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Many years before attending law school, I was a campus organizer at Colgate University. At Colgate, I mobilized students, faculty, and staff on reforming our campus’ sexual assault and sexual harassment policies. After a friend of mine was brutally gang-raped at a fraternity on campus, she left the university largely because of the slut-shaming she endured from our school community, but also due to a lack of justice in Colgate’s Title IX grievance process.

Years later, the #MeToo movement, started by Tarana Burke, has taken our country by storm. In just the past few months, dozens of prominent and famous men have been exposed as serial harassers and perpetrators of sexual violence, including Harvey Weinstein, Junot Díaz, and Aziz Ansari. While #MeToo is certainly far-reaching and has shone new light on what is sadly an evergreen issue, the movement and our society at large have missed something critical: We must reframe what justice and healing can look like for both victims of sexual violence and those who commit that violence. The American legal system has many pitfalls, chief among them its inability to solve systemic issues. In this case, our legal system has never really been able to account for situations where the oppressed becomes the oppressor, where a traumatized victim can eventually become the aggressor.

This thought first came to me when I learned of the accusations against Junot Díaz, only weeks after Díaz recounted, in the New Yorker, tales of his own trauma from being sexually abused as a child. While many on my Facebook newsfeed felt that Díaz had released his story of sexual trauma to cover up the trauma he’d put countless women through, one thing was evident to me – trauma can often beget trauma. I was left with this question looming in my mind: What do we do for those who were traumatized, never truly healed, and then turned their trauma, anger, and pain onto others?

America’s criminal justice system, and even our legal system itself, was originally intended to exclude women, people of color, and victims of sexual violence from all of the privileges that we now take for granted. Excluded from the right to vote, the right to have agency, the right to truly heal. There is a reason why it is extremely difficult to try a rape case criminally – because our criminal justice system has not yet caught up with the reality of how sexual violence operates in our rape culture. This is part of why the #MeToo movement has become so powerful – it serves, in part, as an alternative to the traditional route of seeking justice through our often hostile, and for many dangerous, court system.

But maybe we don’t solve the issue of our rape culture through the criminal justice system in the first place – a system that was never really truly about protecting victims at all. Shoot, our criminal justice system is not even really about “justice” or “fairness.” Our criminal justice system is about consequences and punishment. Look no further than the case of Brock Turner in California. Turner, after sexually assaulting a peer, was given a six-month sentence out of concern for his “future,” while a similarly situated Latino man, who also sexually assaulted his female roommate, was sentenced to three years in prison. In many movements in this country — not just the movement against sexual assault — we reduce systemic problems into individual acts. (Funny-not-funny enough, we do the same thing with systemic issues like racism. For instance, when we think about police brutality, we center the narrative around a few “bad apples,” instead of recognizing that police brutality is part of the larger matrix that is white supremacy.)

Instead of seeing sexual assault for what it really is, which is a systemic public health crisis with a variety of causational factors, we treat each and every case individually. For that is what our courts and our legal system has taught us to do. What, then, might a community-based, survivor-centered approach would look like? In our current system, we punish the perpetrator while ignoring the system that created that opportunity, a system many are consciously and unconsciously perpetuating. Instead of a system where we educate men and boys about enthusiastic consent, we react. And that is the fatal flaw of relying on a legal system that will always be more reactionary than it is proactive — instead of making dents in the system, we continue reproducing a system that is detrimental to perpetrators and survivors alike.

Our criminal justice system has not yet caught up with the reality of how sexual violence operates in our rape culture.

What would it look like to live in a world where, instead of relying on our criminal justice system to fix our social ills, we utilized principles of transformative justice? What if, instead of using our criminal justice system as a Band-Aid solution, we focus our collective efforts and passion on shifting the culture we have around consent, sex, trauma, and healing? What if we created a culture where we check in with our romantic partners, where we have healthy and positive attitudes and practices around sex? What if we taught children in school about consent? What if we shifted (and lifted) the oppressive barriers of toxic masculinity and femininity? What if we created a world where we no longer felt entitled to power and to others’ bodies?

I want to know that world. I do not want to continue living in a world where, instead of shifting our culture, we simply continue recreating oppressive systems. We can say #MeToo and create transformative systems that shift our culture, not simply replicate harm.

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