is something about an end up that at least gives the criminal a hope to better themselves. The ability to say "I served my time." I'd hire an ex-con at my business. I think a lot of people in here would approve of that. If I hired Noah tomorrow, people would be upset. If I hired him a year from now? 2? more?
The core problem with this argument - the core problem with the rehabilitation narrative - is that the only obligations are put on society, not the individual in question. You ask at what point does such an individual get a second chance, but such a question ignores the obligation of the individual to demonstrate that they should be given that chance - this is the purpose of serving one's time, and tends to get particularly messy in the matter of sexual assault because of how our society treats it. As was pointed out above, Bradley has openly subscribed to a philosophy in which demonstrations of contrition are tools to gain breathing time - something that should bring greater scrutiny to his performing such acts, and which demands greater obligations on his part. At this point, the argument of "should he be allowed back into proper society" shouldn't even be on the table, because the prerequisites on his part to bring it there haven't been met yet.
And yes, this means that if he refuses to do that work, society is not obligated to turn a blind eye to that refusal. Nor is society obligated to accept whatever he presents as evidence, either. As I saw pointed out elsewhere in response to the argument of stigmatization:
Do you want to know who else besides rapists spend their entire lifetime wanting to avoid talking about an event in their past because it makes others give them dirty, disapproving looks?
Rape victims.
This is exactly the attitude that leaves people stuck in prison because they don't act sorry enough to please the parole board. And highlights the entire issue notya is talking about. The law has codified sentences and does not necessarily care if you are sorry for what you did. You serve your full time and you leave. Attempts at social and workplace ostracization, which is ultimately what this stuff all ends up being, has no defined sentence.
And we already know from the stigmas against ex-cons that these kind of persistent negative effects on peoples ability to function and support themselves in society.
Your entire framework here is very similar to the one used by "tough on crime" advocates when it comes to how incarceration and afterwards should function.
So, we instead get a culture where victims of sexual/gendered/domestic violence become more and more alienated, because we prioritize the "rehabilitation" of abusers and routinely push their victims (often to the point of outright gaslighting) to have to "accept" their abuser back into the community (which often forces those victims to have to leave for their own safety.) And since you brought it up, it's worth pointing out that sexual and domestic violence is a long-running weak point for the anti-carceral movement because of the nature of such acts of violence and why normal paths of rehabilitation don't really work (this was why the movement really showed their ass during the Persky recall drive.)
I'm a big believer in restorative justice - but as I've said before, the first step (and this goes triple in cases of sexual/gendered/domestic violence) must be contrition. Furthermore, victims must not be forced to be part of the rehabilitation process.
No, the first step is not contrition because that's exactly what I'm talking about above. In terms of actual function justice systems focused on rehabilitation, in the end you have a sentence and then you are done. There is no "indefinite sentence till we believe you when you say you feel bad about it".
"They have to show me they are sorry and make me believe it" is not a system that actually works anyway. Because it's entirely subjective. We've seen how this kind of thing works in the justice system already and about as useful as a cop "knowing a criminal when they see one". And you can see this kind of thing at work just last page, where there's a lot of comments to the effect of "X person said they were sorry, but I don't believe them". Apparently contrition sometimes doesn't count. That's not a system of restorative justice.
And we can see the problem notya was talking about again in the things you keep arguing, even in this post. Because you keep circling around trying to say these people can't be rehabilitated and brushing away what that actually means for where this system, either formal or informal, goes.
Second, contrition isn't "saying sorry". Contrition is accepting the ramifications of one's conduct - that one has harmed others, that the fault for those actions rests with oneself, and that it's on oneself to make amends -and that others are not obligated to accept. (And yeah, part of contrition is to accept that some bridges are well and truly burned due to one's actions.) You talk about people saying that they don't believe Bradley, while ignoring why people were saying that - he subscribed to a philosophy that has an outright precept of using false apologies to gain breathing room ("surrender to recover".) Yeah - it turns out that when you believe something like that, it's going to take more to demonstrate contrition to others, because you have shown that you are willing to lie about it.
Finally, I'm not saying that these people can't be rehabilitated. What I'm saying is that the responsibility of rehabilitation is on them - not on society, and definitely not on their victims. Because when we put the onus on society, what we wind up with is victims forced to have to make the choice between accepting abusers back into their lives when they're not willing, or having to leave communities to be safe.
Dude, this is the entire problem with your argument right here in the first paragraph. I've literally not suggested any system at all. So I've no idea what you are talking about here. You are the one pulling these systems out of your ass. The people you are responding to don't know what they are and are not suggesting them.
And the rest of your post is just illustrative again of the same problem I mentioned above. I'm not ignoring why people are saying they don't believe Bradley, I'm pointing out that the very fact of that means this is an entirely vague subjective assessment on what "counts". You want to claim this as some sort of "restorative justice" system but it's all just undefined and hand-wavey and dependent on whether you actually believe the person's contrition or not. It's one with no defined end in sight and in which you've even posted links seeming arguing against the very restorative justice system you seem to be bringing up on the issue of the very type of case this entire thread is about. There's no defined anything here. No defined criteria, no defined end, no defined idea of rehabilitation. That's the thing notya is talking about right from the start here. At the end of the day, people who go to prison for non-life sentences go home. Even if they don't feel sorry for what they did.
You are openly advocating a system - specifically, you are advocating a system built around "bright line" punishments, with an agreement that once those punishments are completed, the abuser is decreed "rehabilitated" by everyone. You've also argued that people should openly accept an abuser's apologies at face value regardless of any evidence that the apology is made in bad faith, because to act otherwise is to be "subjective".
