Introduction
[Trigger warning general discussion of abuse and abusers behaviors in no explicit descriptions of abuse]
Before getting started on this topic, there are a couple of things that need to be said upfront. First, I do not begrudge survivors for seeking everything transformative justice practitioners and models promise us. Just as we who oppose anti-survivorship do not blame survivors for having been abused, we should not blame survivors for believing that they may find solace and peace by participating in a process.
We are positioned within this fascist period without access to robust collective care practices. Networks of care focused on survivors’ needs can and have developed over the course of processes. This fact is independent from the actual success rate of accountability processes transforming both abusers’ behavior and the environments that helped facilitate their abuse. Still, those who truly care for survivors may develop practical safety and support as an act of collective self-defense. They manage this even though there is such a high likelihood of abusers successfully controlling the outcome of a process and escaping any meaningful consequence for their behavior
It’s rare that survivors are believed, even within abolitionist circles. It is far more common that we are met with scrutiny, pressure to keep quiet, and minimization of our experiences. These expected responses to knowledge of abuse we’ve survived all make the prospect of receiving adequate care, support, a sense of safety, and proof abuse has ceased into improbable outcomes. Processes are presented to us to look like our best chance of receiving help and experiencing safety. It would be wrong to condemn survivors who determine that the risks of participating in an accountability process are worth the chance of receiving care, especially since collective care is so absent in our networks.
Second, I do not wish to coddle and reassure abusers by using any term other than abuser throughout the course of this zine. Likewise, I will not be using any terms that foment anti-survivorship such as the use of the word “carceral” to refer to anything other than the police state itself. I will not treat the terms “punishment” or “punitive” as forbidden bad words or actions we should avoid for the sake of protecting abusers from any inconvenience. If your vision of prison abolition insists upon using these dogwhistles for anti-survivorship, I trust that you will not read further. This zine is not for you and I can only hope that you will lose the stomach for the horrors that anti-survivorship propagates.
Finally, this zine is informed exclusively by my own experiences and observations. If you need a reason to write off what follows in this zine, then it's the fact that I am just one person speaking from my own positionality. I do concede that my stances on processes are informed by the following experiences:
I was drawn to TJ frameworks because I believed they would provide actual support to survivors and defend them against abusers. Abolitionism reaching the national discourse inundated me with practically identical stories of processes enabling anti-survivorship and opportunism in multiple regions. In my own work I rapidly learned how easily abusers can escape consequences. This along with the rise of “anti-cancel culture” and other fascist harbingers drove me to disavow the framework entirely at the start of 2022.
Even though I did this work, I did not ever seek a process with the people who abused me. This was because I felt I had overwhelming proof that people would not care for me nor would they confront anyone on my behalf. The abuse I would go on to experience and the secondhand accounts of abuse I received all led me to conclude that processes want repair for the sake of repair and nearly always favor the abuser over the survivor.
This zine is an attempt to make the problem with processes known in order to hinder their usefulness as anti-survivorship tools. Fundamentally, processes exist to prevent consequences, not to create safety, care, or anything that resembles repair.
I am not an academic, I do not have access to any means of broad sociological research outside of what’s afforded by my own project. But I have seen the harm and abuse that comes with keeping quiet about processes until I’ve mentored under all the right mentors and studied all the right academic resources before offering any criticism. I’ve seen abusers who’ve been called out start reading groups and podcasts. I’ve seen the gurus teach anti-survivorship tactics and DARVO strategies to fellow abusers. I remember the doxxed and neglected survivors before their abusers released half-assed statements that read like counter-accusations rather than apologies.
If you should find that this zine resonates with your experiences and confirms suspicions you’ve harbored about processes you’ve witnessed or participated in, then I consider this zine justified in its existence. I will do my best to discuss these topics as extensively as I can manage as a disabled survivor myself. For my own safety and the safety of other survivors I know and have worked with, I won’t be naming names, but I will speak about abusers’ behaviors and why they paint a condemning picture of processes.
The Problem With Processes
So what is it that dooms processes from the start? The moment someone is chosen as an intermediary between abuser and survivor a prioritization of reconciliation over safety is codified. This prioritization is inherently detrimental to the survivor and further entangles them with their abuser who has already proven themself unsafe. Reconciliation and transformation as the primary goal explicitly removes consequences from the table, necessarily minimizing the severity of abuse. These dynamics ensure the continuation of abusive conditions, achieving the same goals as abusive behaviors themselves. Abusers are so amenable to engaging in processes because they understand it is the easiest route to escaping consequences. In their eyes, their network’s knowledge of their abuse is already a loss of control and a process provides a means of nullifying the impact of this lossl. Indeed, controlling the outcome of a process becomes their prime objective moving forward and this control starts with the selection process of intermediaries/practitioners. If the abuser admits to having abused, the intermediary can’t be someone who is too unsympathetic to the abuser’s position because that would be too “carceral” or would be engaging in “disposability politics.” Where these anti-survivorship dogwhistles command respect, a bystander willing to believe an abuser can change without merit or demonstration becomes the ideal participant.
