Stage IV restorative justice is making survivors responsible for their abusers

Ultimately why cages are worth defending. If the friends and elders of abusers won't shed tears over the things that they've made, let them shed tears over their sudden absence

One thing that's become clearer to me, reading old New Inquiry pieces from Charlotte Shane and others, is the rhetorical feint of minimizing sexual violence as not just common but essentially mundane *in experience*, as an oblique means to destigmatize the preservation of abusers

There is typically a sort of vestigial acknowledgement that violence can be experienced as traumatic, but they (along with Sarah Schulman, et al) are fundamentally about this weirdly macabre imagined future in which trauma is not *necessary*

Shane, et al express a kind of boredom with trauma, PTSD etc. and question its necessity. Which is ultimately what I mean when I say restorative or transformative justice ultimately seek to annihilate the concept of harm rather than recognize it as real and seek to reduce it.

In other words when Shane et al present themselves as people who have experienced violence and are not worked up about it, they are imagining a future in which violence is not something to be worked up about

fwiw it was Vanessa Veselka who, far as I can tell, first articulated a dissatisfaction with violence as a defining experience. Shane, Schulman et al seem to further that argument toward victimhood as a galvanizing force generally https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/the-collapsible-woman

There is this constant tension that you'll pick up on when you look for it within restorative and transformative justice discourse, I think. Violence presents a Gordian knot, there is push and pull between wanting to help survivors and to move past them, to a world without them

Wouldn't be nice if the problem of violence was psychological? If it were a phantasm, if the phenomenon we call violence was not essentially disruptive? If it were, in other words, a conflict rather than an abuse. We could move past it to a world without courts or prisons

We have created a post-violence activism, that came from survivors but is finding them more and more of a problem in analysis. This wish for trauma as a dream cannot sustain itself but for now it is capable of sitting unresolved, like a splinter in the discourse

Schulman articulated the current animus toward survivors without really acknowledging it. There will come a point where it will have to be reckoned with. My fear is that it will definitively pathologize survivors in the name of preserving the notion of communities as harmonious