This is not a comprehensive text rather a living document that should be read as a stream of conscious consolidation of thoughts.
It will ebb and flow with the tide.
KYLR or “Kill Your Local Rapist”. It’s a decades old adage along the lines of “ACAB” and “Eat The Rich”, a refrain which comes loaded with context and like other handy acronyms, often sees people strip it of nuance or otherwise treat the nuance and deeper substance, like they are in opposition, resulting in a positional dipole of self perpetuating animosity that serves no one.
Personally I think such slogans are the essentially compact manifestos, we share four letters, but convey volumes.
Not everyone is aware of KYLR, even within the militant Anarcho-Feminist scene which bore it. It shouldn’t be presumed that everyone knows every slogan or euphemism even if it seems universal within your peer group, nor should someones intellect or knowledge on the topic be undermined based on not knowing your favourite acronym.
Reactions to KYLR vary. Our movements being somewhat torn between militant pragmatism and the tender residue of humanism and the Sixties, not everyone is comfortable with it as a mechanism of justice. For many it seems quite severe as a presumed absolute position and there are those whose reactionary nature leads to them cherry sift random statements and daisy chain logic to fantasise about men being summarily executed for “the rape” of catcalling, or waxing lyrical about the “genocide of men” or various similar themes used to undermine feminism. There is also a tendancy to overly highlight the “kill” bit with something of the Helen Lovejoy-esque “oh my word” dramatic refrain, and subsequently people who try to downplay this element, “KYLR isn’t about actually killing people, it’s talking about a broader posi…….”
For me, Joan Little, Gary Plauché, Maria del Carmen Garcia… these people did nothing wrong. Fuck the appeasing liberal hand wringing, “KYLR is not a policy position”, and the circumlocutive disengagement masking an honest response behind a smoke screen of vapid platitudes and soft laments. I argue across the board that we should “avoid absolutes”, and tho I acknowledge the leadership of more compassionately minded comrades, I still feel that our responses should be swift, severe, and acted upon to ensure with all immediacy that this person never does any such thing again.
KYLR is in fact a verb. What it isn’t is a chance for someone -with the residue of machismo drivers- to assert dominance, play the hero, and ignore everything else hoping to establish supremacy over another individual who has conveniently become ontologically evil in their perception, providing them with an opportunity to ensure perceptive self-value as protector.
The primary concern of course, before all, is the survivors will and welfare; what do they want, what safeguarding is required. This invites a key complexity. A survivor may not desire such severe punitive response. This can’t be presumed, and where it is against the survivors wish, say on behalf of “they’re a threat to the community” well, it’s difficult ground. Whether an active threat to the community should be ended irrespective or even despite a survivor’s will, especially where inaction may lead to further harm, is a matter of intense philosophical discussion amongst people who specialise in the field. I have no easy solution, and even if I did it would be of minimal importance to the thoughts of others so I’m not going to engage further there.
Having said this, were not talking about a policy, “Kill Your Local Rapist” is not a mandate from above. It’s a social understanding, it’s a deeper communication, a manifesto that reflects something every anarchist knows, that “we keep us safe”. The protection of our communities is a responsibility of all those of capacity and conscience.
If you genuinely think someone has done these things. Waste them.
I have taken such action and I will no doubt unfortunately do so again.
I have also taken such action and been very very wrong.
This opens up another key complexity. Mistakes happen and we must assess context where appropriate. The severity of our social response to rape and sexual violence dictates that it is also a duty to ensure our actions are driven by the context, the will of the survivor, and the welfare of the community at-large. Outside of the immediate moment we have a difficult and vital imperative to pursue justice with truth, appropriately.
Sometimes these mistakes come from malicious dis-information, sometimes genuine errors, or false conclusions. We should not judge ourselves too harshly on this, the most vital aspect of all is response first and foremost. Mistakes happen and after them we should aim to make amends rather than skirt our responsibility. In both the situations of violence during my badjacketing, where I was accosted I told them something like “you’ll feel bad about this” when they realise their err, tho perhaps I have too much faith in my comrades capacity to develop their positions based on new information and/or to respond to such mistakes with empathy instead of casual apathy. I like to believe tho that most conscious anarchists, having made such a mistake would take steps to improve their behaviour and after becoming involved in abusing another anarchist through inaction, I sought to talk these steps also. It’s difficult to accept in times such as these, but it’s ok to be wrong, provided you learn and try to improve.
