Few years back I fell down the rabbit hole studying forgiveness. I traveled around the country talking to forgiveness scholars, read everything I could, it was fascinating. What *every* forgiveness expert says is that forgiveness does NOT mean you give up on justice.

As people talk about "healing" and "forgiveness" today, it's really important to remember that. You can have empathy, understand where people might be coming from, let go of active anger or resentment towards them, give up on the idea of "punishing" them. That's forgiveness

It does not mean that you give people the go-ahead to hurt you again, in the exact same way, much less to hurt *other people* again in the exact same way. It does not mean that you remove all consequences for bad behavior.

If you're curious about more, I wrote one essay about it way back when that has links off to all the research: https://aeon.co/essays/we-all-agree-forgiveness-is-healthy-but-why-is-it-so-hard