Justice for an abolitionist

I was given a highly sanitized version of justice in my upbringing–cops catch “bad guys,” and only the “guilty” are convicted for prison–and sadly despite the mounting evidence that neither of these pillars is true, it’s still a relatively common response to the law system. When I finally found myself in the crosshairs of behaviour that is arguably criminal as defined by the law system I am bound to, I did not relish the notion of my abuser being jailed. There was no inherent satisfaction to me in that outcome. She would either be hurt by someone else (which is not what I want) or she would hurt someone else who was imprisoned (which I don’t consider acceptable either). So what does justice look like for people like us?

Punishment and revenge will not heal the harm that has been done to me. It will not take away the pain, nor will it make me feel better about myself when I look in the mirror. But putting forward a system that advocates for a radical shift in our culture, in our way of surviving and handling these atrocities and collectively preventing them, will.

I don’t want temporary healing. I don’t want a fleeting safety.

I genuinely don’t blame anyone for wanting those who have harmed and violated them or someone they love in a jail cell or even dead. That’s what we’ve been fed and told is the only appropriate way to deal with perpetrators of violence, enablers of patriarchy, and even non-violent forms of deviance. But I can tell you with absolute certainty that prisons do not, will not, and cannot protect us. Prisons have never made me feel safe.

My violator(s) did not spend a minute in a cell for what they did to me. I never came forward. I don’t regret that, but I do regret not making it known how they violated me. I regret going through the process of healing alone, which is something I’m still working through as I type this.

If I could go back in time and do things differently, I still to this day would not put my violator(s) in a jail cell. But what I would have wanted was a community, or even a single person, to show me a love that was sincere and much more nuanced than simply regurgitating the hatred I should feel toward my violator(s) and wanting them dead. A community that works toward protection and prevention, where survivors don’t feel it’s their sole responsibility to survive, heal, and search for a nearly non-existent justice for not only themselves but others who have been harmed.

Read more by Joshua Briond here.

-Shiv

Steamrolling Charter rights in street surveillance

Street surveillance, sometimes called street checks or “carding,” are a common practice for police in Edmonton, Alberta. It was recently revealed in The Star that those same police have been handing over data harvested from street surveillance to intelligence authorities–who have then, in turn, constructed profiles on entire communities without any specific allegation of criminal behaviour.

Much to my frustration, there is a substantial portion of Canadian progressives who stop paying attention after the ballot box. The Liberals aren’t “the same” as the Conservatives, but they don’t differ in a number of critical areas–including surveillance, the tool that arguably threatens grassroots organizing the most.

Cell phone video of an Edmonton Police Service (EPS) officer’s interaction with a group of young black men at a south side gym last month offered a rare close-up look at the controversial practice of carding – or street checks, as the police prefer to call it – and raises troubling questions about whether EPS is violating citizens’ Charter rights even as both the Edmonton Police Commission and the provincial justice department is reviewing the practice.

On the video, an officer can be seen engaging with a group of young men who are waiting around for a manager to give them a refund. The officer demands the men produce identification and when they question why, they are all threatened with arrest. When one of the young men says he doesn’t feel comfortable giving the officer his identification, the officer responds (at 3:07 of the video clip), “You don’t feel comfortable? How about I tell you right now that you’re under arrest for obstruction? Turn around and put your hands behind your back.”

The incident – which arose out of a now-resolved commercial dispute between a business and customers (neither of which wished to be quoted on the record for this story) resulted in no arrests. No complaint that a crime had been committed was ever filed.

…

“While there are some occasions when an individual is required by law to provide identification,” she said, “It does not appear that the individuals depicted in the video would be required to do so as there is no lawful basis for an arrest and minimal prior investigation to justify them as being legitimate suspects.”

We asked the Edmonton Police Service if they felt the officer acted appropriately. “Based upon the information provided by both parties and a review of the incident, the EPS believes the officers’ actions were appropriate,” responded EPS communications advisor Carolin Maran.

“Reviews” and “panels” won’t stop this. It’ll be up to the grassroots organizers once again to summon enough pressure to end the practice. The same organizers who have dossiers in Canadian intelligence, because we inconvenience the State by delegitimizing their abuses.

Read more from Mimi Williams here.

-Shiv

Anne Frank’s diary was edited?

