I’ve been thinking through a lot since the Cornell news broke. The heinous nature of the crime, the existence of millions of lesser-known atrocities that lie under the surface of the culture that produces such crimes. There’s a piece of the conversation that is missing. The potential backlash has made me hesitate to talk about it much in public. Speaking on this topic, although it feels vitally important, is an absolute minefield. It’s the white-hot frayed wire that most people don’t dare touch, but we will keep going in circles until we address it. So I will try, as imperfect as it will be. I am very anxious about doing so, as I know it touches on some extremely strong emotions and embedded carceral orientations. Deeply anxious. But I still feel called to do it.

I offer this as unfinished, unpolished act of becoming. I love you, and I love us, and I love this planet we share. I am grateful to you to be walking this path together.

Big, big content warning for this piece: sexual assault (SA). If you are a victim of SA, please deeply consider whether you have the capacity to engage with this. Your own well-being is the most important consideration.

Note also that this is not a conversation about rich and powerful abusers. This is about your friends, neighbours and co-workers. This is about us.

The white-hot frayed wire

All of my clients (for mentorship and psychedelic-supported healing) are people who have been harmed in some way by our society and those around them. But some of them are also men who have done harm. This includes SA.

They reach out to me because my base foundational mode of interacting with others is from a place of non-judgment, as it is the natural extension of understanding the world not through a moral lens of good vs. bad people, but through the social systems that shape human behaviour. And to be honest, there aren’t enough people on the left who practice non-judgment as a matter of strategy. I do, so people who feel deep shame but want to get better are drawn to me. I take on this work as a sacred calling.

What keeps coming up for me, as we go through yet another discourse cycle about The Problems With Men (see my article and video on this subject), is what a terrible job we are doing as a society to create an environment where people who’ve harmed others feel safe enough to talk about what they’ve done. If they can’t talk about it, they can’t address the wounds that led to the harm, help with the development of cultural prevention strategies, and reach out to others like them who are drowning in shame. Many of them want to, especially as they have done so much work to understand why they made the choices they did at that time, and do the deep, difficult labour of personal change, which is incredibly valuable experience to share. But it’s very high risk for pretty much nothing in return but hatred, and we cannot expect people to do it under those circumstances. That is just not how human behaviour works.

Wanting perpetrators to be honest while also wanting them to simply deal with whatever severe, often life-ruining levels of vengeance and punishment anyone might want to level at them is to deny reality. It’s wishful thinking, and it’s perpetuating the cycles we’re stuck in. Focusing on what they “deserve” rather than thinking systemically about what can actually prevent future harm just enables more harm through a culture of silence and punishment. In my experience, people who’ve done harm are often stuck in spirals of shame and self-loathing that do not support their ability to transmute the darkness into lessons and enact positive change in the world. Many of them are victims of abuse themselves, and all of them have trauma in their past. Some of them turn their shame in on themselves, which harms them endlessly. For others—mostly not the ones brave enough to work with me as a client—the shame cycle causes them to harm others continually.

I don’t know exactly what can be done about this. I can and do offer my services to support people’s healing, but I’m only one person. We have to figure out how to at least have these conversations, with the goal of creating support structures for integration. I know how difficult and scary that is, because the entirely justified wrath of a public full of traumatized victims of SA will inevitably pounce on anything that sounds like empathizing with perpetrators. This is understandable, because their voices and experiences have gone so ignored for so long, humanizing a group of people they see as the source of their pain can feel to some of them like yet more harm. In a society where we are raised to believe that everyone is entirely and individually responsible for their own actions and the only just course of action for someone who has done harm is punishment, any approach that doesn’t centre punishment can feel like injustice. But that doesn’t make it so.

Abandonment and shame do not end cycles of violence. People who’ve done harm deserve care and dignity, because they are still human, and all human beings deserve care and dignity. I wish the people who have harmed me had been cared for before they could have harmed me. I wish they had been held in their fullness, loved, healed, integrated. We cannot undo the past, but we can shape the future. We can prevent more harm from happening, and heal the collective body. I don’t want us to let blind rage and vengeance continue to motivate how we deal with harm.

Transformative justice does not mean “no accountability”

In the many medicine circles I’ve been a part of during my PhD research on plant medicine healing, I noticed a trend. Women were often there to figure out how to deal with the men in their lives, or harm done to them by men. Men were often there to figure out how to be better partners to the women in their lives, and better fathers. At one retreat, one man said, rather vaguely, that he was there because his family wanted him to be there, so he could learn to be better to them. I remember thinking that he sounded reluctant, like he wasn’t truly ready to go within, to be confronted with the darker parts inside him. He ended up leaving after the first night.

