What we learn from our justice system

The relationship between our “justice” system and the religious system that it's come out of, is obvious in their focus on people who have done something we think is wrong, the sinner and their sin, the perpetrator and their crime. From the moment someone says they’ve been hurt, our justice system is completely focused on the person who hurt them – finding out who it was, what they did, was it illegal, and what to do with that person. Even a liberal response generally remains directed at an offender – looking at the factors leading to a person offending, trying to understand, reform and rehabilitate them, identifying issues that contributed, poverty, bad role models, lack of education and opportunity, etc.

As much as our justice system developed out of our culture, our culture is affected by the justice system. The way we think about problems often reflects the way the justice system works. Whatever we think of it, the law provides a clear set of rules and expectations that we can point to instead of having to think about our own morality: as long as you can't prove that my behaviour is illegal, then I am a perfectly good person. The legal system provides a way of dealing with conflict. We don’t have to consider the most reasonable, appropriate or potentially successful response to someone hurting us or someone we care about, we can call in the law, and it's out of our hands. Whether or not we would ever do this, that way of thinking is such a part of the pakeha culture most of us grew up in, that we often seem to mimic it. So much so that when one of our friends is hurt by someone, our question quickly becomes how should we respond to the person who hurt them.

What’s missing is a deeper response for the person who was hurt. The justice system only includes them as much as they can help with the process of convicting the person who hurt them. I believe that the first step of a radical response to abuse is to focus on the person who has been hurt. I know this isn’t a new idea, but I think it needs to be constantly restated until there is a deeper understanding, or we come up with a better idea. It needs to be constantly restated because it feels so alien to think first of the person who was abused – we’ve been socialised or brain-washed to think of them as less relevant than the person who hurt them. If we hadn’t been indoctrinated by our punitive culture that treats them as irrelevant when dealing with abusive behaviour, I think we’d know that the most appropriate and rational response would be to focus on them.

How we make it worse

There are many ways we can make people feel worse when they talk to us about being abused. We can tell them that it isn’t such a big deal, we can do nothing about it and act like it isn’t important, we can blame them for not doing something about it sooner, we can take over and tell them what needs to happen. All these responses are common to anarchist scenes as well as the wider community. I want to talk about the ways that anarchists, in particular, can make things worse.

As anarchists, most of us are opposed to punishment for its own sake, and we have ideals about supporting each other through our shit, our learning, and unlearning. We have ideals of compassion and empathy, and try to remember that we aren't perfect. When we hear about abuse, our first thought may be for our friend who was hurt, but most of us are also quick to empathise with the person who hurt our friend. Something along the lines of “I know I've fucked up heaps, I know what that feels like, that person must feel like shit too, they need support.” Which is true, and that person may be a friend of ours as well.

However, we don’t have endless resources and energy, and our circles of support are usually small. Even if we’re supporting people to stop abusing, we need to be careful that we don’t end up putting so much energy and time into them, that we don’t have enough for the person they hurt. If we do this, the person who was hurt may feel like their abuser is being rewarded with attention and resources to heal, while they have to heal and deal with shit on their own. I've participated in this and seen it happen over and again. It creates a system that is even harder on survivors than the justice system.

One reason we end up neglecting the needs of people who have been abused is that we allow ourselves to be rushed. Our compassion for our friend who hurt someone means we want to try to fix things quickly. We start thinking of it as a problem that needs to be solved, we forget about the pain of the person they hurt. We forget to honour and respect their experiences of abuse and what they need to heal. Their pain has become abstract. When this happens, I think we will only make things worse.

When we are first struggling to stay focused on the needs of the person who has been hurt, sometimes we will unintentionally end up asking them for “solutions”. When we do this, it has nothing to do with supporting the person: we are asking them to make it easier for us, for our lives to go back to normal. We may become frustrated with them because they don't have solutions, or they don't know what they need, or what they need seems to keep changing. There probably aren't any simple solutions, and it isn't the responsibility of the person who experienced the abuse to come up with them. At some point, what they need will become clear to them; rushing them isn't going to help them get there. If we're feeling frustrated at them, then we're thinking about things wrong, and we will make things worse for them.

How we make things better

I believe that the person who was hurt should always be given priority. What this means is that whenever there is a conflict between the wants or needs of the two people, the appropriate response is always to try to do what the person who was hurt wants. For example, if the person who was abused feels like they can’t go somewhere in case they see the person that hurt them, then we can try to make sure that person isn’t there. This doesn't mean we should ignore the needs of the person responsible for the abuse. I believe they should be offered support to heal and change their behaviour. It doesn’t mean ostracising or judging them; it has nothing to do with punishment, restorative justice, rehabilitation, or anything focused on that person, nor does it mean those things can’t happen. It just means that whatever else we do, first we try to give the survivor all the support they want.

When they don't know what they want, we might need to take responsibility for some decisions. For example, the person who was hurt might seem to go back and forth on whether they can see the person who hurt them. Rather than making them come up with a single solution to this “problem”, or asking them every time both people might be somewhere, we could say that the person who hurt them is only welcome when invited by the person they hurt. That gives power to the person who was hurt, without putting pressure on them.

We need to do all we can to let that person control their healing process. That means not taking over, or telling them what they need to do, or making it about us in any way. It means not pressuring them to let us do what we want regardless of what they want: e.g. if they don’t want us to confront the person who abused them about their behaviour, then we need to respect that as much as we can, while making sure other people are safe.

The pain probably isn't going to go away quickly for the person who was hurt. We need to honour that pain, and let things take as long as they take, instead of trying to fix things as quickly as possible.

Even thinking about abuse is really hard for lots of us, trying to work out how to respond to it is fucking stressful. Most of us don't have a lot of experience with dealing with abuse in our own communities. We need to take our time, focus on supporting the person who was hurt as much as they need, try not to make things worse for them, and try to put them first whenever there is conflict between them and the person who hurt them. We need to remember how real this is. Someone was hurt. They are hurting, and it isn't their fault.

(notes:
1. I don't offer a model for dealing with abuse in relationships, or abuse we hear about in our scene, or a model for survivor support.

2. I'm no expert, these are just my thoughts, based largely on my struggles to get my head around this, and ways I've screwed up. If you think I've got it wrong, or what I've written is shit or dangerous, please talk or write to me about it (kimsotheraddress[at]gmail[dot]com). We all want to get better at dealing with abuse.

3. It's really hard to write about abuse without using loaded language or making sentences complicated and unintelligible. I've tried to use terms that readers can understand and that remind readers of what I'm talking about. “Survivor” feels too abstract when I'm talking about someone who was hurt. “Abuser” can feel damning and judgmental when I mean someone who has hurt someone else. Hopefully the compromises I made trying to write this mean it's still readable.)

kim