Again, this describes Amish shunning almost to a T, and as we've seen, this sort of system pretty much hangs victims out to dry, as they are routinely forced to either "accept" their abuser back when they don't feel safe in doing so or leave the community to protect themselves.
And yes, traditional models of restorative justice don't really work when we're talking about sexual, gendered, and domestic violence, because of their nature. As the article I posted earlier points out:
Restorative justice is centered on a victim's needs, without turning perpetrators into pariahs. That's good and important. But in a society that sees domestic violence as an interpersonal dispute, and in a community and family that sees an abuser as a good guy and an abusive relationship as one worth fixing, does a victim like Ann stand a chance at getting justice?
Does she have the support to get what she really needs – which is to get away from her abuser, and to have her community and her society take seriously acts of violence against her?
I don't think so: not in the situation the Times article illustrated, and not in many domestic violence cases. As someone who believes in prison reform, social justice and human rights, I believe deeply and strongly that people are capable of radical, transformative change. I believe restorative justice can, in many circumstances, help to set that kind of change in motion.
But radical, transformative change can't come on the backs of victims of violence; it can't come at the expense of their safety or their mental health or their sense of security in their own communities. The radical, transformative change that makes a formerly violent person – especially a person who was repeatedly violent toward someone they claimed to love – nonviolent is a long process that requires accountability from the perpetrator and an understanding that some things may be unforgivable, and that true change does not hinge on or require forgiveness from others.
Transformative change is more than an apology, and it's more than taking steps to repair the damage done. It's a recognition that some damage is irreparable, that one must be be contrite even if forgiveness never comes, and that one's change is only real so long as one makes it so for the rest of one's days.
That's a tall order. In some ways, jail is easier.
If you steal someone's bike or sell drugs on someone's block, there are ways to repay them for your offense. Certainly, feelings of safety and security are violated, but the damage is usually fixable. But if you take the most intimate of all relationships and you pervert love into violence, you damage a person's physical body in addition to their sense of trust and their right to believe that love shouldn't come with a fist to the face.
This also shows why your argument of "this has no end" doesn't really work here either. Being an abuser is in some ways like being an alcoholic - and as an alcoholic has to move forward without drinking, an abuser has to move forward without abusing. The process is indefinite because it's not acceptable to be abusive, so one has to not be abusive moving forward. And again, people get to make their decisions on how much they trust that change, and they can choose to not accept it.
I know you are extremely passionate about this, but I really cannot connect your posts to the quotes at all. Shryke has emphatically *not* advocated a "bright-line" system, and a "you must believe all apologies" approach. They just pointed out that you can't dismiss apologies as insincere, with rightful comparisons to parole boards. They never advocated a different system, just pointed out the flaws with your statements.
What do you propose for people who have been cancelled out of a high-profile industry into a low-profile one? Chances are they will still abuse, but no-one will notice. How do you think we should solve abusers, long term?
When someone says "you serve your sentence and it's done" and that it's wrong to dismiss apologies, that is advocating for a system, even if it's not done explicitly. He was specifically stating how he felt things should be - which is why I pointed out that systems that behave in the manner he wants wind up being horrible for victims of sexual abuse and domestic violence because they don't actually address abuse and the needs of victims.
Beyond that, the arguments are put forth with little support. Why shouldn't people dismiss apologies as insincere, especially when there's evidence that the apology is such? Not to mention that if you are saying dismissing apologies is wrong, does that mean that you want to compel victims to accept apologies when they are unwilling?
Finally, we solve abuse by making it unacceptable, and holding abusers to account for their conduct. The problem with abuse is less that nobody notices, but that a blind eye is turned, and it's that blind eye that needs to be ended. It's worth pointing out that abusers tend to have a good social sense of who they can and cannot abuse.
"If you steal someone's bike or sell drugs on someone's block, there are ways to repay them for your offense. Certainly, feelings of safety and security are violated, but the damage is usually fixable. But if you take the most intimate of all relationships and you pervert love into violence, you damage a person's physical body in addition to their sense of trust and their right to believe that love shouldn't come with a fist to the face."
This seems like a pretty unbalanced comparison, insofar as it contrasts extremely mild nonviolent drug offenses and property crimes against severe intimate partner violence. I mean, many people don't even think that nonviolent drug offenses should be illegal in the first place. Rather, if we really want to think about how "tough on crime" vs. restorative approaches to criminal justice would/should play out when applied to #metoo offenses, it would make more sense to hold severity fixed and compare like-against-like. In that case, a better analogy to severe intimate partner violence is probably something like a botched robbery in which a person is shot/stabbed in their home and suffers serious trauma; a DUI in which a person is crippled and/or loses a spouse or child; or so on. How do/should we handle offenders who commit crimes which incur those very serious/irreperable harms? This is not to say what we would learn from that more accurate comparison, but just to say that I think the one being made in the quoted section of the article is not helpful.
It's also worth noting that, in that Guardian article, Jill Filopovic is opposing a certain restorative justice approach to domestic violence, one which involves bringing the victim into communication with the offender and potentially repairing their relationship. It seems sensible to point out that this may be inappropriate for domestic violence cases where the victim already faces inappropriate social pressure to forgive their abuser and to assume blame themselves, and where the priority may be isolating them from the offender rather than reuniting them. But that's a point about the use of a specific restorative justice model for domestic violence. It doesn't show that the system shouldn't aim to rehabilitate those abusers (just while doing so far away from their victims), and it certainly doesn't show that rehabilitation is a bad goal for the full range of social and legal offenses that fall under the general #metoo umbrella. When it comes to thinking through how to treat those offenders, the usual mix of considerations about retributive punishment, deterrence of future offenders, neutralization of the present offender, and potential for rehabilitation seem like they all apply.