Over and over throughout my research, I saw how change simply cannot happen under conditions of coercion or pressure (see Chapter 5 of my dissertation). People have to want it for themselves. And most often, in a cultural environment that centres shame and judgement for those who’ve done harm, there is everything to lose by being honest–even with themselves–and very little to gain. For those of us in healing spaces, it may feel obvious how much there is to gain from going deep and facing one’s demons. But it is not so obvious to the average person, and it is a lot of work. And we are not making it any easier by continuing to feed into a culture of rage and judgement.

Accountability is essential. But it can only happen under non-coercive conditions. There is a tendency in much of the discourse around these sensitive topics to treat accountability as a cudgel. The layers of power dynamics involved in many current approaches to “accountability” are antithetical to the autonomy that people need to be able to seek help effectively on their own terms. Autonomy is paramount for working class people in settler colonies who have already felt a lifetime of the traumatizing effects of so much coercion and control over their bodies and lives. And given the inherently coercive nature of being commodified and exploited under capitalism, there are limits to, and even harms from, the carceral, control-based approaches that are so pervasive in settler colonial society (Cullors 2019; Gilmore 2022; Maynard 2017), which even leak into environments and communities that are struggling to move beyond them. Though these approaches can be used with good intentions, they do not effectively support community-building, nor are they a sustainable way to effect lasting changes in a person.

As one of my research participants, who was coerced into an intervention for his meth use, said to me, such a control-based approach is “predicated on the continuing presence and attention of the thing that’s instilling fear.” In James C. Scott’s work on hidden transcripts within subordinated populations, he writes about how forced compliance, such as that which my research participant experienced when coerced into treatment, takes a heavy psychological toll: “forced compliance not only fails to produce attitudes that would sustain that compliance in the absence of domination, but produces a reaction against such attitudes. … Coercion, it would seem, can produce compliance but it virtually inoculates the complier against willing compliance” (Scott 1990:109, orig. emph.). Approaches to harm which are organized without an awareness of these issues are likely to reproduce the coercion and forced compliance inherent to settler colonial society, making them ineffective at best and harmful at worst.

Abolitionist principles

When accountability is focused entirely on the individual, we are neglecting to look at the full picture of the conditions that make harm more likely to happen. Transformational justice requires an entirely different approach to how we understand lasting repair, and that is difficult because many people don’t have the resources they would need to be able to start to make that shift. But we also won’t escape this cycle of shame, violence and punishment we’re all trapped in without finding ways to make that shift. Abolitionist principles offer a potential guide for how to move forward.

Abolitionists are not advocating to simply abolish prisons and keep everything else intact. The systemic changes that we need (decommodification, decolonization, land back etc.) can go an enormously long way towards preventing most abuses from happening in the first place. But even right now, it’s important to talk about abolition, because most abusers aren’t being arrested and convicted anyway, and our violent system keeps making more of them. That system is propped up by the cops and prisons in our minds: the way we continue to deal with interpersonal and societal problems by asserting force and control instead of practicing non-authoritarian methods of problem solving. That is something that we can all change.

Abolitionist principles describe approaches to conflict, crisis, violence or disagreement that reject punishment and coercion and instead centre collaboration, the transformation of conflict into opportunities for growth, and flexibility/experimentation.

Emerging out of Black and Indigenous feminist traditions, this approach stands in explicit contrast to colonial approaches, as “the very essence of colonialism and its criminal justice system is rule by force” (McCaslin and Breton 2014:512).

Abolitionist writer, activist, and Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors describes abolition as “a praxis that roots itself in the following principles: people’s power; love, healing, and transformative justice; Black liberation; internationalism; anti-imperialism; dismantling structures; and practice, practice, practice” (Cullors 2019:1685). A great deal of abolitionist writing practices what it preaches by focusing on values and open-ended potentials rather than fixed and prescriptive pedagogy; instead of attempting to capture what abolitionist principles ‘are,’ Cullors describes her own abolitionist journey as “embod[ying] the following twelve principles:

(1) have courageous conversations; (2) commit to response versus reaction; (3) experiment: nothing is fixed; (4) say yes to one’s imagination; (5) forgive actively versus passively; (6) allow oneself to feel; (7) commit to not harming or abusing others; (8) practice accountability for harm caused; (9) embrace non-reformist reforms; (10) build community; (11) value interpersonal relationships; (12) fight the U.S. state and do not make it stronger” (Cullors 2019:1687).

