Memo On Accountability
From a restorative and transformative perspective
Accountability requires that we bring our whole messy and vulnerable selves to the table, whether we want to be there or not. Once there, we do more than admit guilt and apologize. When we’re responding to calls for accountability, we are agreeing to listen, to have empathy, and take responsibility while we also share our experiences of a harm caused. Accountability requires consent from everyone involved.
When we’re dedicated to the work, we who are facilitators and/or educators do as much as we can to create this space of consent inside of calls for accountability. It is sometimes messy and we don’t always get things right. On the flipside, sometimes people who have been harmed react in ways that punish or otherwise negatively impact the people who hurt us, which in turn causes more hurt or harm of a different stripe. It’s complicated work. It’s not as easy as “You did something bad, so now something bad will happen to you.” The work of restorative and transformative justice practitioners is nuanced and fragile and flexible, and yet, it also requires consistency and a strong dedication to changing the ways in which we seek elusive things like justice.
Not so long ago I was hired to facilitate a restorative conference between three parties who had each caused harm to one another. Though there was certainly an antecedent harm, the responses to that harm caused even more harm and thus, it all snowballed until the original harm was reduced, unattended and left to simmer. It was a radical thing then, when these folks reached out to me. Somewhere in the back-and-forth, they were able to realize that each of them was hurt, each of them had an attendant need, and each of them wanted to not simply put things behind them, but to grow beyond what they had learned. This is ultimately what brought them to my door.
These folks needed three things in order to proceed. 1) An understanding that something had happened that caused harm; 2) a willingness to understand who was affected and how so; and 3) a desire and commitment to work together to decide how to make things as right as possible. As I always do, I let them know that this was going to take TIME. I discouraged them from becoming too attached to a particular outcome. I was asking them to trust me and to center their relationships to each other and their broader community, which they all consented to. With their understanding, their dedication and their willingness to contribute to the process, we had established a place where everyone could begin to take responsibility and hold accountability.
I’m thinking of this now as I watch organizers in our communities go hard for restorative practices and transformative justice, and yet stop just short of the part where we’re not here to punish each other. In spite of our selves, we seem reluctant to stop replicating the carceral social order engrained in day to day american* life. I believe strongly that if people had the tools, skills and time, they would practice a restorative and transformative way of bringing folks in and holding people in their communities to account; I believe people would take more responsibility for themselves and the effects of their actions. I feel deeply that people would not rely on authoritarian methods of imposing consequences, of committing acts of violence against each other, if there were more folks willing to model the work required to outgrow these outdated ways of being.
There is always a risk. People often ask me a variation of the question, “What if we invite the people who harm us into a restorative or transformative conversation and they decline?” It’s not my favorite question, but I respond as honestly as I can; we might have to move forward without them. It doesn’t mean that the process can’t or doesn’t work, it merely means that some folks aren’t ready to take accountability on this level. As you couldn’t control their harm the first time, you can’t control their participation now. However, there is still you and your work and your healing and that is something you can and should always stay focused on.