When it comes to thinking through how those considerations should be balanced across a variety of different cases, I think people are often pretty inconsistent, with the obvious diagnosis being that people tend to favor retributive approaches to offenders who they don't sympathize with who inflict harm on victims they do, whereas they favor rehabilitative approaches for offenders they do sympathize with against victims with whom they don't. Ymmv.
Yes, I've said that there should be attempts to rehabilitate abusers - but that the responsibility of rehabilitation should be on the shoulders of the abuser, and nobody else. Furthermore, society should be prioritizing the safety of victims over rehabilitation of the abuser and not compelling victims to interact with their abusers.
(And the story did give that demonstration - the opening part discussing the benefits of restorative justice revolved around a case where a man shot his ex and left her for dead, where her parents then pushed for a restorative model to be used.)
I've just been kind of passively reading this and I have to agree that @AngelHedgie you seem to be arguing with a ghost here that doesn't exist. I get the passion you have for this but at this point it almost looks like you're actively trying to prevent a constructive conversation about what should be done with abusers. You made a comparison to abusers being like alcoholics but alcoholics have myriad ways to help them navigate their disease.
I don't see why we'd do any different for abusers. It's not about the benefit it brings to them - it's about the benefit it brings to society and ideally their victims. That said, you cannot erase the acts of an abuser and you're right that society should maintain a keen eye on that.
People in the thread want to talk about how we deal with the abuser because it's a compelling part of the problem. It doesn't mean we are not focused on the victim or are deprioritizing them. You can't address a problem by ignoring the cause of the problem and myopically focusing just on the damage done.
You're even saying in your post that abusers should get a chance at rehabilitation but then say it needs to be "on the shoulders of the abusers". What does that mean? Are you saying that the public should do nothing to take part in that rehabilitation and that it can only come from the introspection of the accused or are you getting at something else, because I don't understand.
Also, can we do away with the idea that entertaining the question of how you can rehabilitate an abuser means that we're ignoring the victim? We can do two things at once and pointing fingers at people in a thread where everybody is universally in agreement about who suffers in these situations is incredibly counter-productive to having an actual discussion.
Holy fuck how does this discussion always end up, "But how do we protect the abusers?"
I haven't really been a part of this conversation, but, at least for my part, it's not that I want to protect the abusers or see them treated kindly. It's that I don't want these people in our society. That means either:
a. Dispose of them, or
b. Figure out a way to transform shitty people into worthwhile people, and figure out ways to prevent worthwhile people from turning into shitty people.
The current method of firing them or cancelling them or whatever, and then forgetting they exist, feels cathartic, but also feels to me like it just puts abusive predators behind a curtain where we can no longer see them, even though they're still in the room. Option A is a no go for me as an opponent of the death penalty and real exile, sooooooooo here we are. Option b has a lot to talk about, so that becomes a discussion.
Obviously victims also often need rehabilitation, security, and assistance, and I agree that it's often a failure of these discussions to gloss over that in favor of the former.
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TetraNitroCubaneThe DjinneratorAt the bottom of a bottleRegistered Userregular
We need to support and protect victims more than anything else in this situation.
If you don't believe me, go back and read the comments on the Medium story about AngryJoe. Every single comment is some flavor of victim-blaming, gaslighting, DARVO bullshit. I am sure she has been getting utterly dog piled in the last few days. Even a cursory, banal comment from a personality like AngryJoe is enough to turn loose a tidal wave of CHUDS on someone, even if he only mentions her obliquely.
Until we provide an environment where victims are able to speak fully and truthfully without fear, there will be no progress. Victims will be encouraged to stay silent, and abusers will consider this the normal state of things - thus continuing to get away with it.
We need to support and protect victims more than anything else in this situation.
If you don't believe me, go back and read the comments on the Medium story about AngryJoe. Every single comment is some flavor of victim-blaming, gaslighting, DARVO bullshit. I am sure she has been getting utterly dog piled in the last few days. Even a cursory, banal comment from a personality like AngryJoe is enough to turn loose a tidal wave of CHUDS on someone, even if he only mentions her obliquely.
Until we provide an environment where victims are able to speak fully and truthfully without fear, there will be no progress. Victims will be encouraged to stay silent, and abusers will consider this the normal state of things - thus continuing to get away with it.
I'm curious about what is even possible there.
The whole call-out, social vigilantism aspect of MeToo exists because there is no official channel for victims to share their stories. If one did exist it almost certainly wouldn't be public.
As long as it's possible for the victims to publicly share their experiences, I don't see any logical way to prevent the ass hats of the world from responding with the tidal wave of shit we currently see. And if we were to set up some sort of official channel for airing of accusations/experiences that was publicly anonymous, would that have the same impact? People getting "canceled" on social media already has a relatively minimal impact on their actual lives. If the cancellation were entirely anonymous, would it be likely to have any significant impact?
Apparently Angry Joe is telling his accuser she should go to the police.
Because police credibility is at an all time high right now and they're known for taking accusations against connected white people seriously.
You have someone publicly accusing someone of committing a crime and the idea of that the accuser should file a police report - again for the crime they are publicly accusing someone of committing- is treated as absurd. It is inherently an argument for mob justice over the rule of law.
And even ignoring the due process concerns - the no rehabilitation aspect of metoo and basically every item criminal justice reformers have been pushing for decades are inherently in conflict.