adrienne maree brown posits that in transformative justice, “rather than punishing people for surface-level behavior, or restoring conditions to where they were before the harm happened, we need to find the roots of the harm, together, and make the harm impossible in the future” (brown 2019:11). Queer theory scholar and abolitionist Sarah Lamble (2021:148) describes ‘everyday abolition’ as “a means to connect efforts toward structural change with our everyday cultures and practices. Everyday abolition means undoing the cultural norms and mindsets that trap us within punitive habits and logics.” Lamble (2021:149-159) describes four key strategies:

1) Undo carceral cultures: Identify and challenge punitive logics in everyday contexts
2) Shift our everyday responses to harm: We need to stop responding to harm with punishment and isolation and instead offer support, safety, healing and connection – even when it’s hard.
3) Build our collective skills and capacity to prevent harm and to foster everyday accountability and reparation.
4) Connect the everyday to the big picture.

Note that in all the above descriptions, practice is key—not achievement, not success, not winning or training for one big moment or endlessly thinking and planning, but trying, experimenting, repeating, doing, practicing. The worldbuilders I work with practice these abolitionist principles through mutual aid and refusal to abandon (Hayes and Kaba 2023). None of these attempts are implemented perfectly, and often people are unable to live up to their ideals, but aspirations towards it form a regular practice, which is the only way to get better at anything. Abolitionists are thus becoming by doing—dedicatedly trying, stumbling, trying again.

With all of this in mind, what could we imagine? What resources could be created to heal and integrate those who’ve done harm? How can we make it safer for people to change?

When thinking and imagining about this topic I like to try to keep in mind two things:

1. There exists a whole bunch of experts on what it feels like to be at the receiving end of various forms of punishment, accountability, love, healing, coercion, etc., as a response to their acts of violence: people who committed violence themselves and re-integrated into a non-violent life. We should be talking to and listening to them (in addition to survivors, abolitionists and other experts), and take their experiences and opinions seriously (not valued above any other, but deeply considered). What worked best for them? What helped? What didn’t? And try to not unthinkingly pick and choose which accounts we listen to more closely, as we may let our deeply ingrained carceral/fearful bias cause us to only hear the “punishment was helpful for me” accounts over others.
2. An imagination experiment: If I, due to whatever pressures, committed harm, and even kept doing it for a long time because it felt like the only option or it seemed to work, how would I want to be treated by others? What would help me to leave those cycles?

What if I’m a man who’s done harm?

The more you transmute shame into grief, and your grief into action to help your most abandoned and shunned brothers, the more empowered you will feel. The most powerful thing we can do as humans caught in cycles of trauma, shame and oppression is to turn our experiences and growth into empathy for those around us still stuck in the place we once were, and change the future by preventing more harm from happening by reaching out to those people.

It requires a LOT of bravery because actually looking at our own actions, understanding them, and finding compassion and forgiveness for ourselves even when it’s not offered by others can be really difficult and painful. But on the other side of it lies peace. And Mother Earth is here to help us through it.

For more on shame, listen here.

What if I’m a woman who is too angry to have compassion?

In my outreach work with men, I often get women responding by saying that they feel like they are expected to fix men, saying “it’s not my job to do that,” “I shouldn’t be expected to help men who’ve done nothing but hurt me,” things like that. Perfectly valid responses. I want to make it clear right now that it is absolutely not your job, and no one expects you to do that. But it is my job. I’ve taken on this task willingly. When you read an article or watch a video of mine about men, you’re seeing me at work doing this on behalf of us.

So I feel what you’re saying in my heart, and I think it’s very reasonable for you to focus on yourself and your healing, limit contact with people and conversations that hurt too much, and take all the space you need. Myself and other people can do this particular work for the collective, and you can contribute to the broader movement for liberation in whatever ways you’re able to, and trust us to carry the rest.

The only thing I ask women, enbies and other people who’ve been deeply traumatized by patriarchal violence to do, if you’re not up for outreach work or compassion-oriented conversations but you do want to be supportive, is to just not make my job harder by venting your justified anger in spaces where these conversations are being held. In my work, I try to create a space for men to feel safe to talk about their experiences and work through some unlearning they’re doing around various oppressive structures. I’m doing this for us, because I want the cycles to stop. It makes my job harder when women and enbies come at those men, in my comments sections for example, for being confused or emotional when they overall mean well, and are on a journey. People can’t learn when they feel like making a mistake will result in judgement, mockery and criticism. I want them to feel safe engaging with my work. When I taught at the university level, I can’t imagine how much harder it would have been for my students if they’d had someone jumping on every poorly articulated thought. Processing out loud, including in writing, is an essential part of learning.

So please help me out by keeping the venting to those spaces where it won’t be seen by men struggling to free themselves from the mental chains that have been imposed on them—ideally with your girlfriends in the group chat. ❤