From Taking to Giving Account: Narrative Frameworks of Accountability in Transformative Justice Responses to Gendered Violence

Abstract

How do community-based responses to gender-based violence (GBV) imagine and implement perpetrator responsibility outside the criminal legal system? Drawing on participatory research with the transformative justice movement, I articulate a model of accountability called giving account, a narrative, qualitative approach that contrasts with the retributive, quantitative logics of taking account. I compare how these two models define harm, attribute responsibility, and proscribe desistance for GBV. Giving account repurposes a method often relegated to ‘individual’ desistance theory – narrative – as a vehicle for integrating individual agency and structural forces. Insodoing, it brings a feminist and anti-racist lens to narrative criminology.

Keywords

transformative justice restorative justice narrative criminology gender-based violence desistance abolition

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