My wise friend Rachel pointed me to Shannon Perez-Darby's "The Secret Joy of Accountability: Self-accountability as a Building Block for Change", published in this volume.
The deepest claim is that healthy relating (with ourselves, with others, as a society) happens when we are each taking responsibility for our choices. Doing so is difficult: narratives around "abuser" and "abused" are useful in surviving, but they also interfere with our taking that responsibility, as does the very morally mixed context of surviving in a system that aims to take our agency from us. It is tempting to remedy the lack of responsibility by imposing responsibility on others. Not only does doing so usually miss the step of working on ourselves first, it fails to recognize the true nature of abuse: not as an act performed by only one type of person on another type of person, but as a system or performance that we all engage as roles in. True responsibility cannot be imposed, only stepped into voluntarily, as a new role, by any given participant. The best work seems to be in supporting people in making that choice for themselves, although we still have much to learn.
These lines spoke most clearly to me on some of those points.
"It's easier to tell you what he did and harder to tell you what I did. It's harder to tell you about the times I lied to him. It's harder to tell you about the panic attacks or moments when I just couldn't fight anymore. I'm afraid that if I tell you the whole story, the extent of the devastation will, paradoxically, get lost. I'm afraid I'll tell the wrong story. I'm afraid that I can never explain just what it was like; that if I do a bad job of sharing my whole truth, then it'll be like I'm lying and all of this healing work will have been for nothing. I'm afraid my story isn't the story you want to hear. I'm afraid to say that my healing means taking responsibility for the fucked-up things I did because then I'm not the survivor everyone wants me to be."
"The story of my horrible ex served me in so many ways: it helped me rally support, it helped me feel sorry for myself, it helped me break up with him, and it helped me move him out of my life bit by bit. But what that story never did was help me heal. The old story kept me stuck, trapped in old patterns that weren't serving me anymore. I had to change the story I told. Gradually, I took some distance from dramatic stories of the horrible things he did to me and started looking at ways I could take responsibility for my actions."
"In my process of healing, the question I keep coming back to is this: What would it look like to take responsibility for the complex choices I made in a grounded, centered, and accountable way? What are the places I can talk about choices in a manner that contextualizes them within systems of violence? It's not enough to tell me that I had no choice. Time after time, survivors are told you had no choice; you did what you needed to survive. Survival is resiliency, and it is necessary. But survival is not without cost. We make choices within a system that's meant to turn a powerful person who can act and make choices on their own behalf into someone who becomes an object and is acted upon. People are always resisting objectification. They are fighting, pushing, screaming to be people who can act for themselves. Sometimes we fight and we scream and we push against the edges of the things that are holding us, and sometimes int he course of trying to be who we are in the world, we do things we never thought we would."
"If we can't grasp that survivors are people who make choices, then we incorrectly name some of the things they do as battering. [...] There is no one behavior that can tell us who is surviving and who is battering in a particular relationship. To decide whether a relationship is abusive or not, we must look at the entire picture created by all those moments of intention and choice."
"To engage in a process of holding people who batter accountable, we must understand who batterers are. Something we often don't understand about batterers is that they're people. Most often they're hurt people who have almost no support in taking responsibility for their actions; they are also people often determined to avoid taking responsibility for their actions by nearly any means. People who batter are scared. People who batter often believe down to their very core that they are the ones being harmed. Many batterers believe that the world is out to get them and that no one could ever understand. People who batter are also very persuasive when it comes to convincing others that these beliefs are true. Batterers are people skilled at messaging with others and exploiting vulnerabilities."
"There should never be anything we do that's too shameful to talk about. Shame is our enemy, a ghost that keeps us trapped in all the ways we hurt ourselves and others."
"What survivors need is support in their own self-determination and safety. What batterers need is support in accountability."
"While doing this work I often hear people ask questions about how they can hold someone else accountable. So often, people jump to an external definition of accountability that is about other people assuming responsibility for their actions rather than imagining accountability as an internal process where each of us examines our own behaviors and choices so that we can better reconcile those choices with our own values. I define (self) accountability as a process of taking responsibility for your choices and the consequences of those choices. I deeply believe that the skill of self-accountability is one of the fundamental principles we've often overlooked in developing community accountability models. In a process of self-accountability, this reconciliation isn't dependent on another person's involvement, but instead engages with our own sense of values and what is important to us. In the work of self-accountability, we are constantly striving to align our actions and our values, knowing it's likely they will never be exactly the same. When there's a gap in that alignment we can reflect on what choices we would need to make in the future so our actions are more in line with who we want to be.
While I don't think it's possible to hold others accountable, I do think we can create environments that support people in their efforts toward self-accountability."