“Feminist Accountability,” by Ann Russo, highlights the ways that oppressive structures are often unintentionally replicated in the very groups and organizations that attempt to abolish and fight against them. In addition, Russo offers ideas about ways to foster accountability within those groups, hopefully stopping the pattern of those oppressive structures and patterns. In chapter 4, “Shifting Paradigms to End Violence,” Russo writes about the shift in feminist anti-violence organizing from institutional services to community-based work for transformative justice.
One piece of this chapter that I found interesting was Russo’s point that when anti-violence efforts were handled by social service agencies, people in the U.S. viewed sexual violence as a “hyperdelicate issue” that should only be addressed by professionals. This mindset takes away the power to help and support anti-violence efforts from the communities who may be fully equipped to help. This shows how stigma around sexual violence can be harmful, as casting survivors as untouchable. I thought Russo’s specific detailings of the structures of social services, and that many agencies adopt a “one-size-fits-all” model, which results in ignoring the multifaceted lives of many survivors of violence. This has been a topic in other classes I’ve taken, and the way that standardized treatment and intervention affect survivors of domestic violence. For example, mandatory arrest laws which dictate that police arrest abusers right away when they are called to the scene of domestic violence. This approach doesn’t take into account the women who rely on their partner for financial stability or other things that may be left without any resources. I think Russo’s ideas about how to challenge those forms of structure are important and tangible.
Russo focuses on the importance of accountability being a proactive pursuit. Accountability has to be something the community actively works towards, communicates about, and an ongoing process. The way that Russo outlines the ideas of accountability make it seem like a real possibility and solution to the problems in many organizations.
This was such an interesting chapter! It definitely made me rethink a lot of what I thought about anti-violence organizations, especially as a criminal justice major, where these organizations are talked about often. I took the “Victimology” course here on campus that definitely had addressed many of these issues, but hadn’t proposed any kind of change to the system other than changing people’s attitudes about crime victims. Reading this re contextualized a lot of that information, and got me to consider that the issue is more than just society’s attitudes towards victims but is continuously perpetuated by the systems we put in place to help.