Far more often though, abusers deny having done anything wrong and have plenty of people around them who are willing to accept this at face value. Here, the intermediary becomes someone who suspects survivor and abuser equally. As a result, the intermediary, bystanders, and abusers use processes to convince affected networks that abuse never happened or that the survivor is simply engaging in “cancel culture.”
This familiar sequence has the statement become public, garnering more attention than the callout or disclosure that prompted the process in the first place. The affected communities are nearly explicitly commanded to look the other way if they see the “so-called” survivor trying to advocate for themself. These statements do little to nothing to hide the fact that those who conducted the processes are almost entirely chosen by the abuser, if not, fully led by the abuser themself. They make a show of demonstrating how much they tried to believe the survivor but came to the conclusion either that nothing bad happened or they believe the matter has been sufficiently addressed. These conclusions always just happen to be completely separate from the survivor’s actual well being or experience of the process itself. Some such processes are conducted without the survivor’s knowledge until a “mission accomplished” coded statement comes out months or years after the fact.
While I believe these deplorable excuses for processes fail to fit even TJ practitioners’ own models, they still manage to exemplify the fundamental problems with processes. Additionally, they are so ubiquitous that they must be acknowledged. These commonplace examples of processes during this fascist period are preceded only by more elaborate processes held by previous generations that also placed reconciliation over safety.
Stopping abuse necessitates a loss of power and that cannot be accomplished without interventions made of practical actions that disempower abusers. Processes suspend the prospect of intervention and, instead, readily supply abusers with external motivations for participating in a process. This implicitly and explicitly promises abusers continued power and control.
Where processes do attempt to be some kind of intervention, they are resource intensive, are almost certainly retraumatizing, and require a radical reorganizing of the social connections surrounding and overlapping with the abuser and survivor. Ceasing abuse is a major change to the way a network or community relates to itself. This change is a deviation from the established cultural norms of the social environment that permitted abuse. Anti-survivorship disguised as abolitionism identifies this deviation and seeks to make it a temporary measure that’s only warranted under specific circumstances (i.e. when abuse is exposed). This perception that survivor support is exceptional and should only form after a process concludes helps ensure that abuse will continue. It incorrectly presumes that the ways that people interact within a network, formation, or organization is otherwise flawless and doesn’t necessitate a broader culture of care work and self-defense capable of preventing abuse from occurring.
In practice, processes merely keep abuse out of view until some social upheaval makes it known to others. Contrasted with this public obfuscation, the circumstances that precede a process are always transparent to abusers who choose to participate. This is especially so when abusers have the last say on the structure and purpose of a process. In this way, processes exist to preserve the coercions, abuses, and exploitation produced by hierarchical power. To be clear, this does not mean that anarchists or explicitly “non-hierarchical” or “horizontal” formations are exempt from this fact. They simply possess different ideological means of justifying hierarchical power and abuse than formations and organizations with more overt hierarchical structures and disciplines.
Many spaces use a veneer of community care or mutual aid as a cover for coercion and abuse. However obscured this fact may be, abuse always finds a home in an absence of care and robust support networks. Care, if it exists at all in leftist formations and organizations, is often only provided as a service to people outside of these working groups. Like the workplace where employees are expected to prepare themselves for their shifts off the clock, volunteers and members of left groups are expected not to need any of the support they provide to the public.
Care of any quality being given in a fascist world is often misperceived as proof of liberatory values or even the absence of abuse or exploitation. This perception mistakes the dispensing of resources and services for the presence of safety. In social environments such as these, the exposure of abuse and subsequent calls for processes creates friction with the existing structures and relationships that allowed abuse to take place. Any perceived diversion of resources and effort irritates a group’s certainty that their work is more important than care for and defense of survivors.
As a concession to the general belief that abuse is a serious issue that warrants special action (anti-survivorship aside), many bystanders may try to rush a process in order to prevent further disruption to their work. This motivates their attempts to assemble the care and resources necessary to support a process rather than support for individual survivors and the prevention of future abuse. Due to the ubiquity of anti-survivorship, whether or not it is disguised as pro-survivor, the demand for safety and care is regarded as something hostile to the values and goals of these social environments. In this way, processes are a readily available alternative to the risk of redistribution and restructured power dynamics.