The entire mindset with regards to punishment of abusers expressed in this thread is basically one we've all heard before. Just replace "abusers" with "superpredators" and it's like stepping into a time machine back to the mid 90s.
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CambiataCommander ShepardThe likes of which even GAWD has never seenRegistered Userregular
edited June 2020
The idea of "how do we address these people?" Seems perhaps like a naive question. Because to put that in context what you're really asking is, "how do we explain to entitled people that they don't actually deserve the power onto which they have grasped?" With at least some cases of the entitled people being clinical narcissists.
And yeah that's a fucking huge ask. If you want to know how huge an ask that is, consider what means you would use to get Donald Trump to feel genuine remorse for his actions, to get him to perform real reparations, and finally to realize he doesn't have a grievance if not everyone accepts his apologies and reparations. That should give you a general idea of the work involved with such a task, and precisely why it's not something that can really originate from outside the abuser.
Though I do agree that, like with alcoholism, we need to have abusers anonymous in every town in multiple locations, with the understanding that general therapy does not do the job; it requires people with a speciality in abuse dynamics, because abusers are very good at lying and their narrative needs to be questioned for an abuse-anon program to work. Probably a huge reason there are not as many abuse-anon programs out in the world goes back to the Donald Trump comparison above: why would someone like that willingly cede their power and show humility? As reported by Lundy Bancroft, someone who does run a successful abusers clinics, very few of the men he sees in his groups are willing to make the changes necessary to become non-abusers.
Cambiata on
"If you divide the whole world into just enemies and friends, you'll end up destroying everything" --Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind
Apparently Angry Joe is telling his accuser she should go to the police.
Because police credibility is at an all time high right now and they're known for taking accusations against connected white people seriously.
You have someone publicly accusing someone of committing a crime and the idea of that the accuser should file a police report - again for the crime they are publicly accusing someone of committing- is treated as absurd. It is inherently an argument for mob justice over the rule of law.
And even ignoring the due process concerns - the no rehabilitation aspect of metoo and basically every item criminal justice reformers have been pushing for decades are inherently in conflict.
The entire mindset with regards to punishment of abusers expressed in this thread is basically one we've all heard before. Just replace "abusers" with "superpredators" and it's like stepping into a time machine back to the mid 90s.
No, it's an argument that the police and the legal system routinely fail victims of sexual assault and domestic violence, and as such people have rightfully lost faith in the system to protect them.
Apparently Angry Joe is telling his accuser she should go to the police.
Because police credibility is at an all time high right now and they're known for taking accusations against connected white people seriously.
You have someone publicly accusing someone of committing a crime and the idea of that the accuser should file a police report - again for the crime they are publicly accusing someone of committing- is treated as absurd. It is inherently an argument for mob justice over the rule of law.
And even ignoring the due process concerns - the no rehabilitation aspect of metoo and basically every item criminal justice reformers have been pushing for decades are inherently in conflict.
The entire mindset with regards to punishment of abusers expressed in this thread is basically one we've all heard before. Just replace "abusers" with "superpredators" and it's like stepping into a time machine back to the mid 90s.
The "rule of law" has shown time and time again that it will not take these victims seriously, and that they will do everything in their power to protect the abusers in this case - Because the want to preserve the power dynamic.
These people aren't calling for mob justice - They're leveraging the only platform they have because every other system has failed them. Many of them are sending this signal up the pole because they don't want other people to experience the same thing.
The systems that you speak of have failed these people, and have proven they have no interest in protecting the vulnerable. That's why we're having this discussion.
I feel like there is an uncharitable reading of posts happening. I can't speak for everybody, but when I ask "what then?" it's not out of concern for the abuser. It's concern for the people in the abusers new orbit. Yes, Chris Avellone shouldn't get work with game studios anymore. But neither should he be working in an accounting firm, or a pub, or as anything that has access to people. So, what then? He can't stay here, and ideally, he's rejected everywhere. Are we hoping at some point that he'll wink out of existence and no longer be our problem?
Again, this isn't out of concern for him. I'm not worried about guys like him, or Kevin Spacey, or Louis C.K. I'm not concerned when they can "come back." They can all survive just fine with what they have. It's the ones that can't coast that concern me. I want to know the plan because I don't want them working with me, either.
I think discussion also get complicated on this forum because a large number of us are trying to balance two incongruous facts. The justice system fails to hold the predators accountable, and the current penal system in america is a complete abomination akin to torture and should not be the answer for anything.
"If you divide the whole world into just enemies and friends, you'll end up destroying everything" --Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind
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ThegreatcowLord of All BaconsWashington State - It's Wet up here innit? Registered Userregular
Yeah that to me is what makes dealing with this issue so damn hard. So often I hear in the less savory gaming circles I hang out in how so many people do this just for attention/quick payout or something (hooboy was there a lot of that during the whole Vic Mignona fiasco let me tell you) and how they should go to the police/go to court to get this thing settled. But in reality, how feasible is that? How many people will have the time/money/mental and physical energy to bring these people to account? People which, often are in much higher positions of power, surrounded by other powerful people and organizations that will often close ranks and defend them and provide financial support to defend them in ways that an individual that unless blessed by a great financial dice roll, can't afford to pursue "justice" in the traditional manner. And as others have mentioned, the "crime" is sometimes so esoteric/layered in such a way that you can't point to an actual crime being committed without multiple smoking guns, that realistically, you couldn't take them to court in the first place because you'd never have enough evidence to convince a judge/jury anyway, so you're left holding the bag.
