Episode 3: Accountability and Correcting Harm

The occupations taken by the police-military-market-state nexus do not serve the needs of the most vulnerable, and in fact cause harm in most cases. Jasmine, Sarika and Jyotika come together to talk about accountability and correcting harm in the context of their commitment to anti-capitalist and anti-carceral politics. They explore existing abolitionist and transformative ideologies and also discuss the various structures of oppression that shape the politics around harm, danger and violence based on race, caste, class, religion, militarisation, citizenship and borders.

About the hosts

Jasmine Kaur is a punjabi, queer writer/artist. She likes to surround herself with stories and poetics in any medium, including audio, video, still images and performance. Some of her work has been published by VIBE, …ongoing…, streetcake magazine, and Tilt (by QueerAbad). She’s currently working as a Teaching Fellow at the Philosophy Department in Ashoka University.

Sarika Karnad is a Mental Health Professional and Content Head in an organisation that works towards inclusivity & reliable therapy for all. She believes she learns the most about life by talking to people around her – having meaningful conversations and understanding different experiences. Apart from talking and making an extensive list of things to research, Sarika loves spending her day reading books, baking, learning new skills and petting cats.

Jyotika Tomar is an undergraduate student of History at Lady Shri Ram College, University of Delhi.

Content warning: Various forms of Violence, Sexual Assault, Rape, Death, Oppression, India-Pakistan Partitition, Communal Violence, Victim Blaming, Racism and Racial Oppression, Oppressive Laws, Casteism, Gang Rape Case of Priyanka Reddy, State Sanctioned Violence, Police Murder of George Floyd, Racial Oppression, Custodial Torture

Transcript

Sarika

Hello and welcome to “Explorations on Feminist Leadership by #OneFuture Fellows2022”, a podcast by the 2022 cohort of the One Future Fellows where we discuss, examine, and learn about all things feminist leadership. I am Sarika, and my pronouns are she/her. I am a Psychologist and a strong advocate for mental health.

Jyotika

Hi, my name is Jyotika Tomar. My pronouns are she/her. I am a second year undergraduate student of History at Lady Shri Ram College for Women, University of Delhi.

Jasmine

Hi, my name is Jasmine Kaur. My pronouns are she/her and I’m currently working as a teaching fellow at Ashoka University at the Philosophy Department.

Sarika

And today we will be talking about accountability and correcting harm.

Jyotika

So before we begin with the podcast, we would like to tell you about our rationale behind the choice of this theme. We don’t think it can be divorced from our political leanings, which includes among other things, a commitment to anti-capitalist and anti-carceral politics as well as a firm opposition to the various structures of oppression that shapes the politics, that shapes narratives around harm and danger and violence based on race, caste, class, religion, militarization, citizenship and borders.

Jyotika

And we think it’s important to talk about it because the occupations taken by the police, military, market, state, nexus, don’t serve the needs of the most vulnerable, but in fact are enactors and causations of harm themselves in most cases. And we think that we need explanations on these issues from the perspective of feminist leadership to discover how we can build a freer world in opposition to the one that exists now and in furtherance and translation of existing abolitionist thought and transformative principles and traditions of transformative justice, which is things that we want to get into during the course of this podcast.

Jyotika

At this point, I think it’s important to give you some trigger warnings so we’ll be discussing issues and themes of violence, particularly sexual violence and oppression. So we request you to be mindful of that while you’re listening. I think over to you, Jasmine, for us to get started.

Jasmine

Hi, I wanted us to start off with something Ashon Crawley, a teacher, writer and artist, posted about, inevitability of harm on his social media in June 2021. He writes “Harm happens, we harm one another. Many think this saying harm happens and we harm one another to be a value statement and a moral judgement. So instead of thinking about this fact, we pretend we can be innocent, and so too we value innocence as a moral and ethical good. But my garden keeps teaching me my intent to grow more green beans was neither good nor bad, but it appears I have planted too many in too small a space. So though many are blooming, lots of leaves are dying off, and some of the plants too. I have to remove the felled leaves daily. It doesn’t matter that my intent was to grow more food. It actually might even be a noble desire. It certainly was not bad or mean or evil, but the impact is that the growth has still been harmful for some of the plants. What would a claim of innocence ‘I didn’t mean to do it. This isn’t my fault. Maybe I can just keep watering and whooping and wishing’ even mean for the plants. The garden shows me yet again that some concepts, some ideas are deeply insufficient for trying to contend with our world. All that matters is my attempt to repair the harm done. So instead of guilt and shame, which are the underside of and produced by desires for innocence, care, tenderness, handling things, literally putting my hands in the door, pruning, getting messy with my hands. And from this can emerge repair, from this can emerge joy, and from this can be sensed life and love.”

