saw post you replied to floating around and tried to read your blog to get context and i really want to try and understand your position in good faith. i understand there are downsides to callouts, but im struggling to understand what the alternative to them would be? if someone in a community harms someone, what do we do?
I understand your perspective on like, not calling the cops on someone who abused you even after finding their identity. I can totally make sense of that ( carceral systems consistently fail abuse victims, sometimes trying to seek justice can be more re-traumatizing to the victim, and the existing carceral system does nothing but harm etc etc. )
but i would think that the alternative to that would be telling people that 'hey this person did harm me, i am telling others so that they can avoid that person and avoid harm' which is kind of what we now name a "call out/cancelling" if that also isn't a good route to go down what should victims do? as someone impacted by sa and abuse too i really feel at a loss for what the alternative to both traditional justice system approaches and an alternative to community awareness would be.
obvs you do not have to answer this if you don't want to, i don't intend to like pester you! but if theres other sort of systems for accountability/protecting others after harm was done that you know of id sincerely enjoy learning about them so i can do more reading. call outs leave a lot to be desired and can totally be weaponized but it seems like a reduction in harm from the existing justice system. if there's an even less bad alternative to both of those, i'd be invested to hear more
overpunishment is a form of harm.
finite wrongdoing merits finite consequences.
if someone hurts me, and i call them out and it saves five future people from the same harm, but puts the person who hurt me through a campaign of harassment and isolation that hurts a hundred times more than what they originally did to me, what have i actually accomplished? that choice only makes sense if you believe the suffering of someone who has done wrong matters less than everyone else's suffering. and i do not.
we have constructed an absolutely vicious social fabric which makes the quandary worse. every time we ratchet up our infrastructure for isolating "abusers," what we also do is ratchet up the minimum consequence that survivors of abuse can impose. quite frankly, someone would have to beat me half to death and maim me before "exposed to the isolation machine in 2026" starts to seem like a proportionate finite consequence.
so i cannot seek any consequence for the man who raped me. because he isn't the only kind of person shielded from the isolation (cishet white man with cishet social circle), and so i don't believe it's a proportionate consequence, and my peers have deprived me of the ability to impose lesser consequences. you know that hurts? to be unable to seek justice because my nominal allies are so bloodthirsty that the torture they would visit upon him is far greater than what he did to me? it makes me feel betrayed and unsupported by my community.
i have seen entire lives destroyed by callouts from people trying to prevent the isolation outcome, who plead with the people reading it not to destroy the target's life. they do it anyway. they are vicious, eager executioners, salivating for the judge to hand them another verdict.
nobody wants to hear "i don't want you to socially isolate my rapist." because they want to live in a world where they don't associate with any rapists. this is basically a statistical impossibility, as any properly anonymized study of rates of perpetration of sexual violence will tell you - if you have like, 10 friends, the probability is near 100% that at least one of them has sexually assaulted someone at least once.
and all that above, that horrible situation i described, is just how bad it is in cases where the accused actually did what they're accused of. that's how bad it is when it's true! it's one million times worse when it's false, because callouts are basically irrevocable. nobody reads a retraction of a callout. there is no overturning that conviction. even the horribly unjust state justice system is not so horrifyingly final.
and false allegations abound, because callouts are normalized. which means when an abusive relationship is falling apart, both parties are in a standoff over who will make the post first. the only way to protect themself is to make sure their rhetoric "wins" the battle for which callouot gets spread. and the abuser is running the same mental calculus as the abused. the abuser knows that if a true callout is coming, the only way to shield themselves is with a false one. and so false callouts easily approach near 50% of the genre. the math is obvious - nearly everybody subjected to a callout will produce one of their own.
hell, sometimes this standoff results in two people, neither of whom were abusive, calling each other out. people who might have parted ways amicably without this nightmare system we're immersed in. but they hear a rumor that their ex is talking about them, and the game of telephone escalates until they get so scared a fake callout is coming that they have to write their own fake callout. this results in some of the weirdest entries in the genre, the ones where you read it and go "wait, what exactly are they mad about?"
but i'm sure you're wondering, willa, what consequence would you *actually* want to impose on your rapist?
well, there's three components to addressing harm. apology, consequence, amends. people often conflate the three, but they're separate.
i would like an apology, freely given. that means it doesn't affect how severe the consequence is. a coerced apology is worth nothing to me. if he doesn't choose to apologize, i don't want to hear it.
i would like him to be compelled to make amends. things like participation in programs meant to prevent sexual violence, mandatory (AFFORDALBE) payments to organizations working on the eradication of STIs, etc.
and i would like a finite consequence that doesn't ruin his life. i dunno, 6 weeks of house arrest or something, without mandatory disclosure of what it's for. this is my pipe dream world, so i'm imagining this in a context where we've abolished prisons, and detainment in institutional state custody is used only as an absolute last resort to contain people who cannot otherwise be prevented from doing more violence. where giving people punishments for lesser crimes is more normalized, because the punishments aren't The Fucking Torture Nexus. where you get 2 days of house arrest for verbally abusing somebody on the train.
that's just me though, and it's all just pie in the sky hypotheticals. i'm not exactly optimistic that our culture of vicious torture of people who engage in violence, no matter the degree, will be changing much in my lifetime.
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