In a Saturday article for The Nation, Anna Krauthamer claims, “[A] little over four years ago, I was raped by a group of men during a three-day trip I took to Las Vegas with two of my best friends. Of the rape, which lasted all night, I remember both too much and too little. I never did anything about it.”
I’ll let Krauthamer explain her decision.
“The simple answer to the question of why I never reported the rape is that I believe in the abolition of police and prisons,” she says.
“The less simple, less articulate answer is that to pursue prosecuting and potentially incarcerating other people is inconceivable to me, even when they have hurt me more than I could have ever believed possible. Because of this, I can only vocalize what I want in negative and inherently impossible terms: that all I want is for it to never have happened.”
Krauthamer is like a man who shakes his fist at the sky after a tornado. “All I want is for my house to never have been destroyed.” Of course. But the roof has been blown away and the walls are in pieces. The salient question is, “What now?”
In other words, there is what ought to be, and there is what is. People ought not steal or rape or rob or murder. But they do. Hence, prisons. The prison abolitionist is unwilling to engage with what is.
Krauthamer continues: “The prospect of being a participant in other peoples’ incarceration is as alien to me as anything could be, to the point that I can only conceive of it in childish terms—how silly and strange it would be to have a group of people incarcerated at my expense when doing so would do nothing to fix the damage they have already so thoroughly done.”
The obvious objection: Incarceration is not merely a means of punishing the guilty. Incarcerating dangerous men and women temporarily (or permanently) incapacitates them from committing more crimes against the public.
Krauthamer’s friends, she says, mentioned as much: “[F]friends have spoken patiently to me about how, even if I don’t want to do it for myself, pursuing legal action against those men who hurt me might protect other women someday … When there is so little available to sexual violence victims in the way of justice or fairness, the current shape of criminal justice can begin to look appealing, if only because it is the most straightforward type of response to rape that currently exists. In fact, it’s because on some level that I suspect that carceral logic creeps, however unconsciously or unintentionally, into the minds of those who encouraged me to prosecute my rapists, that I cannot fully welcome that advice.”
Ah. Well, sure. Screw the subsequent victims of that gang of rapists you encountered. Allegiance to anti-carceral logic trumps all.
I can’t say I encourage you to read the rest of Krauthamer’s article for yourself. It’s long and mostly devoid of insight. But the above paragraphs are useful in sketching a psychological type: A person who cannot be budged out of their beliefs — not by logic, not by extreme pain. This sort of person welcomes, and possibly seeks, martyrdom.
In other words: Feelings don’t care about your facts. If a feeling is well-entrenched enough, it might not even care about other feelings.
That’s not to say “lived experience” should triumph over all else. But adverse experiences, especially ones as dramatic as rape, typically leave an impression. Non-fanatics are capable of integrating new evidence into their worldview.
Now, to attack the moderates.