Hell, just trying to get a former roommate to pay their fair share of the rent and going through small claims court was a pain in the ass, I can't imagine what someone would have to go through to prove their harassers were guilty to that standard or higher.
I feel like there is an uncharitable reading of posts happening. I can't speak for everybody, but when I ask "what then?" it's not out of concern for the abuser. It's concern for the people in the abusers new orbit. Yes, Chris Avellone shouldn't get work with game studios anymore. But neither should he be working in an accounting firm, or a pub, or as anything that has access to people. So, what then? He can't stay here, and ideally, he's rejected everywhere. Are we hoping at some point that he'll wink out of existence and no longer be our problem?
Again, this isn't out of concern for him. I'm not worried about guys like him, or Kevin Spacey, or Louis C.K. I'm not concerned when they can "come back." They can all survive just fine with what they have. It's the ones that can't coast that concern me. I want to know the plan because I don't want them working with me, either.
I think I basically answered this a couple of posts ago, but to sum up: There's nothing you can do about that guy. He has to do it all himself, and he most likely doesn't have any motivation to do anything unless he really faces some kind of consequences that puts him on rock bottom, and just losing his high-paying job may not be enough. But as a start we can start funding more actually-effective abuser's anonymous style programs, understanding that even the effective ones have a large recidivism rate.
That said, are there thing you can do for all the people around that guy to improve society? I think, yeah! You can start teaching enthusiastic consent in school, no means no. Teach young people from an early age that a guy who pressures a woman into sex is being a shithead. This doesn't change the abuser necessarily, but it does make it harder for him to continue his shit if an entire society is formed around not accepting that behavior. Teach people, too, to recognize the warning signs of a potential abuser early on (like pushing past boundaries and refusing to accept no).
Better media would also help! Far too many of our romance stories involve men pressuring a woman who isn't interested in him, until she finally falls for him. This narrative is where a lot of young people get their idea of what romance is supposed to look like, and so makes the pushy, even controlling partner seem attractive. Another narrative we show is where the romantic hero love bombs the girl and of course she falls for him - love bombing is a technique of domestic abusers to draw their victim in, and also used as an after-abuse apology. Disney and other children's filmmakers need to look more critically at how they portray romance with the understanding that they are forming the ideas on romance for the next generation.
The underpinning of the problem is systemic, and only systemic answers can solve it. Making a world where woman are equally as valued as men.
Edit: I should add that simply having a more just society, making all genders equal, making whites and minorities equal, making all sexualities equal, won't by itself remove abuse. I also realize in the above statement that I only mention women, when non-binary folks get even worse abuse than women do, as do trans women and men, and minorities, and we have to equalize those groups as well. But as I stated way up thread, statistics tell us that the more parity of power a society gets, the more groups other than white men become abusers. Abuse is about power. So it's the abusive mindset we need to fight against, alongside attempts at gender and racial equality.
Cambiata on
"If you divide the whole world into just enemies and friends, you'll end up destroying everything" --Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind
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AthenorBattle Hardened OptimistThe Skies of HiigaraRegistered Userregular
Jesus, no part of me wants to click through and if I was an attorney I'd be appalled - to say nothing of the victims, fuck.
Posts
Noah Bradley admitted to sexual harassment and sexual assault pretty much openly, meaning that basically everybody who accused him was immediately believed without any chance to be demoralized, silenced, or attacked by a significant proportion of readers. Accusations at that time also alleged that Bradley had made extremely similar private apologies to people in the past, and that combined with his 48 rules to power shit means that the vast majority of the MTG community is not likely to believe any attempts at a comeback and WotC will certainly never work with him again. While obviously there are cascading failures that got us to this point, at this point the response is about as strong as it can reasonably be for an independently contracted artist primarily famous for work on a specific game.
And yet, even with all that, it is very likely that Noah Bradley continues to have a career, and that trajectory very likely has him working with the shittier parts of the MTG fan community by leaning on how he posted a big perfect apology and yet he's still cancelled years later and all that bullshit. And given he will still have a career and have a fanbase, he will still be capable of harassing, assaulting, or abusing women, and just because those women are like... associated with shitheads, or shitheads themselves, doesn't mean they deserve it.
So... what's the solution to that problem? Is there even a solution, or way to improve things? Like, even assuming we truly can't trust that he's rehabilitated and the wider community rejects him and keeps itself safe, that doesn't stop him from continuing to be a big fish in a now-smaller pond. It's tricky, since most of the mechanisms to prevent him from committing abuse are de facto rejected by the contrarian nature of the shitty side of the MTG community.
Maybe there is no solution other than for society to slowly reform itself into a better one, selecting and promoting good people over toxic people. Keep calling people out on their toxicity, etc.
I mean there's a lot of ailments in society and they are all interrelated and reinforce each other. Toxicity begets toxicity. All we can do it is reject it along with these notions of tolerating intolerance and that ostracism of even toxic people is somehow bad.
I mean, I don't know other than to just work on persuading and converting people to the side of good and eventually overwhelm the bad. I'd love to be able to sit society down and give them a good talkin' to and convince them that this shit is just unacceptable but...well the only thing we absolutely know works is that individuals can wake up. Anything more than that, I'm honestly not sure is possible.
We need to be better to serve as examples to each other an expect better from others. Always call people out. Never laugh along with them. Drop them from your life. Etc. There's plenty of things we can do as individuals. I'm just not sure social ails have any collective panacea.
edit: In a sense, I'm actually suggesting we all get along less with each other. Because people just "getting along" with each other provides the atmosphere for people to hide their toxicity in. For example, BLM was like pulling the curtain back on social media. We can do the same to people that exhibit any kind of predatory behavior or any enablers of said behavior. Call people out every fucking time and support other people doing that too.
