YES. THIS THING. It is so hard to make words about and so important.
I grew up in the Mennonite church and they're ALL ABOUT rehabilitative justice. The problem I see most often is the thing where the language and structure of rehabilitative justice is used to tell victims that they have to forgive the people who hurt them _and accept those people back into their lives/churches_, because we have to accept the perpetrator back into the community and not hold grudges and be kind, because we are all children of God and we are all sinners and........yeah.
Some of it is "abusers will use whatever system they have to hand to manipulate people," some of it is good old-fashioned victim blaming, some of it is people not understanding power dynamics. In some cases I know about (e.g. sexual abuse of students by a professor, or church members by a pastor), people want to deny that hierarchies of authority exist, because they don't really think they _should_ exist. (Because the priesthood of all believers, assorted church doctrines I won't go into). So they ignore those power dynamics. But they're still _there_, people just don't acknowledge them, so they just sit there leaching poison into everything.
And look: I think rehabilitative justice CAN be really...well, transformational is the buzzword, but _good_ anyway...when done well. But it's also not something that's going to work for every victim or every perpetrator. And so I think it has to be the victim's choice to pursue that path, because even if the process is done well, it asks a lot of everyone involved. And not everyone is willing to go through that--and that's okay, and that HAS TO be okay, and a respected choice. Otherwise it's only rehabilitative for the perpetrator (maybe, like you say), while for the victim it's re-traumatizing.
Anyway. I don't know how much sense that makes, but tl;dr I also think a lot about these things and I'm glad you wrote this down.
(I'm using "victim" and "perpetrator" because that's the language I learned this stuff in, and I need some words. Not to imply that these are the only correct ones you could use)
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I grew up in the Mennonite church and they're ALL ABOUT rehabilitative justice. The problem I see most often is the thing where the language and structure of rehabilitative justice is used to tell victims that they have to forgive the people who hurt them _and accept those people back into their lives/churches_, because we have to accept the perpetrator back into the community and not hold grudges and be kind, because we are all children of God and we are all sinners and........yeah.
Some of it is "abusers will use whatever system they have to hand to manipulate people," some of it is good old-fashioned victim blaming, some of it is people not understanding power dynamics. In some cases I know about (e.g. sexual abuse of students by a professor, or church members by a pastor), people want to deny that hierarchies of authority exist, because they don't really think they _should_ exist. (Because the priesthood of all believers, assorted church doctrines I won't go into). So they ignore those power dynamics. But they're still _there_, people just don't acknowledge them, so they just sit there leaching poison into everything.
And look: I think rehabilitative justice CAN be really...well, transformational is the buzzword, but _good_ anyway...when done well. But it's also not something that's going to work for every victim or every perpetrator. And so I think it has to be the victim's choice to pursue that path, because even if the process is done well, it asks a lot of everyone involved. And not everyone is willing to go through that--and that's okay, and that HAS TO be okay, and a respected choice. Otherwise it's only rehabilitative for the perpetrator (maybe, like you say), while for the victim it's re-traumatizing.
Anyway. I don't know how much sense that makes, but tl;dr I also think a lot about these things and I'm glad you wrote this down.
(I'm using "victim" and "perpetrator" because that's the language I learned this stuff in, and I need some words. Not to imply that these are the only correct ones you could use)