I tried this and got some odd coded results.
When Good Intentions Cause Harm
Louisa April 22, 2020
Activism,
More Than Two,
Relationship Fluidity & Beyond Leave a Comment
It was the worst of times; I was in the middle of a breakdown of my relationship, having just given birth to his child. I was also in the middle of a masters course for journalism in Berlin, struggling to help my older two children adapt to a new country, language, culture and schooling system. I was on depression medication, which wasn't proving particularly helpful. And then she called me.
Eve Rickert, my friend and publisher, told me over skype that her co-author, her business partner (therefore also my publisher) and ex-partner Franklin Veaux had been gaslighting her. Then she asked me to document the stories of the women who preferred not to write their own experience of abuse and/or harm at his hands.
As a woman who has experienced abuse herself and who had published memoirs about both polyamory and abuse, it seemed a perfect fit. And perhaps it was, for a time.
Yet I hadn't ever had an assignment like this, where I would help other women go up against someone like Franklin, who was the guru of (mainly) the cis-het portion of the community. I was scared. Scared of letting the women down, if the shit hit the fan. Scared of the vitriol that would no doubt be spewed forth my way. Scared of harming my own writing career. Understand that writing, to me, is like breathing. I must write...or die.
I proposed to Eve that if I did it, it had to be combined with my thesis in some way, because my life was already chaotic and hellish. That was a mistake--the first one. It meant my agendas became conflicted: it became about my goals and decentered the women.
To agree to do something enormous with no time to do it justice was also a mistake (and indicative of my own lack of boundaries, I'm afraid). I had even less time to educate myself on the concept of transformative justice. Still, I read a hell of a lot about it (and then forgot most of it). Today only three things have stuck with me. Transformative justice seeks
- Not to deprive the perpetrator of their freedom
- To preserve their dignity throughout the process
- To transform the community structures which enabled the abuse in the first place
They turned out not to be the most important things (
this is a handy resource about TJ if you want to know what the other things are). I also picked the press codex apart, which, for those of you who don't know, is a lengthy document on the ethics of journalism. I particularly noted the part about confidentiality and corroboration. I couldn't, wouldn't let the women who confided in me be exposed to unnecessary risk. These were the tools I had when I started the journey.
It wasn't long before I encountered obstacles for which my tools were woefully inadequate. They couldn't fight or mitigate my own trauma responses.
Often I couldn't believe what I was hearing. Franklin Veaux had been blogging for two decades on ethical polyamory. He was admired, and successful at relationships—at least to the outside world. But the women told me about the awful things he had done, and I heard their very real hurt. I recognised and resonated with their experiences. I felt that my high stress reaction of extreme cognitive dissonance would be experienced by many in the community. So I had to verify what they were saying, again and again, to see if I could see the patterns myself, compare it with what he'd said—both in order to understand how such a thing had happened in the public eye and, as a journalist, to make sure no one could dispute the women's accounts.
To my horror, I found not only that these women were telling the truth, but that LiveJournal had documented every single lie Franklin told, every abusive pattern, and every misogynous snide remark. It was all there. People had seen it happen. But it had still continued over a period of 20 years, harming multiple women.
I don't even know if I can convey the despair I felt at the time. As an abuse survivor with complex trauma, my depression had been triggered by Trump's ascension to the White House. The world was built to benefit abusive men. How could I live in it? And here it was again, this time in my close and intimate circle. Additionally, I had qualms. It seemed to me that I was flushing Franklin’s reputation down the toilet. And how was that compatible with transformative justice?
What if by making these accounts and the evidence I'd found public, I was destroying any chance Franklin had of preserving his dignity? Didn't it go against the entire concept of TJ? After seeking advice, this was how I eventually understood it:
Franklin's actions had done harm, and the consequences of his actions were Franklin’s responsibility. The women who named the harm weren’t responsible for whether his harm damaged his reputation, or his dignity. He did this to himself.
cont'd
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