There's no need to apologize.
I'm not sure what the last part you heard was. The next thing I would say is that legal workers often also lack forms of digital literacy that are crucial to cyberviolence cases. Regardless of which side they took on the verdict in my case, many observers commented on how the judge's decision revealed what was, on his part, a very limited grasp of how the Internet works, and Twitter in particular, which is where the harassment occurred.
Let me be clear that the judge in my case did work very hard to understand how Twitter works by asking many follow-up questions. He was very thorough. However, you don't learn what it's like to use Twitter by asking questions. You learn what it's like to use Twitter by using it.
While on the stand, I explained what it means to put a period in front of someone's username in a tweet. I explained the mechanics of blocking someone on Twitter and what it actually achieves, which is not very much. I explained what the sticky-outtie tongue emoticon means.
But how do you explain to someone who has never used Twitter what it's like to be someone who uses Twitter as your primary means of sharing your voice with the world? How do you explain to that person who never uses Twitter just how much it impacted your life to no longer be able to use it freely, and to feel fear every time you sign in that your harasser is going to be there to greet you? The answer is that you can't, but that person who doesn't use the Internet will have the power to determine the official public narrative of what happened to you on the Internet. That person will compare Twitter, a privately owned corporation, to a public square. That person will characterize your choice to have a public Twitter account as inviting the world into your living room, without acknowledging that you should be able to kick that person out of your living room if they are behaving in a way that scares you.
In other words, that person will essentially conclude that you asked for it, that this kind of treatment is to be expected and tolerated, and that the onus is on potential victims to do everything in their power to prevent others from preying on them.
The adversarial nature of the criminal legal system means that survivors are bombarded with scrutiny of their actions, a scrutiny which in many cases is not equally levied at the accused. In this case, the criminal legal system simply reproduces the victim-blaming and impossible standards of behaviour that our society already imposes on survivors of gender-based violence, and also reproduces the comparative leniency experienced by those who inflict it in broader society.
My fear was characterized by the judge as unreasonable because I at times lashed out angrily about the man who was harassing me. Judges are called upon to apply an objective standard to determine the reasonability of a victim's feelings. “Reasonable”—that's a funny, subjective word, isn't it? It's easy to see the many ways in which societal stereotypes about appropriate victim behaviour and who makes a good or a bad victim might inform these judgments.
The criminal legal system, frankly, fetishizes an objectivity that in many cases does not exist. The reality is that many crimes relating to interpersonal violence, including crimes that fall under the gender-based violence umbrella, such as cyberviolence, involve a significant degree of subjectivity. We're talking about feelings, about interpretations of other people's feelings, about intuition based on non-verbal communication. There is often not a smoking gun, and there's often no objective crow's nest that any participant can sit in to assess the situation.
Even my own judge openly stated in his ruling that his lens on the law is shaped by his lens on society, which is in turn shaped by his social location, in this case as a man. He quoted from another judge's ruling and said, “We may try to see things as objectively as we please. Nonetheless, we can never see them with any eyes except our own”, yet he still found me unreasonable to fear for my safety when I was, by his own admission, being harassed by an unhinged and vulgar man.
In my own case, I often wonder what might have happened if my harasser had been a young black man instead of a middle-aged, middle-class white man with a white-collar job. I wonder how the police might have responded had I not been a middle-class, well-educated white woman. A legal principle at the end of the day is only a principle. How it looks in action and not on paper tends to shift and change depending on the relative power of the parties involved.
I understand why the rights of the accused are theoretically paramount in a criminal case. The stakes are high. We're talking about incarceration. We're talking about a permanent record. These things are a big deal.
I can tell you right now that I didn't go to the police because I wanted my harasser thrown in jail. I didn't go to the police because I wanted his reputation destroyed. I just wanted him to leave me alone.
I had already done everything in my power to achieve that, but with no success. I wanted help. I wanted a third party to intervene and to support me in conveying to him the harm that he was causing to me. I'm a middle-class women, and the narrative I've been peddled since childhood for when I need to be protected and when I need safety was to call the police. Doing that just raised the stakes to a level that I didn't want. It raised the stakes to a level that discourages many men who use violence and intimidation from ever being willing to admit to the harm they caused, because if they admit to the harm that they caused, then they might be incarcerated. It also meant that I gave up my agency to speak openly about what happened to me. This is the first time I've done that. I handed my official narrative to a judge, the only person whose opinion apparently matters, and a man who was not there and did not understand many of the particulars of the case.
What if we had more options for intervention that don't seek consequences like incarceration, but that simply seek an end to, and an acknowledgement of, the harm? I can tell you that I would have called a service like that in a heartbeat. I've talked to many survivors who feel the same.
Restorative and transformative justice processes offer these types of approaches, but these programs are few and far between, they're underfunded, access is extremely limited, and outcomes from these types of proceedings are often not afforded the same societal legitimacy as outcomes from criminal proceedings.
Restorative and transformative practices offer models of justice that research shows are more in step with the type of support that most survivors are seeking when they contact police. These processes are rooted in the practices of indigenous communities and communities of colour. They offer safer alternatives for survivors who don't feel safe contacting police because of the violence, historically and currently, inflicted by police upon their communities, such as black and indigenous people, sex workers, undocumented people, and transgendered people.
Survivors of cyberviolence need support to heal, and those who inflict it need to be reminded of the survivor's humanity and the right to live in peace. I don't believe the criminal legal system is truly capable of either of these things. As a survivor of both cyberviolence and the violence of our criminal court system, I'd like to see state resources diverted away from law enforcement and criminal courts and toward holistic, trauma-informed, survivor-centred processes of healing and accountability.
Thank you.