Any dynamic that threatens the stability of hierarchical power draws out a desire for a process that neutralizes the risk. To the beneficiaries of abusive and exploitative social environments, these dynamics inform their expectations of what will result from a process before it even begins.
The predictable reliability of conditions that allow for abuse and exploitation is what attracts abusers. Compared to the dangerous and precarious work of survivor support and self-defense, the motivations formed and harbored by people other than survivors have the most influence on the outcome of processes. The consistency with which these reactionary forces effectively protect abusers and exploiters is a function of the historical foundations of the fascism we face today.
We know abusers possess the highest responsibility for abusing others. Still, bystanders also bear responsibility for abuse wherever they possess the agency to disrupt it or help protect people from potential abuse. The culpability of bystanders is complicated by situations where they are being threatened with abuse or more severe exploitation. However, survivor support and defensive intervention are mere impossibilities without their involvement. Processes dissuade bystanders away from forming effective care and safety by presenting processes as something mutually exclusive to care and safety. It makes the material reality for survivors into something negligible. This causes even small gestures that challenge anti-survivorship to agitate the prejudices (internalized or otherwise) of organizers / participants in a process. Here, victim-blaming and other forms of anti-survivorship get expressed as justifications for abuse that occurred, rationalizing inaction.
Given that abuse occurs within a context of neglect and isolation, efforts to stop abuse and nullify its impacts are necessarily starting from a place of inadequate resources. In the absence of broad meaningful care networks capable of mitigating the full breadth of fascist violence, bystanders and participants in a process often also face precarity. Where this is not the case, they typically benefit from hierarchical structures that made the abuse possible in the first place. All of these dynamics heighten the likelihood of a process’s failure to produce survivor support and defensive interventions. These factors further complicate the already tenuous nature of any process involving abusers and exploiters, turning any substantive challenge to their power into a distant impossibility.
These constituent parts of processes are what make them unable to address the absence of care. This inability is what makes them ineffective strategies of stopping abuse. The same scarcity that fascism takes advantage of is what makes attempts to establish meaningful care susceptible to abuse, exploitative dynamics, and other systems of control. At best, a process will incite competition for scarcely found collective care efforts. At worst, a process will be entirely subsumed by abusers and bystanders who stand to gain from anti-survivorship. This is because processes are fundamentally symbolic gestures that are meant to reassure community members that abuse will not reappear or that it didn’t happen in the first place. Were this not the case, the conditions in community that bring about abuse would not exist and the ability to control and exploit would not be so well preserved. Hierarchy ultimately is the maintenance of abusive and exploitative structures, so it follows that organizational disciplines that protect hierarchy formally and informally are most prone to favoring processes. They understand that processes are designed to be effective strategies of protecting power from upheavals.
Any delay on or abstention from actions that inhibit hierarchical power and abuse will always beget more abuse and exploitation. The prioritization of reconciliation is always the minimization of abuse with a different face. Encouraging the disavowal of all consequences and punishments ensures survivors will continue to be forced to weather abuse, precarity, and isolation. The ideological justifications for anti-survivorship that a given locale favors are simply another arm of control maintaining social mechanisms that facilitate abuse and exploitation. These dynamics all represent a pacifist acceptance of both the broader forces of fascism and the individual applications of fascist logics we find embedded within interpersonal abuse. In this way interpersonal abuse is but one more instance of violence wielded by reactionaries. Just as racism, ableism, and gender-based oppression each take different forms and can be utilized in different configurations, so too can abuse and exploitation.
Each weapon in fascism’s arsenal serves a unique purpose in coercing passivity and submission. Abstention from consequences and punishments being treated as anything liberatory completely collapses in the face of many leftists' own political disciplines. Anti-survivorship reveals itself here as their stances against imperialism, the state, capitalism, slavery and anti-Blackness do not demonstrate the same passive neutrality found in their stances on abuse. Only when positions of power are threatened or there is some challenge to how collective work is being done does this pacifism show itself. Processes are the manifestation of this pacifism and they twist the knife of abuse wounding survivors.
If we truly had collective care, fascism would not exist. So it follows that our efforts to create collective care will always be under threat so long as we have not dismantled this oppressive apparatus. However rare and fleeting a sense of safety may be during this fascist era, pursuit of safety necessitates a vigilant study of and reflection upon the efficacy of our self-defense efforts. We do not arrive at safety and care with resignation to the presence of abuse and exploitation because fascism is too cruel to allow our liberation to be decided by random chance. Care and safety is only forged with the defeat of what coerces and kills us. Processes are not a shortcut to liberatory efficacy, yet, insidiously, they easily ensure inaction against violence. Believing “the work” is too important to stop or change has proven itself to be the form of anti-survivorship best suited to leftists’ formal and informal networks. Processes exist for this belief alone and that is a serious problem.