biggest recurring questions in my life. Later events have taught me a lot about work that

biggest recurring questions in my life. Later events have taught me a lot about work that has already been done on accountability within communities. In particular, I want to highlight the book The Revolution Starts At Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities (edited by Ching-In Chen, Jai Dulani, and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha), which was published in 2011. But there's a lot of other work out there on how to deal with a perpetrator of violence without resorting to our corrupt and violent established prison svstem. People of color Should be credited for much of this work, because communities of color are rarely well- served by the criminal justice system, and thus have particular incentives to seek alternatives. Sometimes, this field is called "transformative justice" or "restorative justice." Here is a post that links to a number of resources on transformative justice: http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2012/01/30/some-transformative-justice-links/ te Ok ok Social Responsibility Within Activism Tonight I had Thanksgiving dinner with my mother and her boyfriend. Some friends of my mother attended, one of whom is a lesbian who I'll call Kay. Kay attended dinner with her mother, who is unaware of Kay's sexual orientation. One of the reasons Kay's mom doesn't know about Kay's sexual orientation is that Kay's mom has already behaved quite badly towards Kay's elder sister, who is an out-of-the-closet lesbian. I knew this whole situation going in, and one thing that struck me was how much of a nice person Kay's mom is. I mean... she's really nice. I mean, she clearly tries to be a good person. She also tried really hard to help me do the dishes. (I didn't let her because I wanted them all to myself.) I've been thinking a lot lately about how to engage with people who have done bad things, or who are currently doing things I think are bad (like shaming their lesbian daughters). It wouldn't have been right to throw my sex-positive ideas on the table while talking to Kay's mom -- mostly because Kay specifically asked me not to, ahead of time. But. The most powerful tool for getting people to reconsider their stigma against alternative sexuality is personal engagement. Don't I have some responsibility here? Is there something I can do? Other examples of this are rife. One very intense, very important issue I grappled with this week was having a friend email me to inform me that another friend -- someone I like and admire a lot -- has been credibly accused of sexual assault by a person who will never press charges. This has come up before in my life... every time it's a little different, and yet so many things are the same: a person is assaulted, the news gets out among friends, the survivor doesn't press charges, there is confusion among the friends about how to act, eventually things die down, and I feel as though I should have done more. When I was in high school, one of my closest male friends raped a female acquaintance of mine. She didn't press charges and they later had a romance that was, to all appearances, consensual. I pieced events together slowly -- he did acknowledge what he'd done, though never directly to me. I didn't know what to do, at the time, and I still feel as though I should have done so much more. He and I were so close. I never had the nerve HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018569