Jasmine

I wanted to share this because this is something that really challenged my perspective on associating guilt and shame with harm, and it really forced me to understand how inevitable harm is and how useless it is to think about notions of innocence instead of notions of repairing the harm that you have done. And I wanted to ask what you both think about this.

Jyotika

So I think this excerpt was a very, very beautiful and advocative way to put a lot of our thoughts around this. And I think I see it as a way in which we approach relationships with each other. And these can be various kinds. These could be, these could look like friendships, these could look like romantic relationships, these could look like parent-child relationships. And even though a lot of them may be based on principles of love and respect, justice and equality, I think there’s a need to also look at, like the excerpt put it, the inevitability of harm of us enacting harm on the other person and us also experiencing harm. And sitting with the fact that it’s a very uncomfortable place to be. But that discomfort is necessary.

Jyotika

And I think it’s also important to look at not just the intention of the actions that we do, the things we say in the context of these relationships, but also look at the consequences of whatever it is that we did, like divorcing it from what we intended to do. And that is where I think we can practice not associating guilt and hurt with it, but looking at the consequences it had for the other person. Especially when things are as contested as the identity or, you know, invasions of privacy or just things that we didn’t mean to be hurtful but did end up being hurtful and grappling with how we deal with that. Sarika, what do you think of this?

Sarika

I think I really like the part where you talked about personal relationships, right? Because I think when we move away from guilt and shame that comes with harm, it also means that we realize that we do hold power in different relationships. For example, in the child-parent sort of relation that there is, punishment is something that’s very, very common and it directly sort of associates like there’s zero tolerance to any sort of violence that happens, right. So it immediately sort of creates a binary. So either wrong, you’re either a perpetrator or you are a victim. And that’s, I mean, is that helpful? There’s strict imposition of punishments, but it also comes with really less exploration, really less reflection. There are no alternatives to it.

Sarika

And that also means that there’s very little accountability that we give to the we hold to the perpetrator themselves, right? So how do we correct harm with alternative behaviors to ignorance? Or like, how do we find an alternative that’s not so much about ignorance, where they just say I’m sorry and how do we move more towards the actions part of it.

Sarika

And I think also adding on to this is that especially as leaders in different sectors, how do we really hold ourselves accountable where even if we do any sort of harm to anybody, even if we have good intentions, how do we prepare for that? When is harm more of an initial response that we work towards and move away from in a way, than something that we sort of just say sorry and move on from, right?

Jasmine

I think we do this by de-linking harm from innocence and guilt, by recognizing that even in our aim to do good, we will end up causing harm and to understand that not as something to feel guilty and ashamed about, but as something to repair. But I am also wondering about how we think of harm at the social level, whatever constructs that exist around it. How do social systems respond to harm? And how we have been socialized in such systems such that we also are and have been enactors and acceptors of this harm, of these systems around harm.

Jasmine

I want to work here with the example of sexual assault. When a woman is raped in India, it is often construed as harm against a family rather than harm against a person. And many of us have been socialized in this ideology. And not to think that a woman who has been raped has faced a fate worse than death. We often accept this narrative even if we do not believe the victim herself. How then do we contribute to the conceptions of harm when we do this? What are some of the other ways in which we do contribute to this conception of harm? How might we be able to mitigate this harm by changing our notions around sexual assault from the ones we have been socialized and to a notion where we sent to the person harmed and how they would like to deal with instead of imposing how we would like them to deal with it? In other words, how have they been chained to hold people accountable in these systems and how do we move out of that training?

Jyotika

Yeah, the very, very important example that you brought up right now, it makes me think of this book on partition narratives, like oral histories of partition survivors written by Urvashi Butalia. So it’s called ‘The Other Side of Silence’. And one of the ideas that she discusses while talking about particularly sexual violence enacted on women during the partition riots was how women’s bodies were used as battlegrounds for contesting groups of like contesting communities and how they were the sites of violence that, you know, these communities used to enact violence against each other, if that makes sense. Which makes us, which puts us in a position where we have to contest with the construction of narratives of harm, of danger and of safety.