The Diary of Anne Frank was a portion of my public education. Knowing what I know now I think the way it was used was more to scare the children who read it, rather than contextualize what actually led to the events described in Frank’s diary. Shocking, horrible material of the holocaust is important, but it’s difficult-to-grasp nature has often had the effect of distancing current circumstances (“that could never happen here”) rather than bringing them home–at least, that was my conclusion based on how it was presented in my particular education.

That was the last thought I had on Frank’s diary a few years ago. It never crossed my mind that the material was altered.

After her father was given the remains of both versions by Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl, who hid the Franks, he and the publishing house edited them into a version that combined the original diary and the rewritten version, with some additional redactions. I considered this blend offensive to Anne’s privacy — since in the diary itself she stated that she didn’t want anyone to read her unfiltered thoughts. Moreover, it omits things that she surely would have wanted kept in version B, since she put them there in the first place.

According to the forward of Penguin’s Definitive Edition (the audiobook I began listening to), several paragraphs on Anne’s personal attitudes and experiences were edited or completely removed from version C. Anne’s opinions on her parents were edited to seem less harsh — for instance, this version removes the line “Father’s fondness for talking about farting and going to the lavatory is disgusting.”

Anne’s thoughts and observations about her body were also cut in version C. Take a look at this section in which she talks about her vagina: “Until I was 11 or 12, I didn’t realize there was a second set of labia on the inside [of the vagina], though you couldn’t see them. What’s even funnier is that I thought urine came out of the clitoris.”

Thankfully there is an edition which compares the edits between the three versions of the diary, and discusses their impact.

-Shiv

#MeToo as a queer and trans person

I’ve been somewhat open on this blag about my experiences with abuse, and yet I was hesitant to add my voice to the #MeToo hashtag started on Twitter. It was proposed in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein allegations as a way to “get people to see the gravity of the problem”–yet, the ways in which the conversation were carried out led me to believe I would be met with more hostility than support.

Sam Hope concurs.

“If all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote “Me too.” as a status, we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem.”

My trans and trans-friendly connections started to throw up alternatives to this original copy&paste meme: “women and non binary people” was one alternative, “women and femmes” another, as people struggled to include the complexity of how gendered violence impacts our diverse world. What was less surprising, perhaps, was how many of my trans friends could say #MeToo: Statistically, trans people, whether men, women or non-binary, are at greater risk of sexual violence as children than cis women, and this extra vulnerability continues into adult lives. Lesbians and gay men also experience more sexual violence than their straight counterparts, and bi people even more than lesbian and gay men.

There’s a reason this is not often talked about. For years, we have been told, without foundation, that somehow abuse turned us queer. The truth is a mirror image of this – queer/trans kids tend to be more easily isolated and have more strained relationships with caregivers. This creates conditions where they are more easily preyed upon. Social exclusion continues to mark out LGBTQ+ people as targets into adult life, and fear of being outed can also give abusers a hold, particularly for people from certain families or communities that hold hostile attitudes to LGBTQ+ people. In a world that was not sexist, cissexist and heteronormative, they would be as accepted and socially included as everyone else, and they would not carry this additional vulnerability.

We see similar themes of elevated levels of abuse within other vulnerable groups – autistic people, disabled people, people who grew up in care, to name but a few.

It was only after my abuser had attempted to burn bridges with a well-respected cis man in the community that people began to believe the trail of allegations that followed her. That’s… hard to forgive.

Read more here.

-Shiv

Mammals? Using mammaries? Shock. Horror!

Or, it shouldn’t really be the case. I don’t understand what motivates such virulent responses to public breastfeeding in North America, but Tony Thompson reviews some common responses:

Once upon a time, in a land across the country, there existed a woman. This woman was mother to a 10-month-old. One day, the two of them set out on a journey to the house of the mouse in Anaheim, California. While they were there, her child became hungry, and the woman found herself facing a critical decision: “do I feed my child like any loving parent would, regardless of when and where” or “do I say screw it kid. You can starve” ? In short time, she made her decision and boy was it shocking: she chose to breastfeed her 10-month-old. Right then and there.

I’m glad she received more support than criticism. That she received a backlash at all though, is really annoying and frustrating. It’s far from surprising though.  It’s pretty much to be expected. Here in the great old USofA, any woman who breastfeeds in public will quickly find herself on the receiving end of some vicious comments. I can predict some of the responses without even going to look:

Read more here.

