Briarpatch just published this article we wrote. We’re posting the plain text version here. For the version with beautiful graphics, go here.
Over the last decade, our small collective in Ottawa has regularly heard from people who have been raped, stalked, abused, or otherwise profoundly harmed by other activists in our city. Given the amount of interpersonal violence that suffuses our world right now, we haven’t been hugely surprised to hear these stories. Still, it breaks our hearts to know that we continue to harm one another in these ways, even in groups aiming to build a better world.
We’ve seen a wide spectrum of responses among activists to people disclosing harms. These responses have included formal processes rooted in transformative justice principles, informal sharing of accounts of harm, and experienced activists saying they don’t believe anything bad happened at all.
When people have told our collective details about harm they’ve experienced, they’ve sometimes asked us to just hold the knowledge of what was done to them without telling anyone else, or to tell them if their abuser registers for an event that we’re hosting. Sometimes we’ve been asked to not promote the work their rapist continues to do.
We have no critique of anyone’s response to being harmed, and we firmly believe that building better responses is absolutely necessary. Tremendous work has been done, and continues to be done, on transformative justice models and in thinking about what non-carceral community accountability can look like. Inspired by that work, one of the first things we did after forming our collective in 2014 was to establish our own conflict and accountability policy and process.
But we’re increasingly convinced that it’s valuable – indeed, essential – to focus also on how we can decrease harm in activist spaces. Every time someone comes to us to tell us about abuse in our city, we ask ourselves what we could have done to avert it. In general, we think it’s better to prevent harm than to have even the most amazing mechanisms for addressing it after it occurs.
From Response to Prevention
Rape and sexual predation are some of the most extreme forms of social harm we have encountered, but they are not the only ones. A range of forms of harm and boundary violation can be found in activist spaces. For instance, when activists trash-talk someone else in a scene or convince others to ostracize them without good reasons, when someone is angry and lashes out destructively at others, or when someone is made to feel like they are the only person who can keep a project going and they overwork themself and burn out – we can see all of these as examples of harm and boundaries violations.
There are important differences between harm, boundary violations, and conflicts. Discerning these differences, we’ve come to realize, isn’t always easy. For help navigating this, we look to Creative Interventions, an Oakland-based organization working on community-based responses to interpersonal violence. They define harm as “[s]ome form of injury to a person, group, or community. This injury can be of many types: physical, financial, emotional, sexual, spiritual, environmental and so on.”
For us, preventing harm isn’t just about having explicit procedures for responding to it. It’s also about the kinds of collective practices and structures through which we organize and interact, some of which may not seem to be explicitly about harm. We’ve come to believe that this kind of social infrastructure is an essential element of proactively preventing rape and other forms of harm inside activist scenes.
We’ve also come to think that changing our infrastructural practices can help prevent burning people out, defuse tiring conflicts before they start, and build resilient organizations that can grow and change. We think there’s a lot of potential for activists and progressive organizations to build on our strengths here.
Infrastructure
Infrastructure is the taken-for-granted background to our activities, the rails on which the train of liberation – or oppression – runs. We can think of infrastructure as both built and social. In our physical world, built infrastructure encodes standards and guidelines that manifest some of our social commitments: the gauge of wire electricians use must conform to certain criteria aimed at reducing the risk of fire; the pipes that carry water should ideally not leach lead.
Social infrastructure also shapes our world, in everything from identity documents to contract law. Many infrastructural things fade into the background of our experiences and therefore can be difficult to address or transform.
Infrastructure is crucial for social movements, and many have intentionally transformed the taken-for-granted social and material practices they inherit to generate new forms of living and being together. This shows up everywhere, from how we convene a meeting to how we feed people and clean up after events. If we can change our infrastructure in these ways – and we can – then changing infrastructure to prevent harm is well within our capacities as activists. Building different social infrastructure can shift the preconditions for how we relate with one another – which in turn can help to prevent us from harming one another.
A key assumption here, for us, is that without deliberate intention, we will tend to reproduce existing power relations in our activist groups. These power relations play a key role in enabling harm within our communities. Middle-class and rich people are often very comfortable making decisions for others; people with university or professional credentials might tend to have an easy time speaking in public; men can feel very sure of themselves; and so on.
Simply deciding to do better won’t disrupt oppressive social hierarchies, and critiquing people when they talk too much or take on only the public-facing roles doesn’t really work, either. What we need are the right kinds of infrastructure that create a different set of practices to structurally disrupt the habits of social hierarchies and build meaningful relationships of trust and accountability.
Here are some ideas about how transforming or building new infrastructure can help to address the conditions that enable harm within our communities. Some of these are structural considerations, some are meeting tools, and some are about building intentionality in group design.