Jyotika

And so the one recurring narrative is that of stranger danger. And that is essentially being told, like young women and girls particularly being taught from a very young age that they need to be necessary, like particularly careful of their safety when they leave the home and they go outside because of, you know, this, like this construction of the dangerous stranger which I will get into, which will, which is usually and structurally deployed against particularly men from marginalized communities.

Jyotika

And what also comes at this point is the construction of a binary of the home being a space of safety and comfort and the outside or the public being a space of potential harm and violence. Which is an obfuscation of facts, because statistically, every single year the National Crime Records Bureau data tells us that in over 92-93% cases, in cases of sexual violence against women, it is individuals known to the survivor who are the enactors of harm, who are the perpetrators.

Jyotika

So how do we grapple with this idea of stranger danger, right? And also look at how the entire energy and resources and time of the state and the military have been deployed to sort of give shape and structure to these narratives. And I think that some clarity about that will come when we talk about the disproportionate incarceration of persons from marginalized communities and I’ll take two examples to discuss that.

Jyotika

So in the United States it is the African American population along with of course Hispanic people and other communities which are disproportionately incarcerated and face the brunt of police and custodial violence and systematic targeting. So the African American population though it’s only 13% total population of the country, they make up 40% of the incarcerated population. And when we talk about the Indian context and look at under-trials, it is individuals from Scheduled Caste and Tribe communities and from Muslim and Sikh communities who make up 70% of the under-trial population, right, which is disproportionate to the actual population demographic that they have.

Jyotika

So and a very, very important way of implicating them is through directives of particularly sexual violence and of course these have legal and political basis. So if you look at say for instance legislation like the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871, a colonial era legislation, it sort of designated certain communities as habitual offenders and even though in the context of post independent India, that was like the law isn’t enforced anymore, but it’s not enough to say that it’s simply because it’s not enforced anymore, it doesn’t have any consequence because it’s solidified through narratives and the way state and its institutions function.

Jyotika

So the way particularly in individuals from the notified tribes are, you know, targeted by the state now is because of the consequence of what this legislation did, the designation of habitual offenders. And there are organizations that we link in the resources that are working on these issues, which also makes us think about how the level to which violence has been normalized and simply because it is enacted by the state and its institutions, it’s not something that counts for a space of critique or, you know, questioning and it’s just taken as, say, the natural.

Jyotika

So if you look at the sexual violence enacted by the military in places where the Armed Forces Special Powers Act is in is deployed, that won’t, you know, that that won’t be questioned to the extent to which other cases of sexual violence will be. And to give you another example of how even though a category of the victim is created, so there is a binary creation of the good victim and the bad victim. And the good victim is something that attracts a lot of public outcry, there is mobilization and so on. And the other kind of victim is a space where that’s not the response that we receive.

Jyotika

And say for instance though Priyanka Reddy gang rape case that happened in Hyderabad in 2019, it was followed by what is referred to as an encounter, right. It’s an extra-judicial killing of the accused. And I remember being in a legal studies class and my teacher who was teaching me legal studies and ideas of political science, tell us very jubilantly that, you know, an encounter happened and they were killed. And I did not have the vocabulary to really pinpoint why I felt uncomfortable about that. But it points to the same thing that I’ve been talking about, about the normalization of violence and how extremely punitive carceral systems of punishment, is the only thing people rally around right in when a case of sexual violence happens. And not only does that structurally not solve anything, but it also takes away the agency of the individuals who have gone through the harm, right? Yeah I think I’ve been going on quite a bit. So if there’s anything that you want to say at this point or come in, please feel free to do that.

Sarika

Thank you so much for that, Jyotika. I think that gives us a lot of context, right, of how this is sort of enacted on a larger ground, like the large perspective of it. And what I also understood is, it is that the power remains with the majority and is and the definition of justice also comes through this majority and is sort of used against the minority a lot more. And I think the main thing that we’re also coming to is that the carceral systems really don’t negate harm caused.

Sarika

And it’s not like the amount of harm caused in society is decreasing. Violence remains, theft remains, everything remains. So it’s not particularly negating the harm. Then we also come to the next question, which is then, how do we transform the society? And right now, what factors in society take us away from accountability and what factors actually lead to justice at the grassroots?

