ALEX's Story
I was 17 years old and I was out at a party. My friend and I were the only two women there and throughout the night I became more and more intoxicated. I remember the terror of not knowing what was wrong but knowing something was wrong. That… that night, I was sexually assaulted.
Even in the moments as I realized what it happened I… I don't know what the police would’ve done. Because the way that they would speak to victims was revictimizing, it was dehumanizing, it was blameful… When we face trauma we kind of have one choice to either survive it or not survive it. I survived it, I found a way to survive it.
Emotionally I was incredibly impacted. I questioned my role, I blamed myself… I needed someone to tell me it wasn’t my fault. I needed him to be held accountable because now he is off in the world and who knows how many other victims had the same situation with him.
As far as I know, he’s never learned better - he’s never learned the pain and the aftermath of putting someone in that sort of situation. I think that a lot of people hear stories of violence and they get angry and I’m angry too but my expression of anger is just not in the form of punishment. It’s not to take their life, it’s not to dehumanize them. We have such a reaction to say “go arrest people”, “go put them in jail”, that you know, “that’s where they should rot”. That’s a human and at the end of the day you haven’t changed their heart, you haven’t changed how they view things, they haven’t understood the gravity of what happened.
To ask for restorative justice rather than punishment, it feels fitting to my own principles. I can’t look at another person and see anything other than the human in front of me even if that human has hurt me. They have their own story, they have their own life. Our criminal justice system punishes and this sentencing framework and then people go and ruin their lives. Their lives are done, if you go to jail and come out you’re really not accepted back into society.
What does that get me? It doesn’t get me anything and then from my life I have to carry the weight of ruining someone else's.
- Alex