1. Build people’s capacities
Over the past 50 years, people’s capacities for collective work have been systematically deskilled. Our capabilities for working, planning, and making decisions together in groups have been displaced by vertical relations that centralize decision-making and foster the specialization of skills. While this deskilling closely maps social relations of oppression and advantage, it has affected everyone. This deskilling has reduced our collective capacity to readily take on tasks key to building sustainable infrastructure, leading to situations where particular individuals usually have responsibility for specific tasks. Often in groups there might be one person who always takes on facilitating, another who does the tech work, or other specific people who hold emotional labour, and so on.
The specialization of labour can be a good thing – not everyone needs to do everything. But when we don’t have training and support to get better together at all of the skills involved in activist work, our movements suffer. People burn out, or they don’t get a chance to try things out that are intimidating but that may help them discover new abilities. And a simple reversal is not transformation – we don’t just want already-confident people to never participate in meetings. We want everyone to have the confidence to speak, participate, and initiate.
To achieve this, we need to build more consistent, skills-based training. This could include training on public speaking, writing press releases, caring for kids, strategic planning, conflict resolution, logistical coordination, event planning, and non-hierarchical decision making, among other skills.
All of us benefit from building our capacities, whether this is figuring out how to work with others or deepening skills that matter to us. When we sincerely commit to expanding the skills and capacities of all of us, we reduce the likelihood that our organizations and relationships will reproduce existing harmful power dynamics.
2. Build a foundation of trust and accountability
Too frequently we’re involved in isolated, ad hoc, or crisis-oriented activist spaces – spaces that often don’t offer the opportunity to build meaningful relationships or trust in one another. This can mean that people expect others to launch into high-risk actions, weather prolonged conflicts, or forgive bad behaviour simply because they have a shared political commitment to an issue. Creating spaces and formations that are intentional about relationship-building helps to prevent harm by fostering trust and accountability among everyone involved.
We can learn from successful movements how to build political relationships for the long haul and across issues. Not everyone has to be friends, but we do need to feel like we can count on one another, or at least we need to feel like we can count on some people. A big part of this is just investing time. When individuals show up and do what they say they’re going to do, we come to trust that they’ll keep doing that – or if they drop the ball that there’s a good reason.
Organizationally, this means investing time in doing things together, focusing not just on the political work but also on the human practice of being together. It means relating with people as full participants in struggle rather than as pawns to carry out activities determined by others. It might also mean doing some of this work across organizations, in order to build relationships of trust between and among groups.
In many activist spaces these days, there is a perception that the way to keep one another safe is to avoid disclosing our identities to one another. As a result, we have big Signal or Telegram group threads, often with ever-changing nicknames, and actions announced at the very last minute. When we talk about building an infrastructure of trust and accountability, we’re suggesting that knowing one another is a better practice for collective safety.
Activists of the past built trust through formations such as affinity groups and collectives. Today we often see people finding connection through crafting together, bike clubs, book groups, or neighbourhood food-sharing. There is no set form through which activists come to know one another. But as the Toronto-based Mining Injustice Solidarity Network points out in their reflection on having their group infiltrated by state agents, building trust is one of our best forms of security.
3. Build correction mechanisms when things are small
Many of us have a deep aversion to conflict and fear criticism or messing up, so problems can build for a long time until they become really serious. The modes of criticism we have available to us can also be pretty destructive and biting. All too often people use criticism of others as a self-protective mechanism, as if identifying something someone else is doing wrong means they, themselves, won’t be criticized. Meanwhile, our conflict-resolution skills aren’t well-developed. Many of us carry substantial trauma, and the available models of giving and receiving feedback can often feel punitive.
We should try to make it possible, before smaller issues can accrete into something more serious, to raise problems or concerns within groups. We can intentionally develop ways for people to cultivate modes of giving and receiving feedback with more kindness.
We want to explore moving away from models that rely on one person as solely responsible for mediating conflict, and build structures that allow for, and even invite, more direct feedback.
When conflict comes up inside activist groups, people often call for someone “in charge” to investigate what happened and punish the wrongdoer. What would it look like to move beyond the tools employed by the legal system and human resources departments and build our own expectations of how we would like one another to behave? Answers to these questions will be specific and unique to each group or project, but it can often be very helpful to have an explicit conversation about how to handle conflicts or misunderstandings before they arise.
4. Recognize and respect our limits
Because things are quickly descending into fascism and ecological collapse, the work of organizing toward social, environmental, and economic justice is incredibly urgent. This means that people and organizations often overcommit, taking on more than they can realistically do. This can lead to violating our own boundaries, pushing heroically to accomplish things in the short term, even if we do ourselves or others sustained damage in the process.
Chronic over-extension leads us and our organizations to be depleted, burnt out, and unable to adequately follow through on our commitments to one another. This creates situations in which harm is more likely to occur. We think about this tendency toward personal overcommitment as just another facet in the relations of domination that need to be transformed: even if we’re not oppressing someone else, being in a relationship of domination over ourselves isn’t good.