Sarika

I think Jasmine also mentioned sort of giving the victim the power to decide how they’d like justice or how they’d like the harm to be corrected. That would also be something that’s very important here, right? How do we move away then from that punishment and sort of isolating the bad actions of one person to that one person only? Because what we’re also understanding is that the end of the day is something that’s been taught to us from the very beginning, like we talked about personal relationships. Punishment has been a part of our personal relationships in school, in college, probably also, in a parent-child relationship. I think that’s what I’ve also understood from everything that Jyotika talked about. Jasmine, do you want to add to this?

Jasmine

Yes. Thank you again Jyotika for giving us so much context. I also want to add to this through. So something that has really influenced my thought on this is this video that is called “What Should Happen To Abusers If You Do Not Lock Them Up?” And it is by Kimberly Foster on her channel ‘For Harriet’ and features Professor Leigh Goodmark. And it is all about decriminalizing domestic violence and goes into the history of domestic violence and criminalizing it in the US.

Jasmine

But I think a lot of thought also applies elsewhere and in our context also, because they are discussing this question of if we cannot lock the abusers up, what should we do? Because I think we can all agree that domestic abuse is this incredibly important issue against mostly women, but also against people of other genders. And it is heinous to have to be abused for any length of time. And also especially in cases of domestic abuse, the abuse lasts for a long time, even a lifetime. And we also know that not a lot of people even come forward with abuse cases.

Jasmine

So it is a very unaddressed problem. But what really affected me in this conversation was the concept that a lot of times when we criminalize domestic abuse, we are not addressing what is causing the abuse in the first place. We are just saying, ‘Oh, you did this bad thing, now you’re going to going to go to jail forever and the person that you were in this relationship with is maybe partly responsible for that’ and also from the victim we’re asking that ‘This person that you love and have other positive feelings about also is the one you have to put behind bars’. And that is a lot to ask from someone.

Jasmine

And it also talks about how there is correlation between things like unemployment and poverty to domestic abuse. That it is that there is no point if we just put people who are already hurting and people who might have been abused themselves as younger people, to put them behind bars and to hold them further instead of addressing a lot of material realities that are kind of pushing them towards hurting other people around them. And I think trying to focus on this is something that really made a difference in how I think about this.

Jasmine

And also centering victims, because a lot of victims do not exactly want the abuser to go to jail, they want them to stop abusing. That is the main thing. And if not, then maybe to get out of that relationship. But that is also limited and what the understanding of Professor Leigh Goodmark’s has been is that a lot of victims when they have this option that their abusers can be rehabilitated, will choose the rehabilitation over getting this carceral revenge or justice that we have been taught is the only thing we can be getting.

Jasmine

So that is something that has that’s what I think about this and trying to move to restorative justice instead of this very carceral and very punitive justice.

Jyotika

Right. So over here I just want to talk about one thing about to mention on the which is about the reasons abolitionists brought and what and those reasons are foremost and what is an abolitionist and what they think of the issues that we’re talking about. So these are people who call for the complete dismantling of structures such as the prison, the police, the military and so on.

Jyotika

And they locate that political position that they take in a politics based on anti-capitalist and anti-carceral ideas. And they see these structures as violent entities, inherently violent entities, constructed by oppression based on race, caste, class, religion, gender, sexuality, citizenship, militarization, and so on. And I got interested in these ideas during the 2020 protests against police brutality in the aftermath of the institutional murder by the police of George Floyd.

00:25:43 Jyotika

So the prominent abolitionist thinkers are people like Angela Davis and Ruth Wilson Gilmore. And what they say is that these institutions don’t serve the needs of the most vulnerable, but what they do is they deploy their coercive posts against them. And this takes several forms that we’ve discussed. So it looks like systematic targeting, surveillance, custodial torture and violence, creation of the narratives of criminality, of sexual violence or dismissal, of tool of law in the way in which the process takes shape.

Jyotika

And because of these reasons and their analysis of it and the looking of course this is a situation in the American context. So they do a lot of work on how the African American community is targeted by these issues and they say that these institutions will not help us solve crime and must be done away with.

Jyotika

And the alternative they offer is things that look like material and structural changes and that comes from a socialist perspective. So they talk about building communities of care and support, They talk about the state funding, of education, of healthcare, better working conditions. And they say that crime is caused in the absence of all of these things. And that is where we should divert our attention, resources and time instead of, you know, furthering the punitive and carceral response.

Jyotika

And they also talk a lot about restorative and transformative justice, which over to you, Sarika, for introducing us to that.