Mistakes, regardless of their cause should not stymie our reduce our response. I know “mistakes happen” might seem somewhat trite to those who have experienced such injustice, but I’m one of them and truly, I still think “mistakes happen” is better than “let rapists be” which seems to be our current social response to this most obscene situation.
Another complexity we face is that people can do the most terrible things for a variety of reasons and their will, perceptions, and experiences vary. Miscommunications happen and the results are very often breaches of trust, abuses of power, and violations of consent. This is especially so within a society and culture so toxic as ours.
Some place all fault on the individual, of dismiss notes on social issues and cultural programming as “abuse apologia” like awareness of “why” manifests an excuse or downplays the seriousness of sexual violence. I think it’s rather the opposite. The capacity and inclination to rape someone, isn’t just a illness in a person, it is an illness within our society. We live in society which advocates individualistic power, hierarchical order and predation. It’s not just weak men and bad judgement. It’s infrastructural, it’s woven into the fabric of our being. We must accept and confront rape, not as something that happens to unfortunate women alone in car parks and ginnels, but a social plague that happens everywhere, across every gender and sex dynamic, in war and peace, amongst friends and strangers, at parties, in the marital bed, at work, an inevitable manifestation of our sick culture, eons old, vile at every point.
This is the reasoning behind the argument that we need to change the very essence of our social paradigm so that rape is as unconscionable as cannibalism. This may seem as impossible as turning us away from greed for power and towards egalitarian solidarity, but it is the struggle every anarchist makes their own and we cannot have one without the other.
That brings us to the last complexity I’ll go into in this short piece. Overwhelmingly the position of most anarchists who specialise in this field is that our responses should be dynamic, adroit, and where appropriate transformative, restorative, or transitional. In some cases we can “kill the rapist” without killing the person, in other cases, not so much. Sometimes justice is a bat to the dick, sometimes it’s monthly meetings and self development, sometimes it’s self-imposed social exile… and sometimes, sometimes it’s murder.
Where it gets particularly difficult is after the immediate and matters are somewhat removed. When we’re talking about punishment from the collective entity. While it might be appeasing to tell ourselves “no rapist is redeemable”, this is counter to the data, to the social observations, and the dynamics of a better, more compassionate society. I know this because better people who spend their lives studying these things, tell us this. They’ve written zines, books, papers and communicated every way they can. Just like the war on drug and mandatory minimum sentencing has not resulted in an end to drug use and misuse, and the war on terror with vast infrastructure of death and violence only produces more“terrorists”… the solutions are more complex than the simple common sense would suggest. I know this, I accept this, I lean on their specialist knowledge with all reason and consideration, but I do not feel this.
There is this idea that men often say “I don’t know any rapists”. I don’t know how much it’s true to be honest, maybe it’s just a saying I don’t know. I’ve known such men all my life, from childhood through my capricious and eventful young adulthood and into the now. Even after my own dramas and adventures with badjacketing, I’ve discovered things and events have happened to friends that have sickened me, and there are people who still have teeth because the survivor is a much more forgiving person than I am.
I am not forgiving. I have spent a life absorbing the trauma of women around me, watching my predatory peers and trying, with success and failure, to act as a barrier. This is why justice isn’t my focus, why I lean so heavily on the thoughts and politics of anarchist sisters and trust in their frameworks and visions.
I am broadly speaking an occupant of several of the demographics least at-threat so my words on this can really only come from an adjacent position, and I defer to the great variety of perspectives better informed, of those who face gender and sex based violence whose keen political insightes are informed first hand by the systematic injustice and all to often, the personal trauma.
Like with many aspects of my socialisation, I have tried my best to improve. It is a major factor of why I spent several years as a staunch pacifist, but that vow was broken with a skateboard across the face of a friend who sexually violated someone I hardly knew while she was unconscious. This was before I tempered myself with the cool rationality of anarchism tho I would still, almost certainly, do the same.
I can’t be a judge, I can’t be a juror, justice can never be my focus.
I have too much machismo and too much vengeance in me.
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