Crimes Against the Community

In the criminal justice set of informal mores, the victims can be described as two separate yet vastly unequal kinds: the individual, who is actually a victim of a heinous act; and the community, which seeks to maintain cohesion over justice. These are their stories.

When I was in high school, I was friends with a group in the grade ahead of me. One of the guys in said group was a bit of a loose cannon—sweet and charming one minute, threatening and anti-social the next. My senior year, that group spread to the four winds, as the grade ahead of you is wont to do, but we would still keep in touch from time to time.

I heard through the grape vine that the loose cannon was going to prison. He had held his girlfriend hostage in a dorm room at knife point. His guilt was pretty overwhelming. As I recall, some kids in a neighboring dorm room heard what was happening and called the police, and he was still in the act when the police arrived. So a he said/she said, they said the police said situation.

It made me sick to think of being friends with someone who had done something so violent and awful, and I desperately wanted it not to be true. Around Christmas time, that clique was back in town and we were all hanging out when the topic of his crime came up. I was shocked to find that most of the clique did not believe his victim, even though the evidence seemed so open and shut. She was lying or exaggerating. She egged him on. Cops are pigs. I wanted, desperately, to hold on to one of these things as a sufficient excuse and for the gang to go back to the way it had been before, but I just couldn’t swallow any of it. It probably helped that I was a younger hanger-on and not a core group member, and I still had high school waiting for me if that community were to be destroyed.

I’ve seen the exact same dynamic play out in sexual assault cases both in my life and in the media. Committing sexual assault is a heinous crime with an individual victim, but a sexual assault accusation, that is the type of crime that can harm a community, and the community is going to fight back. It’s a well known dynamic that victims of sexual assault feel like they are the person on trial, and I think it is in part due to the social nature of this crime (also misogyny). The victim and the perpetrator share friends, schools, churches, workplaces, even families, and then each member of the community has to weigh the evidence, evaluate guilt, decide how serious the punishment should be… The community remains strongest by lancing the victim and continuing on as before.

Indeed, sexual abuse is often a sad feature of the tightest knit religious communities—from the ultra Orthodox to the Amish to Penn State football. Brush the victim aside for the greater good! The perpetrator is usually happy to shut up about the problem.

This is why I am also extremely skeptical of “community justice.” We’ve seen time and time again that communities will choose self preservation over justice if the two ever come in conflict, and they very often do.

On election day at work, I was part of another hangout that reminded my of my high school friends long ago. A group of coworkers were complaining about how mean people were to Trump supporters. There were lesbian aunts making them choose between Thanksgiving with them or with the conservative uncle, an ungrateful son who went off to college and didn’t want to go to his Trumpy grandparent’s house, and liberals all over social media who kept trying to make this election so personal at the expense of comity!

I think I mumbled something about how I’d rather not talk about it, sent a prayer to St Selzer, and went back to my desk. The levity of that conversation didn’t really hit me until the election results started to come in. These were not MAGA people, and they all probably find Trump fairly distasteful, but they wanted their calm communities, and it was the libs who threatened that desire.

Our current moment wasn’t really created by the evil people who have gained power. Not that such people aren’t responsible for their own repulsiveness, but they wouldn’t be able to get away with what they are doing if people would choose goodness over community. I am not sure how, but the key to preserving our future and avoiding the darkest timeline requires winning these people to our side. Somehow, we have to make it so the MAGA relatives don’t want to come to our Thanksgiving, and we reap the spoils when its time to kiss and make up.