You are openly advocating a system - specifically, you are advocating a system built around "bright line" punishments, with an agreement that once those punishments are completed, the abuser is decreed "rehabilitated" by everyone. You've also argued that people should openly accept an abuser's apologies at face value regardless of any evidence that the apology is made in bad faith, because to act otherwise is to be "subjective".
Again, this describes Amish shunning almost to a T, and as we've seen, this sort of system pretty much hangs victims out to dry, as they are routinely forced to either "accept" their abuser back when they don't feel safe in doing so or leave the community to protect themselves.
And yes, traditional models of restorative justice don't really work when we're talking about sexual, gendered, and domestic violence, because of their nature. As the article I posted earlier points out:
This also shows why your argument of "this has no end" doesn't really work here either. Being an abuser is in some ways like being an alcoholic - and as an alcoholic has to move forward without drinking, an abuser has to move forward without abusing. The process is indefinite because it's not acceptable to be abusive, so one has to not be abusive moving forward. And again, people get to make their decisions on how much they trust that change, and they can choose to not accept it.
As the saying goes, "we have a word for those who support Nazis for profit. That word is Nazi."
We need to treat communities that support abusers as abusive as well, because in a very real way they are. The problem is that we're often told that it's somehow unfair to do so, even though the community is enabling abuse to continue. Also, we need to provide support for victims looking to leave, as well as providing resources for rehabilitation ("an open door", so to speak) for those from that community who want to leave because they're no longer willing to tolerate abuse.
But I also don't want "being a jerk" to be illegal. To me the question is, what's the line where we consider people's actions so upsetting that they should be illegal? People are extremely upset with many of these stories. Have we crossed the threshold yet?
Except that they don't give things a sense of fairness, and oftentimes reinforce injustice. Minorities have legitimate reasons to be angry with how society has treated them, but "emotionless" justice systems routinely punish them for showing that anger - what part of that is even remotely fair?
Also, abuse is not "being a jerk", victims responding to abuse with justifiable anger are not "upset", and this framing is how abusers routinely avoid consequences for their abuse.
Let's be careful with the word illegal. I don't want "being a jerk" to be illegal. But society should continue to frown on "being a jerk."
That's not emotional. I don't think being a jerk is necessarily all that subjective. Society has a pretty clear concept of "jerk." And even if that concept moves around a bit, society can autocorrect as it already does.
All I'm saying is, let's collectively push society toward being nicer and better and caring for each other as opposed to selfishness and xenophobia. We don't have to and should not rely on law alone to guide society. Just because the law allows a large range of legally acceptable behaviors, that doesn't mean society has to follow suit 1x1. I mean, it never has. Social mores have always existed. Let's guide society to be a more productive, better, collaborative one.
Either do that or resign to live in the dark ages for ever because I don't think the right solution is to make everything that hurts society illegal but rather to make it untenable. It's an evolution.
To your first point. Yes, the system is absolutely wildly unfair right now. And I'd like to think it's slowly becoming better. But I'm not sure what point you're making. I like that we have a system of laws.
"Also, abuse is not "being a jerk"
Sorry if that's the impression I gave. That's not what I meant. There's a sliding scale of bad things a person can do that are not illegal. Being a jerk is the low end. D'Elia's grooming of teens is way on the other end. I'm trying to figure out where I want the line to be before it becomes illegal.
The point is that the law is not meant to be emotionless. For example, part of the reason we have juries (both petit and grand) is to incorporate emotion into our legal system. Furthermore, when we make "emotionlessness" a virtue, we wind up punishing the rightfully angry, and empowering those who can hide their hate with casual disdain - this was the strategy of Richard Spencer.
I think juries exist to allow nuance to exist in our legal system that a strictly written text can't provide. I don't think they exist to add emotion. In fact, juries are often instructed to act dispassionately. The very fact that we select juries that are strangers, rather than the victims is proof that they're meant to be objective and detached.
Richard Spencer is objectively evil. Emotion doesn't need to be a factor to know that.
What do you mean when you say "isolate them"? I'm guessing you don't mean solitary confinement on account of that being torture. Isolate them from their previous victims? Isolate them from all potential future victims?
Because police credibility is at an all time high right now and they're known for taking accusations against connected white people seriously.
That's not true, is it?
Juries aren't supposed to be "well, we don't really have any evidence, but we're really angry, so, to the chair he goes"
The whole point of a jury is to find facts, not to judge someone.
And we've seen time and time again in the past that "rightfully angry" is incredibly damaging to minorities. As people are always rightfully angry at minorities.
I know you are extremely passionate about this, but I really cannot connect your posts to the quotes at all. Shryke has emphatically *not* advocated a "bright-line" system, and a "you must believe all apologies" approach. They just pointed out that you can't dismiss apologies as insincere, with rightful comparisons to parole boards. They never advocated a different system, just pointed out the flaws with your statements.
What do you propose for people who have been cancelled out of a high-profile industry into a low-profile one? Chances are they will still abuse, but no-one will notice. How do you think we should solve abusers, long term?
In my opinion:
Because we are good people and we want to see a good redemption/turnaround story.
Which is part of the problem, because people abuse that and then we have to.. do something with such people.
And because the victims didn't do anything wrong, they get isolated and ignored.
