What is accountability abuse?
Accountability abuse is abuse that happens under the pretense of holding someone accountable for harm. Accountability abuse may take the form of bullying via spreading rumors as well as violent restorative justice accountability processes.
Accountability abuse creates perpetual fear in communities and deeply erodes safety.
What are the signs of accountability abuse?
Accountability abuse can be hard to spot at first because it is also reasonable that people who have been abusive, have not been accountable, may lose social connections, work, etc. for valid reasons.
Because of this, impact is not a good assessment tool for accountability abuse.
Instead, what we are going to want to look at is HOW a possible case of accountability abuse is happening, rather than WHAT the claims are.
There are a number of key identifiers to accountability abuse. They all come down to are unfolding in a way that the people who are claiming someone has harmed or is harmful are not going about their matters in an accountable way themselves.
1. There is a presumption of guilt.
It is NEVER ethical to act in a way that presumes guilt. Accountability abuse took off massively with the advent of the slogan: ‘Believe Survivors’.
The problem with this is that once you are able to become completely immune to accountability for your claim once you have claimed the Survivor position.
2. There is a lot of abstraction and a lack of specifics.
It is NOT ethical to claim harm with abstract statements and without specifics such as who got harmed and how. This is important for a number of reasons. This is because abstract statements as they have boundary issues, or even they are a predator, are nearly impossible to refute.
Abstract claims without details, especially without evidence, removes the accountability of the claimant to provide information that is accurate as possible.
Another reason why this is important is that we need to know if the person who was allegedly harmed is consenting to their story being used in a claim. In many cases of accountability abuse there is no permission given.
3. The claimant(s) are exhibiting reactive behavior.
This is a more nuanced identifier as it does not always indicate accountability abuse while the above two points inherently are indicative of abusive.
Yet, it is important for us to track the behaviors that claimants show. This is because projections, distortions, and fabrications of accounts is something that we have to hold claimants accountable to and the more reactive someone is, the more likely they are unconsciously projecting, fabricating, and distorting their claim.
While this goes against the slogan of ‘Believe Survivors’ it is a reality that the more overwhelmed someone is the more likely their memory will be misshaped because highly emotional events can trigger other traumas that inject emotional reactivity that actually doesn’t belong in the story.
For example, even if it is true that someone confronted the claimant in a hall way, the claimant being triggered, may unconsciously distort their memory to say they were physically assaulted.
We are responsible to track the possibility of these kinds of distortions to maintain integrity of the claim.
How do we prevent accountability abuse?
The first most important thing is to look out for signs of accountability abuse and do not enable it or participate in it by spreading rumors or supporting abusive processes.
If you have doubts that accountability abuse may be happening, it is important to ask questions.
Some useful questions might be:
- Who was allegedly harmed and how?
- Has the person who has been harmed explicitly consented to this claim?
- Has the person who has allegedly been harmed or the claimant directly communicated their claim to the person who has allegedly harmed?
If the claimants answers to these is negative we may assess that there is accountability abuse happening and the next step might be to check in with the person who the claim is against.
Of course, even with positive answers to these questions, accountability abuse is always possible because of projections, distortions, and fabrications of claims.
The important point here is that when we receive a claim of harm it is important we are first tracking HOW the claim is being brought, rather than WHAT the claim is.
This is because it is hard to wholly assess the validity of a claims, whereas present moment behaviors are much easier to assess and they may even gives us some strong clues about the validity of the claim itself.
How can I help?
First, just reading this is really helpful.
If you would like to be further helpful, we ask you to share this website with people in your community.
Preventing accountability abuse is really about changing community standards for behavior.
Particularly, if you are a community organizer, it is important you understand accountability abuse as you are likely to encounter and will have to respond to it by making a choice of enabling it or preventing it.
Accountability Abuse 101 