Feminist justice and the need for collective processes
- It has been many months since the Feminist Working Group of the Social Forum began to reflect on justice. Therefore, in early 2019, we opened a process of reflection together with other feminists that took place in Durango within the framework of the 5th Feminist Justice Seminar of Euskal Herria. At the Feminist Conference we presented a paper.
Now, with the aim of spreading the Nik Sinisten 2017 initiative: to recognize the truth of women and the media created in 2019 to reflect on feminist justice, we have opened the website: justiziafeminista.eus. In it, in addition to our own initiatives, we will also collect other collective experiences that are a sign of a genealogy that exists in construction.
For this reason, we follow with great attention the processes, conflicts and reflections that arise in our society around this issue. We are convinced that the need to build Feminist Justice is opening up to us every time as a wound. Or every time we hear speeches and sentences of legitimacy in the face of multiple violence against women. Or that our lives -- pains, wounds, opinions -- are not worth as long as we are left to see. Or when it exalts and defends those who have exercised violence. Or every time we put in place protocols to combat male assaults in ever-widening areas and tackle contradictory, difficult and complex avenues. Well, when we are tempted to solve this structural social, cultural, political and economic problem with a punitive attitude.
The experience accumulated by the feminist movement shows that rather than supporting women who have suffered machista violence and have decided to denounce it formally, the justice system increases the risk and vulnerability of women. In addition, the current justice system places the penalty of “guilty” in the city centre, without giving priority to collective responsibility, protection of the “victim” and solidarity with it.
However, the objective of justice should be the recognition and reparation of the damage caused and the assurance that it will not happen again. In this respect, we must start a debate that questions the logic of punishment, including prison, which is its ultimate expression.
In fact, the truth can only be understood if we understand it within a process of acknowledging the fact and sharing socially, that is, if it is socially accepted what happened. Unfortunately, today, the institutional or judicial truth has full credibility. On the contrary, we are interested in reflecting on responsibility, not so much if it is a crime under the law, but on the pain caused by actions, not only at the individual level, but from a collective and co-responsible perspective.
For this reason, we want to understand Justice as a process and reclaim its collective dimension. We believe that justice is something that is built more than what is distributed, and therefore, a process that requires the participation of different subjects and the existence of different tools (materials, cultural…). If we place justice outside institutions, we can reflect on the spaces in which all people can participate. And this is an appeal to all of us: to those who want to hide dirty rags and to those who want to wash them at home, but also to those who believe that everything is fixed by throwing away, to those who want to wash their hands or to those who try to take revenge. We believe that holding hands is inevitable. Therefore, we take care to walk new and varied paths, understanding each other as complementary and not as opposed or substitutable. Leaving justice in the hands of the institutions that generate and distribute injustice would be a mistake, as would be the responsibility of all public institutions, replacing community works, or leaving the responsibility of the whole society behind women, or feminists.
These new paths are being addressed both by social agents and the feminist movement and by the tools they have created: protocols, courts of women’s rights, exercise of recognition and reparation, citizen initiatives to construct truth, networks of solidarity and support among injured women. In these lines, even though we know that all these tools are perfect or incomplete, we want to reclaim them, because we have to be brave in order to be able to invent new organizations of world life.
This article has also been signed by: Arantza Urkaregi, Mari Luz Esteban, Maite Barreña, Amaia Zufia, Nagore Larrazabal of the Feminist Working Group of the Social Forum.
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