Which is to say nothing of the pre-existing systematic abuse that can be found in many entertainment industries generalized across various tiers of workers, artists and fans. Shit goes deep.
This seems like a pretty unbalanced comparison, insofar as it contrasts extremely mild nonviolent drug offenses and property crimes against severe intimate partner violence. I mean, many people don't even think that nonviolent drug offenses should be illegal in the first place. Rather, if we really want to think about how "tough on crime" vs. restorative approaches to criminal justice would/should play out when applied to #metoo offenses, it would make more sense to hold severity fixed and compare like-against-like. In that case, a better analogy to severe intimate partner violence is probably something like a botched robbery in which a person is shot/stabbed in their home and suffers serious trauma; a DUI in which a person is crippled and/or loses a spouse or child; or so on. How do/should we handle offenders who commit crimes which incur those very serious/irreperable harms? This is not to say what we would learn from that more accurate comparison, but just to say that I think the one being made in the quoted section of the article is not helpful.
It's also worth noting that, in that Guardian article, Jill Filopovic is opposing a certain restorative justice approach to domestic violence, one which involves bringing the victim into communication with the offender and potentially repairing their relationship. It seems sensible to point out that this may be inappropriate for domestic violence cases where the victim already faces inappropriate social pressure to forgive their abuser and to assume blame themselves, and where the priority may be isolating them from the offender rather than reuniting them. But that's a point about the use of a specific restorative justice model for domestic violence. It doesn't show that the system shouldn't aim to rehabilitate those abusers (just while doing so far away from their victims), and it certainly doesn't show that rehabilitation is a bad goal for the full range of social and legal offenses that fall under the general #metoo umbrella. When it comes to thinking through how to treat those offenders, the usual mix of considerations about retributive punishment, deterrence of future offenders, neutralization of the present offender, and potential for rehabilitation seem like they all apply.
When it comes to thinking through how those considerations should be balanced across a variety of different cases, I think people are often pretty inconsistent, with the obvious diagnosis being that people tend to favor retributive approaches to offenders who they don't sympathize with who inflict harm on victims they do, whereas they favor rehabilitative approaches for offenders they do sympathize with against victims with whom they don't. Ymmv.
When someone says "you serve your sentence and it's done" and that it's wrong to dismiss apologies, that is advocating for a system, even if it's not done explicitly. He was specifically stating how he felt things should be - which is why I pointed out that systems that behave in the manner he wants wind up being horrible for victims of sexual abuse and domestic violence because they don't actually address abuse and the needs of victims.
Beyond that, the arguments are put forth with little support. Why shouldn't people dismiss apologies as insincere, especially when there's evidence that the apology is such? Not to mention that if you are saying dismissing apologies is wrong, does that mean that you want to compel victims to accept apologies when they are unwilling?
Finally, we solve abuse by making it unacceptable, and holding abusers to account for their conduct. The problem with abuse is less that nobody notices, but that a blind eye is turned, and it's that blind eye that needs to be ended. It's worth pointing out that abusers tend to have a good social sense of who they can and cannot abuse.
Yes, I've said that there should be attempts to rehabilitate abusers - but that the responsibility of rehabilitation should be on the shoulders of the abuser, and nobody else. Furthermore, society should be prioritizing the safety of victims over rehabilitation of the abuser and not compelling victims to interact with their abusers.
(And the story did give that demonstration - the opening part discussing the benefits of restorative justice revolved around a case where a man shot his ex and left her for dead, where her parents then pushed for a restorative model to be used.)
I don't see why we'd do any different for abusers. It's not about the benefit it brings to them - it's about the benefit it brings to society and ideally their victims. That said, you cannot erase the acts of an abuser and you're right that society should maintain a keen eye on that.
People in the thread want to talk about how we deal with the abuser because it's a compelling part of the problem. It doesn't mean we are not focused on the victim or are deprioritizing them. You can't address a problem by ignoring the cause of the problem and myopically focusing just on the damage done.
You're even saying in your post that abusers should get a chance at rehabilitation but then say it needs to be "on the shoulders of the abusers". What does that mean? Are you saying that the public should do nothing to take part in that rehabilitation and that it can only come from the introspection of the accused or are you getting at something else, because I don't understand.
Also, can we do away with the idea that entertaining the question of how you can rehabilitate an abuser means that we're ignoring the victim? We can do two things at once and pointing fingers at people in a thread where everybody is universally in agreement about who suffers in these situations is incredibly counter-productive to having an actual discussion.
I haven't really been a part of this conversation, but, at least for my part, it's not that I want to protect the abusers or see them treated kindly. It's that I don't want these people in our society. That means either:
a. Dispose of them, or
b. Figure out a way to transform shitty people into worthwhile people, and figure out ways to prevent worthwhile people from turning into shitty people.
The current method of firing them or cancelling them or whatever, and then forgetting they exist, feels cathartic, but also feels to me like it just puts abusive predators behind a curtain where we can no longer see them, even though they're still in the room. Option A is a no go for me as an opponent of the death penalty and real exile, sooooooooo here we are. Option b has a lot to talk about, so that becomes a discussion.
Obviously victims also often need rehabilitation, security, and assistance, and I agree that it's often a failure of these discussions to gloss over that in favor of the former.
If you don't believe me, go back and read the comments on the Medium story about AngryJoe. Every single comment is some flavor of victim-blaming, gaslighting, DARVO bullshit. I am sure she has been getting utterly dog piled in the last few days. Even a cursory, banal comment from a personality like AngryJoe is enough to turn loose a tidal wave of CHUDS on someone, even if he only mentions her obliquely.
