Community accountability is a process in which a

to address violence within our communities. Community accountability is a process in
which a community – a group of friends, a family, a church, a workplace, an apartment
complex, a neighborhood, etc – work together to do the following things:
-Create and affirm VALUES & PRACTICES that resist abuse and oppression and
encourage safety, support, and accountability
-Develop sustainable strategies to ADDRESS COMMUNITY MEMBERS’ ABUSIVE
BEHAVIOR, creating a process for them to account for their actions and transform their
behavior
-Commit to ongoing development of all members of the community, and the community
itself, to TRANSFORM THE POLITICAL CONDITIONS that reinforce oppression and
violence
-Provide SAFETY & SUPPORT to community members who are violently targeted that
RESPECTS THEIR SELF-DETERMINATION 36
Despite the noble efforts of activists to constantly improve upon their methodology and praxis, no
process is without defects, and the work is highly situational, and utterly dependent upon cooperation
by all parties, and this cooperation is not always easy to obtain on more than a superficial level. In
order for the restorative process to work, the perpetrator must be willing to engage in an honest
dialogue, accept accountability, and be willing to re-examine their behavior.
In an interview that I conducted with Augustine 37 regarding hir work as a part of an ad-hoc
group formed around a series of abuses between two partners in hir community of “boston/northeast
anarchists”, zie expressed significant doubts about the effectiveness of the process used by hir group.
The process that Augustine described to me was
at first a bunch of us just gathered at someone's house to talk to g and figure out what he
needed and remind him that yes, all that 38 was really fucked up and we're not cool with it
36 From the INCITE! Webpage, <; To read INCITE!’s actual community
accountability strategies (praxis), see appendix.
37 Name has been changed to protect the privacy of my interviewee upon hir request. Zie additionally requested that I use
gender-neutral pronouns when referring to her after our interview, as zie identifies as gender queer. Hopefully the shift
in pronouns isn’t too confusing.
The interview was conducted over e-mail on December 13, 2007. To read the transcript, please see the appendix.
38
By “all that,” Augustine means “my partner (g) at the time and i were in an open relationship and he was dating this
asshole (d), also an 'activist', who repeatedly sexually and emotionally abused him, to the point that he could barely
function. Their relationship was rife with power imbalances and generally fucked up shit, especially in regards to sexism
and transphobia. at one point the 3 of us and most of our friends were attending a now-defunct queer group, and d's
presence there really disturbed g. eventually g talked to some other people about what happened, and we banded together to
talk to d about how we felt about his actions and attempt to reach some compromise based on what g needed and for our
general dislike of sexual assault happening in our community.”

social context of inequality.”