From Taking Account to Giving Account: Abolitionist Accountability in Community-based Responses to Sexual Harm

• In Event: Carceral Care and Anti-carceral Alternatives

Abstract

How do non-carceral and non-punitive programs with perpetrators envision responsibility outside the criminal legal system? This paper draws upon a research study of the transformative justice movement for alternatives to police and prisons for gender-based violence, which included 63 interviews, archival research, and participant observation. Using case studies of two community-based, volunteer-run programs with perpetrators of sexual harm, I theorize their underlying approach to responsibility as one of 'giving' rather than 'taking' account. 'Giving account' is a narrative approach to restorying the self and its relations to others (Butler 2005, Augusta-Scott 2009, 2017) as a form of transformative justice, situated within an abolitionist framework that reimagines responsibility in qualitative terms as response to others. This stands over and against a carceral approach of 'taking account', which measures responsibility quantitatively in a liability framework (Young 2011) as a debt paid through retributive punishment. Distilling themes from case study vignettes, I contrast 'taking account' and 'giving account' along several axes: how they define harm, how they attribute responsibility, and the model of response they proscribe. Lastly, I explore how the 'giving account' model can offer a useful rebuttal to a common fear that abolitionist approaches' diminish perpetrators' blameworthiness, by reframing responsibility through a more complex social ontology of the self.

Author

• Melanie Brazzell, Harvard University