Until we provide an environment where victims are able to speak fully and truthfully without fear, there will be no progress. Victims will be encouraged to stay silent, and abusers will consider this the normal state of things - thus continuing to get away with it.
I'm curious about what is even possible there.
The whole call-out, social vigilantism aspect of MeToo exists because there is no official channel for victims to share their stories. If one did exist it almost certainly wouldn't be public.
As long as it's possible for the victims to publicly share their experiences, I don't see any logical way to prevent the ass hats of the world from responding with the tidal wave of shit we currently see. And if we were to set up some sort of official channel for airing of accusations/experiences that was publicly anonymous, would that have the same impact? People getting "canceled" on social media already has a relatively minimal impact on their actual lives. If the cancellation were entirely anonymous, would it be likely to have any significant impact?
Because the only controversial part of this is how far we should in abandoning our principles to punish the guilty.
Because the entire system being used to hold abusers to account is fundamentally an end run on the justice system.
I mean this:
You have someone publicly accusing someone of committing a crime and the idea of that the accuser should file a police report - again for the crime they are publicly accusing someone of committing- is treated as absurd. It is inherently an argument for mob justice over the rule of law.
And even ignoring the due process concerns - the no rehabilitation aspect of metoo and basically every item criminal justice reformers have been pushing for decades are inherently in conflict.
The entire mindset with regards to punishment of abusers expressed in this thread is basically one we've all heard before. Just replace "abusers" with "superpredators" and it's like stepping into a time machine back to the mid 90s.
And yeah that's a fucking huge ask. If you want to know how huge an ask that is, consider what means you would use to get Donald Trump to feel genuine remorse for his actions, to get him to perform real reparations, and finally to realize he doesn't have a grievance if not everyone accepts his apologies and reparations. That should give you a general idea of the work involved with such a task, and precisely why it's not something that can really originate from outside the abuser.
Though I do agree that, like with alcoholism, we need to have abusers anonymous in every town in multiple locations, with the understanding that general therapy does not do the job; it requires people with a speciality in abuse dynamics, because abusers are very good at lying and their narrative needs to be questioned for an abuse-anon program to work. Probably a huge reason there are not as many abuse-anon programs out in the world goes back to the Donald Trump comparison above: why would someone like that willingly cede their power and show humility? As reported by Lundy Bancroft, someone who does run a successful abusers clinics, very few of the men he sees in his groups are willing to make the changes necessary to become non-abusers.
No, it's an argument that the police and the legal system routinely fail victims of sexual assault and domestic violence, and as such people have rightfully lost faith in the system to protect them.
The "rule of law" has shown time and time again that it will not take these victims seriously, and that they will do everything in their power to protect the abusers in this case - Because the want to preserve the power dynamic.
These people aren't calling for mob justice - They're leveraging the only platform they have because every other system has failed them. Many of them are sending this signal up the pole because they don't want other people to experience the same thing.
The systems that you speak of have failed these people, and have proven they have no interest in protecting the vulnerable. That's why we're having this discussion.
Again, this isn't out of concern for him. I'm not worried about guys like him, or Kevin Spacey, or Louis C.K. I'm not concerned when they can "come back." They can all survive just fine with what they have. It's the ones that can't coast that concern me. I want to know the plan because I don't want them working with me, either.
There's more if you click through.
Hell, just trying to get a former roommate to pay their fair share of the rent and going through small claims court was a pain in the ass, I can't imagine what someone would have to go through to prove their harassers were guilty to that standard or higher.
Wud yoo laek to lern aboot meatz? Look here!
I think I basically answered this a couple of posts ago, but to sum up: There's nothing you can do about that guy. He has to do it all himself, and he most likely doesn't have any motivation to do anything unless he really faces some kind of consequences that puts him on rock bottom, and just losing his high-paying job may not be enough. But as a start we can start funding more actually-effective abuser's anonymous style programs, understanding that even the effective ones have a large recidivism rate.
That said, are there thing you can do for all the people around that guy to improve society? I think, yeah! You can start teaching enthusiastic consent in school, no means no. Teach young people from an early age that a guy who pressures a woman into sex is being a shithead. This doesn't change the abuser necessarily, but it does make it harder for him to continue his shit if an entire society is formed around not accepting that behavior. Teach people, too, to recognize the warning signs of a potential abuser early on (like pushing past boundaries and refusing to accept no).
Better media would also help! Far too many of our romance stories involve men pressuring a woman who isn't interested in him, until she finally falls for him. This narrative is where a lot of young people get their idea of what romance is supposed to look like, and so makes the pushy, even controlling partner seem attractive. Another narrative we show is where the romantic hero love bombs the girl and of course she falls for him - love bombing is a technique of domestic abusers to draw their victim in, and also used as an after-abuse apology. Disney and other children's filmmakers need to look more critically at how they portray romance with the understanding that they are forming the ideas on romance for the next generation.
The underpinning of the problem is systemic, and only systemic answers can solve it. Making a world where woman are equally as valued as men.
Edit: I should add that simply having a more just society, making all genders equal, making whites and minorities equal, making all sexualities equal, won't by itself remove abuse. I also realize in the above statement that I only mention women, when non-binary folks get even worse abuse than women do, as do trans women and men, and minorities, and we have to equalize those groups as well. But as I stated way up thread, statistics tell us that the more parity of power a society gets, the more groups other than white men become abusers. Abuse is about power. So it's the abusive mindset we need to fight against, alongside attempts at gender and racial equality.
Am I safe to assume those are all male judges?
Nope! Not even that! At least a couple of them were women!