00:00

SHANNON: Domestic violence movements and anti-violence movements broadly have really struggled in: what do we do with people who do harm? What do we do with people who rape people? What do we do with people who batter people? What do we do with people who do those kinds of harms to other people? The criminal legal system is crushing my communities, is crushing our communities, and people want, are hungry for other mechanisms for, someone has done harm, how do you reasonably help that person to be responsible for that harm without putting them into a system that's crushing them and their communities?

00:32

KIYOMI: So I'm wondering if you could just start by telling me, What do we mean when we talk about accountability? It's a big word that gets thrown around a lot.

00:40

SHANNON: The definition that I use, that actually was gifted to me from the Northwest Network, is taking responsibility for your choices and the consequences of those choices. And so accountability is one tool for figuring out, if you do something that's outside your values, if you do something that is, you know, harmful to other humans, what do you do about that? So we need to figure out what are what I call reasonable or appropriate, proportional consequences for people who do harm? What I'll often say is like, there's no batterers' island. There's no island where you send all the people who do harm and you don't have to think about them. When you kick somebody who has battered someone, who's assaulted somebody out of your communities, they just go to the next community and continue to do harm. Which doesn't mean each of us individually has to take responsibility for the harm someone else does. But as communities broadly, we have to be coming up with solutions, and coming up with ways to support people who are doing harm in how to knock it off and take responsibility for the harm that they've done. What would be reasonable and appropriate consequences for people who do harm, short of, you know, kicking them out being sort of our primary tool? All human beings deserve to have their need basic needs met. You may not get to be in leadership. You may not get to be at the front of the movement. You may not get to, there may be things you don't get to do, or at least for a very, very long time if you have done harm to other folks. A lot of social justice communities have a lot of visions of the world we want and the thing that keeps getting in the way, I've seen time and time again, is our ability to actually interact with each other. Like how do we organize groups of people tends to continue to get in the way of that, or continues to be a thing that breaks down movements. Thinking about accountability, both self accountability and accountability on a community level, actually helps us start to provide some of those answers and those tools.

02:32

KIYOMI: I've heard the network talk a lot about how accountability isn't something that happens to a bad person, right? And that it could be a practice that we all sort of take in. Can you talk about sort of that shift from community accountability as an idea of something that happens to someone, to accountable communities where our communities are actually showing up for us?

02:51

SHANNON: The idea behind accountable communities is shifting the focus from community accountability, which tends to have this idea that like, we're all going to come together and support you to be accountable, to the idea that we are going to create environments where it is possible to be accountable. So where community accountability is saying like, you know, what are you gonna do? Accountable communities say what am I going to do to support my community to have what we need to make accountability a robust, viable option for people? I think about this with, almost any time there is a public figure who's a part of my communities or who's, you know, in relationship to my communities who has been accused of doing harm, sexual or domestic violence specifically, how could we create a space that would allow those people to genuinely take responsibility for the harm they've done and have a reasonable consequence? Because right now the consequences are potentially like, go to jail, be ostracized, have everybody just kind of like want to crush you or just or at the very least just like isolate you. Human beings need other humans. And so those are the fears that what people who have done harm are dealing with. And so it would be very hard, even if you genuinely were like, I did something wrong and I need to be responsible for it, it would be very hard to publicly do that without any sense of that there's something that you could do that would be proportional and right-sized. So that might be quitting your job. That might be, you know, finding another place to live. There may may be action you need to take. We are not going to move forward in ending domestic violence and sexual assault without this key piece of what do we do with, what do we do for, how do we support people who've done harm in being accountable.

04:59

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