I had confronted my then boyfriend with his abusive behaviour during and after our relationship. I asked him to send me a letter in which he would admit what he did and apologise for it. I wanted him to realise what he had done and I hoped that this was a way for him to change and for me to forgive. It took him 2 years to do this and when I received his letter in 2014 I realised that he had written it solely out of the fear of facing consequences and that it was no expression of taking either me or his behaviour seriously.
The open letter of a victim/survivor of sexualised violence to the left scene of Berlin then gave me a new perspective on how I could deal with this not on my own, but collectively. It was crucial that one comrade and friend offered his support to me without me having to ask, which I probably would have never done.
In December 2014 a support group was set up in Berlin with two comrades of the victim’s political organisation (iL) and two of their flatmates. The aim of this support group was to discuss strategies and take collective responsibility for our actions, such as the publishing of the letter and all of the emails we sent, including those to the perpetrator. By doing this, we attempted to take responsibility from the shoulders of the victim into a collective process.
We started pretty fast, building on the work already done by the victim and one supporter. In our first meeting, we discussed issues of confidentiality, language we wanted to use, aims and mode of our collaboration. Thus, we had not just established the group, but already sketched an agenda. Afterwards, the group members met without the victim in order to talk about expectations, commitment and availability before we started to work. At least one bilateral meeting was held to sort out conflicting perspectives between support group members.
In a next step, the victim shared their experiences concerning the rape incidents, their relationship with the perpetrator, their social and political context and their efforts of holding the perpetrator accountable. Soon after that we informed two allies from Birmingham and discussed our agenda with them. From now on, the support group, including the victim, met once or twice a month, if needed, more often.
It is usually recommended to split the tasks of the support and the group doing perpetrator work. However, since we were in a different city and none of the people knew the perpetrator, we felt to have enough distance to him to do both. We further wanted to make sure the process did not focus on the perpetrator to not divert attention away from organising a community accountability process in Birmingham.
We kept meeting until a perpetrator contact group was established in Birmingham at the beginning of 2016.
In the support group we decided to inform the people closest to the perpetrator, including his partner, at an early stage in the process and assured them that no more people would be informed until a certain date. This was because we wanted to give them time without public pressure to process the information and find emotional/material support if needed. However, this selection of people, the openness about the next steps of the accountability process and the geographical distance between us supported the creation of a group trying to prevent more people from being told.
While this need not be the case, in retrospect, it could have been anticipated that those people closest to the perpetrator would have the biggest fears about the negative impact a publication of the letter would have on their personal lives and political credibility. Instead of empathising with the victim, they started to portray themselves as victims of this process and shifted the blame from the perpetrator to the victim for disrupting their lives. The accusations and doubts formulated by these people to delegitimise the process were extremely harmful and if we were to do this again, we would pay more attention to inform people first who we think will be supportive.
Because so many concerns had been raised about a possible “witch hunt” (sadly, yes), we, the support group in Berlin, decided to keep the open letter off the internet and only distribute it in printed form. This was extremely time consuming and it was clear that we needed people in Birmingham to do this. Unfortunately, only two out of the nine people who had been given the open letter, were willing to shoulder this task. More people joined at this point, but still the work rested on very few people, which is another reason why it would have been important to include more supportive people earlier on in the process.
Open Meetings and Community Group
With the distribution of the open letter people were invited to an initial open meeting in Birmingham. Everyone was allowed to come and there was no specific agenda; factual questions were answered, issues raised that people found relevant to discuss and next steps were agreed on. Since both the victim and the perpetrator had moved to different cities, the work supporting the victim from Birmingham was limited to what could be called a theoretical role because the need to provide immediate emotional support for the victim was not necessary. Our contribution as ‘community process group’ in Birmingham to their welfare was instead bound up in creating an environment in which they could be satisfied that their story was believed and that the incidences were taken seriously by the community. In order to create this environment, we decided to meet regularly to discuss the history of our student group and how its structures had facilitated sexual violence. And with the continuing relationship to the affected person, many felt like achieving this trust was something worth celebrating.
In efforts to limit the formation of informal hierarchies, the meetings were organised in the following way: A coordination group was set up only to coordinate the email and ensure the bi-monthly meetings were well advertised, agendas were sent out at least 4 days in advance, allowing for any amendments and additions to the existing agenda, and minutes were sent to all on the email list, as well as the victim and their support group straight after the meeting. This group consisted of 5 volunteers and was meant to rotate every six months. An agenda group was formed after each meeting and had the task of meeting up to set agendas and questions for discussions at the next meeting. This rotating agenda group allowed members to autonomously decide what they wanted to discuss. Each meeting also had a wellbeing go-around at the beginning and end of each meeting. It was decided to incorporate discussions around the mental health of the members into the meeting rather than have separate well-being meetings as many saw the separation arbitrary and there were fears that separate wellbeing meetings would not carry as much importance/value to members and reproduce a division of labour in this process.
