Philly Stands Up: Inside the Politics and Poetics of Transformative Justice and Community Accountability in Sexual Assault Situations

内容摘要

PHILLY'S PISSED AND PHILLY STANDS UP EMERGED IN RESPONSE TO A SERIES OF SEXUAL assaults that consumed the anarcho-punk community during a summertime festival in Philadelphia in 2004. Both arose as expressions of a community grounded in do-it-yourself anarchist politics, accustomed to political organizing in times of need, particularly times of crisis. Though our community differs from those earlier days, Philly Stands Up has gleaned informative lessons from nearly one decade of on-the-ground work responding to sexual assault situations and directly engaging people who have caused harm. Our organization resists dichotomous approaches to this work, balancing national organizing with local education and community-based antiviolence work. This article is an account of our journey, organizational transformations, lessons learned, and the politics developed through this vital organizing. (1) Roots and Radicals Philly's Pissed (Pissed) and Philly Stands Up (PSU) started as volunteer collectives consisting almost entirely of white, cis-gendered, (2) mostly heterosexual but also queer, punk-affiliated anarchists in their early 20s to late 30s. When a series of high-profile sexual assaults devastated the punk community of West Philly in the summer of 2004, some community members decided that they had had enough. West Philly punks who were survivors and bystanders to sexual assault that summer and throughout their lives were pissed, and they got organized. Philly's Pissed set out to be a group by women for women. When they first organized, the collective viewed women as a category of people who are primarily targeted by sexual assault. Therefore, women--as the survivors of this violence--were best equipped to provide emotional, psychological, legal, and general support. As in many communities in the United States, the women who established Pissed had had a lifetime of informal experience in supporting friends or family through the trauma of sexual assault. Enough was enough, in their eyes, and they decided to get organized around this work. Shortly after Philly's Pissed was established, men in the West Philly anarcho-punk community responded. They recognized that they had a role to play and organized a complementary collective that would work with men who had perpetrated sexual assault. A vibrant queer community existed in West Philly in 2004, some of whom were involved in these groups, but months passed before a critique challenged this traditional gender bifurcation. The shift came from PSU as questions of internal accountability brought about a radicalizing opportunity. In October 2004, a large crowd had gathered for the monthly PSU meeting. Earlier that week, a member of Pissed had pulled aside one of the few original members of PSU to say that it was necessary to raise a tough issue at the forthcoming meeting. Without betraying the anonymity of the survivor with whom Pissed was working, this senior collective member called out another person in PSU (Charlie) for sexual assault. Charlie was highly regarded within the punk scene and was widely admired by local anarchists. He vehemently denied any culpability, insisting that he could not possibly have been involved in a situation. Nor was there any gray area of misunderstanding related to sexual assault, sexualized violence, or a crossing of personal, physical boundaries. The room unquestioningly agreed with Charlie. He was a stand-up guy. Any further pursuit of this situation would be a waste of time. Among the nearly 30 members attending the meeting, only two men thought otherwise. No one was aware of a back-story, but in their minds that did not matter. If someone was being called out for sexual assault, was it not PSU's raison d'etre to pursue the situation and hold that person accountable? Despite changes, overlooking situations of sexual assault remained the norm in most anarchist/punk communities. Those gendered dynamics reproduced previous iterations of men's groups in which men rallied around one another, at times falling over themselves to demonstrate allegiance to men of stature. …