Sarika

Thank you for that, Jyotika. So I think in terms of restorative justice, right, as a psychologist, I am very used to sort of looking up different researchers and different studies that have been done. And this is something I was honestly really interested in because I really wanted to know how do we implement it right? Because I’m going to say it’s easier said than done when it comes to this because it’s something that has to change at the very grassroots of society.

Sarika

So I’ve actually looked up this study that was done in Florida in 2020, where they implemented restorative justice in a middle school and I think that gave me a really good idea of how it could be something that is put forward and acted on and from there on, right. So it was basically sixth to eighth grade students who were, they sort of changed their model of justice. There were no punishment. If there was any sort of problem that came up, any sort of conflict that came up, they were asked to write letters to each other.

Sarika

And I think Jyotika, what you talked about in terms of community-building in order to get justice, in order to correct harm was something that they used a lot over here. And I think that was something that really changed my mind on how it is something that can be implemented, right?

Sarika

So that’s one. But again, I’m gonna see at the roots of it, restorative justice also comes down to why education is important, why economic stability is important. Having a community around that’s supportive becomes very, very important in this case, because when we see the principles of restorative justice, there’s a lot of what, like a feeling of safety, is something that’s very important. Having stuff that’s accessible is very important. Respect is important and these are things that we also learn when we are children to sort of avoid any bias, to be more neutral and also just having that accessibility of people around who would understand and support you in that space, right, and also hold you accountable more than anything else. I think that is something that is very important.

Jasmine

I think we can wrap this up and we can do that by maybe sharing one thing we have learned in this podcast episode. I can begin. I learned that to reduce people to good and evil is very reductive and harmful. That it does very little to repair the harm caused, if it does anything at all. And rather I think it tends to increase the harm in the world. That our focus has to be step out, stepping out of a preoccupation with being innocent and working on repair and to centering people who have been harmed, rather than punishing people who have done the harm who might have been harmed themselves in the past or even in the present. And to just send over repair and care instead of punishing.

Jyotika

So thank you so much for this very, very reflective conversation. And even though we had some pointers prepared earlier for what we wanted to discuss, all of the pauses and reflections we took in while we were talking is testament to how much we really learned from activity. And I think my take away from this would be how important it is for us to value complexity and nuance when we approach these conversations, be it at the personal level, when we sit in a position where we confront the reality that we might just be, you know, enactors of harm ourselves and it is important to be held accountable for that and sit with that discomfort and also at the public level where we must create spaces where we approach these conversations with a lot more nuance than we do as of now because the position we are right now because it doesn’t approach these conversations in that way. All it does., like you said, Jasmine, is further the kind of violence that we already have prevailing and it’s important for us to have re-imaginations of our responses. So that would be what I took away from this.

Sarika

Thank you so much, Jyotika and Jasmine. I think this was actually a very reflective discussion. And like you said, Jyotika, I’ve also been reflecting a lot more personally on this topic right? And even in the context of feminist leadership. I mean, it’s something that we have to sort of constantly strengthen and work towards in order to be accountable, in order to be kind and empathetic and build that community for people and for each other.

Sarika

It’s almost like a muscle that we have to keep sort of strengthening over time, right? To be kind, to be empathetic. And it’s not something that comes easily. There’s a lot of unlearning that sort of goes into it. But yeah, I think that’s what I’m taking with me. There are still a lot of questions that would need more objective sort of answers, but this is a start and I really like this start. So yeah.

Jyotika

Yeah, you put that really well. It’s a starting point for questions and we don’t have all the answers, but I think that’s the point.

Jasmine

I think so too. I also really like the start, and thank you both for giving such a good reflective conversation, and I think it’s a good place to begin.

Jyotika

To our listeners, thank you so much for joining us and listening in. We really, really appreciate your support. If you like this episode, please follow us on Instagram and Facebook @OneFutureCollective and One Future_India on Twitter and keep an eye out for future episodes of “Explorations on Feminist Leadership by #OneFutureFellows2022”. Please leave in your questions, comments or feedback for us on Anchor or in our dms. We really look forward to hearing your thoughts and until next time, take care of yourself and we hope that we can explore more together. Have a good day.

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End of the transcript

Resources mentioned by the hosts

1. Ashon Crawley: https://ashoncrawley.com/
2. The Other Side of Silence by Urvashi Butalia: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/49988813
3. What Should Happen To Abusers If You Do Not Lock Them Up?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmZqyYFudVg
4. A Case Study of the Implementation of Restorative Justice in a Middle School: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19404476.2020.1733912