Critiques of The Alternative Justices Project: Part 2

This is a continuation of our examination of critiques of the Alternative Justices Project. For more see part 1 and General Critiques of Community Accountability Processes.

Critiques from Those Outside the Roles of Harmed and Harmer

We have been accused of enabling and/or apologizing for rape

We try our best to hold those who have been accused of harm accountable and also recognize that society plays a role in all of our behavior. We believe rape can cause extensive harm, but we do not believe in coercing anyone into transformation.

We have been accused of being too lenient on actors

As we do not believe in punishment, we believe we cannot be too lenient. We are here to transform harm and help people transform their own behaviors. We do not believe in forcing actors into transformation. We are not policing each other, but we understand how at times this choice can seems as if we are letting actors off the hook. We do our best to check in with actors who are not participating in our groups regularly.

We are not well trained enough

While many of our stewards have some training in various conflict mediation, survivor crisis, etc., we do not claim to be trained in any concrete way. We are people who have experience in this but are not experts. We are working on ways to make this lack of formal training more explicit to those we work with.

We are not available enough

As a small collective we acknowledge that we sometimes do not have enough energy, human hours, and capacity to be constantly available.

We have been accused of being too PC

This is a critique that has come occasionally from those outside our processes and is often arises in times of social unrest. We believe in what we are doing and try our best not to make decisions based on what is socially or politically popular at any given time.

Alt J is simply a bad idea

We hear this often from those who have not been involved in our processes. We realized that not everyone believes in transformative justice or shares our shared critiques. This is ok; however, we still firmly believe in our methods and goals.

Critiques from Our Stewards

Stewards are the folks who volunteer to be with people who enter into our Alternative Justices Project processes, and make up a significant portion of our project’s core team.

The system isn’t voluntary

Our stewards often wonder if voluntary participation comes only because there is a worst alternative in the criminal legal system. or because people were called out publicly. Public call outs, black listing, legal and criminal charges, are what people face if they don’t come to us. We wonder if accountability will always require something worse to encourage it.

Giving people tools for accountability is also giving people tools to fake it

Our stewards note that it is impossible to tell the difference between someone who has actually changed and someone who wants to look like they have changed until they harm someone else. We can only trust and know that transformation is a process and we all are capable of causing and being harmed.

Some of our language and methodologies may unintentionally reified the harm/harmer binary

In an effort to be succinct and clear, we often talk about harmers and victim/survivors without explicitly noting that many people fall into both categories, often simultaneously. We host survivors circle and Transformation pods which seem like separate categories, although we know that participants often are both people who have done harm and people who have been harmed. Also, as we address instances of harm, we clearly address harm going one direction, while occasionally ignoring that, in many cases we see, there are often mutually harmful dynamics at work.

For more, see part 1 and part 3.