In response to the ongoing wave of of public naming of sexual assault in Minneapolis music communities, the theme I keep noticing coming up in conversations with other women is that it’s all so complicated even as we also want to believe survivors. And yeah, it is messy.

I just want to offer that things like being friends or colleagues in an industry/scene with people who violate other people’s consent and then struggling through that accountability process is *supposed* to be hard work and fall outside of the binary of good/bad or right/wrong.

Personally, I don’t think any of the conversations about how we deal with violations and abuse in our world are served by an overly reductive binary that often happens. And that shouldn’t minimize survivors who are like “fuck that guy entirely”. We can hold all of it.

The longing for a tidy process and a clear box to put someone in who violated consent with some people while also being really great to a lot of other people is a fantasy. And maybe a fallacy too.

In my experience, avoidance of discomfort is really tied up with whiteness and we really need to lean into the discomfort of this messy complex work as part of our work against white supremacy.

I dunno. I don’t think I’m saying anything new. I just want to acknowledge that anyone who is meaningfully talking about transformative justice or restorative justice is both centering victims AND holding a lot of tensions as we work to shape change and create a new future.

The fact that it’s hard to do this and that we all have emotional reactivity around the process (or, perhaps, whose truth is the truest truth) doesn’t mean it’s wrong to engage this way.

The logic of carcerality is we should throw anyone/everyone away who doesn’t conform to a white supremacist society. This seeps into our thinking about how we should deal with these interpersonal violences. If we want to create a new world we have to extricate that thinking.

One point of doing this work at the level of the community is that the survivor doesn’t have to single-handledly bear the load. The survivor can have exactly the feelings and the needs they have and WE, the rest of us, figure out how to meet their needs. Beyond disposability.

This thread is me processing out loud; not me prescribing a way of feeling or acting on anyone. I just really want a world not built on policing and punishment and that means we all gotta get uncomfy. Because how DO we navigate a survivors needs without disposing the violators?