After initial discussions, we decided to draw up a list of questions which we aimed to tease out factors that contributed to the incidents. These meetings went on over the course of around three years with some spells of inactivity and stagnation and were attended by approximately 10-15 people. People often were confused about or disagreed on what we should be doing going forward, how far we should be focusing on perpetrator work and how far the contact group should be feeding back to us, for example. However, many stated that these discussions had made them think about their own behaviour as well as providing a space to share experiences of rape and abuse.
In December 2015, out of the Birmingham community process group we constituted a perpetrator contact group. The victim and their support group were handing over this task and had written a document about the aims, principles and tasks they saw for this group.* Five people living in different cities joined this group and have worked in changing composition since then to hold the perpetrator accountable according to the demands formulated in the open letter. At this point, five years later, he hasn‘t done any of these demands.
// update 2023:
By now the perpetrator has applied to different perpetrator programs in the UK. In 2020 he applied to Everyman (https://justiceinnovation.org/project/everyman-project) and to DVIP (https://dvip.org/). The application was confirmed via mail by the people reading this website’s e-mail. Apart from that the perpetrator did the STOPSO programm (https://stopso.org.uk/) from June to December 2022. He has written occasional e-mails to this website’s adress since 2020 and continues giving updates about his steps. However, we can not judge his progress or reflections. We acknowledge that through staying accountable through e-mail the situation is different than in the (many) years before, though.
// end of update
Chronology from 2015: First, we asked him to seek critical help to recall and understand what he has done in order to change. However, he refused to do perpetrator work and never provided us with reflections on his behaviour. In the conversations we had he implied that his circumstances were to blame for his behaviour instead of taking responsibility for it himself. He never wanted to talk to anyone who took on the victim‘s perspective but only to people who he thought would empathise with his perspective. Second, we wanted him to inform any new political environment and sexual partners with the open letter about his abusive behaviour in order to prevent future abuse. We don’t know if this has taken place at all, since he never informed us about this. However, we know that he continued to do organizing without informing the people he worked with. We tried to work with him on that, but communication was very poor and we felt he was playing for time. Third, we wanted him to stay accountable but often he didn‘t reply to emails for extended periods of time for over a year or attend scheduled meetings.
Concluding, we thus have to state that he has failed to do any of the three demands and with that has been supported by a network of people legitimising this behaviour. The contact group traveled to London to inform and meet comrades and friends of his and to include them in the process. We still believe that he needs to do these demands and that his surroundings have a responsibility to hold him accountable. However, as part of the work in the perpetrator group it was important to realise that one could not force someone to change, particularly if they have no motivation themselves and when they are well supported by people and structures that operate on a basis of rape apologism. Ultimately, while we still believe in transformative justice as a possible alternative to state repression, we have to acknowledge that our powers are limited. We as a contact group can only put demands to the perpetrator, offer the victim‘s perspective and act on it ourselves, the group could not force the perpetrator to do anything and should not take responsibility for his actions.
Here you read the full conclusion of the perpetrator contact group.
*The following document had been written by the support group to the newly formed perpetrator contact group in 2016. It describes the support group’s perspective on the aims and principles of the contact group at the time. Many more emails have been exchanged since then but we felt it might be a useful document for future discussions.
After a couple of open meetings in Birmingham, some people decided that they wanted to progress by meeting among those who agreed with the principle aims of the letter. Two groups were formed; a reading group and a writing group. The reading group was set up as many felt out of their depth, creating a space for mutual learning and consciousness raising. Another attempt for consciousness raising concentrated on examining masculinity from a critical perspective and was far less successful. Following a relatively well-attended public event concentrating on the role of the military in constructing damaging forms of masculinity there was an attempt to begin a reading group which would focus on critically examining masculinity more generally. However, these meetings were very poorly attended and stopped after a few attempts. Some of the reasons for this are discussed in the section ‘Reflections – Limiting Factors’.
Furthermore, we made the decision to begin thinking about functioning in an open facing way so that the left could benefit from what we believe are some of the useful conversations we have been having to help ourselves deal with what happened in our circles. We therefore also constituted a writing group to work on a publication of our experiences and reflections, the outcome of which is this website. Publishing this website has taken a lot longer than we had planned and the process was stuck somewhere between very high expectations towards ourselves and having other commitments as well. Further, many of us agreed that accountability couldn’t simply end at a certain defined point but were unsure how we, as a group with limited capacity who were increasingly spreading out over the country, could continue to meaningfully engage in it. This is why we agreed to find a collective closing point for at least a chapter in this accountability process by publishing this website. Those who were part of this process, but stopped for different reasons, were invited to write personal statements.
Closing and evaluating the accountability process that took place in Birmingham doesn‘t mean we stop talking or thinking about it. But it means we stop working in the groups that have formed. Some of us may continue this work in other contexts, such as Plan C or the interventionist Left and other extra-parliamentary left wing groups, campaigns, smaller base unions and other forms of organising. But most of all we hope that others will feel encouraged by our experiences to debate and practice what we see as an essential anti-sexist agenda of left-wing politics. It may be hard to imagine a world without sexualised violence but in a world where victims would know that they would be listened to, believed and supported once they decide to speak about what happened to them, the perpetrators would lose a lot of their powers that partially made the violence possible in the first place.