If we want to stay in struggle for the long term and build resilient and caring collective spaces, we need to resist taking on more than we can do. This requires knowing our capacities, which is difficult; becoming stronger and softer; slowing down when we need to; and setting different group norms. Instead of valorizing martyrdom and heroic exhaustion, we can lift up ideals of steadiness and care. We see more people resting before getting burnt out and prioritizing moving at a sustainable pace.
We can deliberately take up a habit of asking for help when we are unable to follow through on our commitments. This requires a shift in organizational culture and collective expectations, so that the individual work of holding boundaries does not simply dump more tasks and responsibilities onto others. We want to stress that this is important not only because we don’t want a culture that encourages burnout, but also because overcommitting and then not following through actually makes it harder to get sustained work done.
In practice, doing things like a task review at the end of meetings can enable collectively noticing when people are taking on too many tasks and redistributing them. We can refocus organizing conversations from what work would be “good” or “important” to the question of “who has time and inspiration to actually do this work?” This helps to avoid a dynamic in which the group has committed to do something but no one in the group actually has taken responsibility for doing it!
5. Be deliberate about membership
When conflict arises in activist scenes, people often call for “community accountability.” But community accountability is most effective when there’s an actual “community” that can be aware of, respond to, hold its members accountable for harm and – crucially – hold themselves accountable for how they respond to harm in their community. And while “community” is a difficult thing to define, we can be clear and transparent about what it means to be part of a group. Many activist groups have a very fuzzy definition of membership, at best. Most don’t have any definition of membership at all.
This fuzziness can make organizing difficult for all kinds of practical reasons. It can be tough to ensure follow through when no one really knows who will show up from meeting to meeting. In addition, membership fuzziness leaves our organizing efforts open to disruption, whether intentional or unintentional. It also makes it difficult for activists to build relationships of trust and understanding with one another, or a shared understanding of how they are accountable to each other, to other groups, and to the wider community. Not having clear membership can make it difficult, as well, to hold an organization accountable for harm caused by individuals associated with that organization.
Organizations should be intentional about how they approach the question of membership. For example, if the decision-making process is consensus-based, does anyone who happens to show up to a given meeting have the power to block a decision? If not, how do you decide who has standing to set group priorities?
We think it can be quite valuable for organizations to have a clearly defined membership as a way of creating accountability, both within the organization and between the organization and the wider community. Of course, what membership might look like from group to group will no doubt vary widely, based on specific politics and goals. But not thinking through the membership question undermines efforts to prevent harm from occurring, or responding effectively once it does.
Making Movements Less Hospitable to Harm
None of these ideas will transform our communities overnight, nor are they the only ideas that might have positive impacts in activist spaces. We’ve offered these suggestions as just one part of the ongoing conversation about movement building at this moment. But we do believe that building and strengthening infrastructural practices can aid us in both reducing the possibility of harm occurring in our groups and in responding to harm once it occurs.
Using these sorts of practices to shift organizational cultures and establish new habits, we can begin to build groups that are more capable, communicative, deliberate, and durable. We can lay the groundwork for organizations – and, we hope, movements – that are less hospitable to harm and more generative of trust and accountability. In doing so, we will expand our collective abilities to both undermine oppressive social hierarchies and build a better world, together.
1. Event Description and Details
This year Punch Up Collective hosted our seventh contribution to recognizing May Day in Ottawa: a kid-centred picnic and short march. We wanted to share something about why this was so fun and to reflect a little on including kids and families in these kinds of celebrations, and the difference between including them and focusing events on kids and families.
mal collective might look at this litany and decide that there just isn’t the need in the local radical left to have formal kid care available at our events generally and May Day in particular. 2020’s May Day was the first one under the shadow of the pandemic, and we instead doubled down on trying to do something with kids in mind: we paid a local artist friend to make 
music to tell him maybe not to come. Luckily, he was biking over with his guitar, and so he missed our call, and thus was there when, bit by bit, a whole bunch of adults and kids showed up. Some people knew one another, many others didn’t know anyone. The kids got right down to work making drums out of buckets, shakers out of paper plates taped together with beans and grains inside, and decorating other noisemakers. Others drifted over to draw flowers, hearts, and other more mysterious things on our “Everything for Everyone” banner. People had snacks, and listened to a reading of 
Although we’d invited people who aren’t parents or caregivers, mostly the people who came were pretty directly connected to the kids there in one way or another. Even though we reached out to parents we know, we didn’t connect with organizers in town like the folks working with Child Care Now, who are campaigning for universal publicly-funded childcare, nor did we reach out to our anarchist librarian friends who host kid-centred events in public spaces in Ottawa to see if they had ideas for activities leading up to the parade that might have brought in people we didn’t already know. In general, we were not thinking sufficiently strategically about the context in which we wanted to participate.
