Transformative Justice for All: Abolition and Survivorhood

Art by Olly Costello

Working with survivors of sexual assault for the past 10 years has offered me the chance to learn from a wide breadth of stories and experiences. I am grateful to every person who has allowed me to witness and be with their pain for even the briefest moment. Everyone’s story is unique, but I have been reflecting on the common desire among many survivors to incarcerate people who hurt them. 

In my experience, most survivors I have met care deeply about the safety of other people. Oftentimes they feel the only way they can hope for any level of violence prevention is to cooperate with the criminal legal process, hopefully leading to incarceration. They feel that an incarcerated perpetrator can’t hurt others. 

I can totally empathize with this feeling. We learn to believe that the purpose of prisons is to disappear problems, as written by Angela Davis in “Are Prisons Obsolete?”yes. A world with prisons encourages us to view people as disposable. When you take your trash to the bin, and your bin is picked up by the city, you don’t have to think about the garbage you created after that. This is how our current criminal legal systems encourage us to think about people and prisons.

There are many realities we are avoiding when we fall into this mindset. Incarceration is temporary in most cases, in the rare situations where sexual offenders are found guilty and incarcerated. Even if a person is incarcerated, they will likely be released eventually and technically able to harm others again. I’m certainly not advocating for a legal system that permanently separates offenders from society. This reality reminds me that even if we try to rely on prison systems to confine folks who have harmed, this is only temporary. 

Secondly, we cannot ignore the prevalence of sexual violence within prisons. Incarcerated people are not safe from nor unable to engage in more sexual harm. In fact, as of 2020, the Correctional Service of Canada did not gather or report data about sexual harm that their employees engaged in inside of the system. We can’t really be anti-rape if we are advocating to put people in “rape factories,” as Mariame Kaba bluntly states in “We Do This ‘Til We Free Us."

Lastly, and most depressingly for me, I think about the millions of people who, usually due to power and privilege, are entirely protected from the criminal legal system. Wealth, power, adjacency to power, and systemic privilege offer people safety from being indicted and legally punished for their actions, or even socially impacted at all. 

The painful truth is this: there is nothing a survivor can do to prevent others from experiencing the same harm they did. The desire to increase safety for a community is noble and admirable. But taking on this burden is ultimately a losing game and setting one up to fail. 

Don’t get me wrong. As a therapist, survivor, and friend to numerous survivors, I’m not opposed to people wishing violence upon their abuser or wishing they could hurt the person who hurt them. These are normal and often helpful ways of processing anger, especially in the aftermath of trauma. This doesn’t mean that I truly believe in or advocate for harm towards people who have engaged in sexual harm. Believing in transformative justice, abolition and also healing for every survivor of sexual violence really requires me to kill the cop in my head. Dreaming of a better world demands that I dream of a better world for EVERYONE, including people who have harmed others.