-Shiv

From reform to abolition

Every thing in our capitalist prison system is to deny humanity, to turn people from people into things; no sex, no control over what food they have, no windows to even look outside, no upward educational opportunities, extremely limited movement, forced and hyper-exploited labor, being sold and traded to fill prison and labor quotas, being given and even sometimes called by numbers rather than their names. It is an ultimate thingification, a state of outright and complete denial of humanity in the utmost form.

–Devyn Springer, “From Prison Reformist to Abolitionist.”

Springer ties together a lot of threads in this essay–how poverty is linked to the definition of many crimes, and race to poverty, and then again prison to race, back around to prison and poverty–and I think it serves as a powerful introduction to the prison abolition movements.

I’m still cutting my teeth on many of his recommendations in this piece, but I appreciated it as a start and thought you might too.

-Shiv

Suckered into unnecessary debate

“Due process” is often erroneously cited during sexual assault allegations as to how the public at large ought to respond to allegations of misconduct, especially sexual assault and harassment. Often this is to the benefit of the accused, with the implicit idea that we should mistrust the source of the allegations unless the process goes through criminal court.

The thing is, survivors of harassment and sexualized violence aren’t “against due process,” and framing the issue as such is a tremendous disservice:

The opposing view. I furrowed my brow trying to understand what they were asking. An opposing view to whether a reckoning on sexual harassment was healthy and overdue? An opposing view on whether each case is different and the accused deserve due process? I replied with a request to discuss further via phone.

I’d never interacted with USA Today before, so while waiting, I looked up the representative who had contacted me. She appeared to be a low-level employee who was tasked with putting stories together. It was unusual, as I’d almost always been contacted by editors directly when they wanted me to write a piece.

She called just a few minutes after I sent the email. I asked her to please give me more details about the editorial that they wanted me to rebut. “We are going to write about how we think it is a very good thing that women are going forward,” she began and basically repeated the same thing she had said in her email: individual cases…due process…etc. “Would you be willing to write the rebuttal to that?”

I paused for a second, thinking of how to best reply.

“No, I can’t write a rebuttal to that because of course I believe in due process,” I answered, deciding not to delve into the side discussion of how due process is a legal term that doesn’t usually apply to private employment, “But I’d be happy to write a response.”

I told her that I’d be happy to write about how the fixation on “due process” for these men was an attempt to re-center the concerns of men. How the question itself was absurd, because if there’s anything these stories show, it’s that these men in their years of open abuse were given more than just due process — but the women, many of whom had tried bringing this abuse to those in authority years before, were given no process at all. I said I’d love to write about the countless women whose careers were ended by coming forward with the abuse they faced, about the countless women whose careers were never able to get off of the ground because of abuse and gender discrimination. Due process. Women would love ANY process. They would love to even be heard.

Read more from Ijeoma Oluo here.

-Shiv

Overcompensate

At this point it’s no longer a secret to anyone but Democratic politicians that their way forward is to reinforce the voter franchise, the undermining of which has primarily affected black and poor voters. In the wake of Doug Jones’ victory in Alabama, however, commentary has largely seem to have taken the franchise for granted. Black voters were lauded for tipping the scales against a literal pedophile, but hardly any ink has been spilled to talk about the importance of the franchise.

As Talynn Kel notes, this isn’t the first time this has happened, and won’t be the last.

Over the last few months, we watched white supremacy work overtime to disenfranchise voters and advocate for a known racist and alleged sexual abuser to take public office. And now that the election is over — and we see from the exit polls that Black women played a pivotal role in electing Doug Jones, the first Democrat Alabama senator in 25 years — we must, in typical fashion, watch as white supremacy skews the narrative to minimize and erase the impact and importance of Black women.

“They saved us,” white people say, erasing our personal motives and structuring the narrative to prioritize whiteness. As usual with white supremacy, our votes aren’t being viewed as designed to save us — they’re being viewed as designed to save white people. To save the country.

And meanwhile, this country we saved? It will inevitably continue to turn its back on us. “This is not just a question about African American voters,” Doug Jones said. “This election is about everybody in the state.” But somehow, that American “everybody” seems to rarely, if ever, include Black women.

Read more here.

-Shiv

I thought the Section 28 boat set sail already

Section 28 was a British law until 2000 that required government authorities to censor and omit any information on homosexuality. Nearly two decades after its repeal, gay Brits lambasted the law for the damage it caused it in their youth–the deafening silence of the resources available to them led many to believe something was inherently wrong with them. Its heinous effects haven’t deterred the press from quoting Section 28 arguments verbatim, only this time against trans people.

[Read more…]