General Critiques of Community Accountability Processes

These are critiques we have heard at the Alternative Justices Project that critique of community accountability processes in general, rather than ours specifically. While we firmly believe in the importance of all kinds of alternative justices and community accountability processes, we think addressing these general critiques is still vital and an essential part of creating alternative systems of harm reduction and harm response.

Community support can be detrimental

In some cases, engaging a larger community or more members of someone’s community can be detrimental to the process, especially if one or more parties are working to harm someone else’s public reputation. The Alternative Justices Project works hard to keep confidentiality, but also has no special system for dealing with cases that involve actions seeking to disparage repudiations.

Bias affects the process

In a world where gender and race bias are still rampant, and where the victim/actor binary is still strong, and other community prejudices exist, community accountability processes can be biased before they even begin. Some bias may also include a bias towards whoever makes feelings of harm public first, towards claims of harm from people seen as weaker or more deserving of protections, and bias based on people’s reputations. This is why it is vital that accountability processes not base themselves in “discovering” the “truth”, but in transforming harm and behaviors.

Good intentions can still lead to coercion

In general, it is possible that stewards, core team, or other practitioners of community accountability processes can cross the line from encouragement to threats and pressure when inviting people into accountability processes. No matter the intentions or circumstance, accountability processes need to be free of coercion and totally voluntary.

Accounting for repeat behaviors

Many community accountability processes don’t have good ways of addressing someone’s previous actions, history and needs when embarking on a new process. Whether this is a pattern of lashing out publicly, stalking behaviors, or mental illnesses or other traumas, a person’s past can affect their participation in community accountability and yet most of these processes have no way to reconcile this reality well.

For more like this read Part 1 and Part 2 of the Critiques of the Alternative Justices Project.