Love WITH Accountability: Digging Up the Roots of Child Sexual Abuse - Tapa blanda

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Aishah Shahidah Simmons is an award-winning Black feminist lesbian documentary filmmaker, activist, cultural worker, and international lecturer. A child sexual abuse and adult rape survivor, she is the producer/director of the film, NO! The Rape Documentary, and the creator of the #LoveWITHAccountability Project. Simmons is a Just Beginnings Collaborative Fellow, and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania where she is also affiliated with the Ortner Center on Violence and Abuse in Relationships.

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I believe the silence around child sexual abuse in the family plays a direct role in creating a culture of sexual violence in all other institutions—religious, academic, activist, political, and professional. We cannot and must not address rape, including campus rape, without also addressing child sexual abuse. For too many victim-survivors of adult rape, child sexual abuse is a precursor. Ending sexual violence starts with ending child sexual abuse, and ending child sexual abuse starts in the family, in religious institutions, schools, and other spaces in communities. For me, and for many survivors of child sexual abuse, the family is simultaneously a source of deep pain and love. I am committed to creating models of holding family members accountable without suppressing that love. And I am not alone.

Thirty-seven years after Pop-pop first molested me, I invited an intergenerational group of twenty-nine diasporic Black cisgender women and men, transgender men, and gender non-binary people to join me in an online #LoveWITHAccountability forum that I curated and edited. The forum was published for ten days, October 17–28, 2018, in the online publication The Feminist Wire. Each of the contributors to the online forum explored what love with accountability could look and feel like in the context of child sexual abuse.

This is sacred space

Violence does not happen in a vacuum. There are approximately 42 million child sexual abuse survivors in the U.S. and millions of bystanders who look the other way as the abuse happens and cover for the harm doers.

In her landmark text, The Cancer Journals, the late award-winning Black, feminist, lesbian, mother, warrior poet Audre Lorde wrote, “Without community there is no liberation only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression.”

I am interested in and committed to co-creating communal responses to intra-racial, gender-based violence outside of the criminal injustice system. I believe people who commit harm in our communities must be held accountable

Black feminist scholar and cultural critic Dr. bell hooks wrote, “For me, forgiveness and compassion are always linked: how do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed?”

I do not believe incarceration is the answer, in fact, I am opposed to imprisonment as it operates in the United States. Prisons are not focused on rehabilitation, but instead are a kind of modern-day enslavement as the incarcerated who are disproportionately Black, Indigenous, and Latinx, are raped and degraded. Too often family and community bystanders ignore child sexual abuse; the prison system does worse, facilitating its continuation. Equally as important, so many U.S. laws that are in place to protect victim/survivors of child sexual abuse and other forms of sexual and domestic violence end up severely punishing survivors and harming more than helping. The national coalition, Survived and Punished, has not only documented this frightening reality, but its members, “organize to de-criminalize efforts to survive domestic and sexual violence, support and free criminalized survivors, and abolish gender violence, policing, prisons, and deportations.”