As I write this, suppose I were being pursued at the Junior Dean’s office for bullying and harassment of another student; and suppose I were to declare that I am guilty; but also declare that I was bullied and harassed, and that harm was done on both sides, and that guilt befalls them too. What benefit does it give us, that at the end of the process, we shall receive a paper which recognises this fact?
The formal complaints mechanism of the DRC lends itself to being used to continue interpersonal conflict rather than resolve it. The service is wholly unfit for purpose. It is an illegitimate, paternalistic, ineffective, powerless, bureaucratic waste of resources which does not resolve interpersonal conflict, but fans the flames and constitutes a traumatising process. It should be stated at the outset that students should always be striving for autonomy from the bureaucratic regime of the university and should, first and foremost, seek to resolve conflict by themselves.
Students should not drag other students or accept being dragged to the Junior Dean’s office for the continuation of interpersonal conflict and should register their non-recognition of the formal complaints process of the DRC as a symbolic act so as to prefigure its abolition. The “welfarist” regime within universities continues to hold strong, relying on formulaic proceduralism to provide “justice”, an “investigation” without investigative powers, a faux-judiciary. Incidents are cases to be managed, giving the illusion of resolution, equalising in incidents where there is no clear-cut answer. A complaint followed by a counter-complaint; perhaps a report or two to the Gardaí, who inevitably will not care either way; an escalating tit-for-tat spiral which deadlocks any chance of resolution.
It is not the case, necessarily, as it has been claimed, that perpetrators weaponise it in order to continue conflict and silence victims, but rather, that upon the initiation of a case, a carceral framing begins to take shape, which tends away from the principles of restorative justice. Its structure seeks to find an infraction based on a rulebook, and proceeds to punish; in its eyes, we are either victims or perpetrators, a structure which arises from its carceral nature, rotten at its very framing, derived from the State. By flattening interpersonal conflict into institutional cases to be managed, its ontology is shifted; it becomes something else, an administrative object. This framing, in turn, locks the participants into categorical prisons, “complainant” and “respondent”, “respondent” and “complainant”, which inevitably diametrically oppose them, rather than resolving the underlying conflict.
Rather, there should be mediation services, set up by students themselves, with the aim of restorative justice. This would take power away from the university and the long arms of the State, set up a dual-power strategy, and ensure that matters of the student body are resolved without the intervention of carceral systems. Rooted in a rich history of indigenous practices, the community itself should be equipped to intervene in interpersonal conflicts with its credibility drawn not from its ability to dole out punishment but from its recognition by the community itself. It is evident the vast majority of conflicts on campus can in fact be resolved by a peoples’ mediation tribunal, which should be equipped with the ability to intervene, de-escalate and provide a vast array of services for restorative justice, such as referral to mental health support, and should expand beyond the framing of victim and offender into dissecting underlying relationships and how those are mediated by social, cultural and political factors. It is based on the faith that we ourselves can be trusted to keep order without the watchful eye of the State, just as so-called “primitive” tribes have shown themselves capable of doing once upon a time.
If it is recognised by prison abolitionist literature that the Gardaí and the courts system are ineffective for the resolution of harm done by members of the community, why should the bureaucratic charade of the Junior Dean’s office be any different?
We only use these mechanisms because capitalist culture is acidic; it has corroded our vision so much that we are unable to conceive of our own un-freedom, to see how enmeshed we are with the oppressive institutions that surround us, deprived of the language to articulate transformative paths to justice. Infractions in the community are handed over to the State and its adjacent bodies because we lack the courage to develop our own para-State structures to seize our autonomy from the hands of the authorities. In line with the advent of neoliberal capitalism, relationships are increasingly mediated by bureaucracies, markets and institutions; the density of our social ties has deteriorated to such an extent that there is no longer community accountability, alienated from person to person, which compels us to refer our issues to higher authorities. The reflex to run to the paternal authority of the State at the first sight of harm done, rather than recognising that the locus of justice is the community with the aim of seeking repair, is the outcome. There needs to develop a recognition amongst the student body that we have all done wrong to one another, that we have at various points done harm, infractions which should be submitted to community forums for dispute resolution.
This is what it means to be radical, from the Latin word radix, to grasp the issue at its roots, perhaps condemned as “utopian” and “anarchist” by some, as it stands against those who wish to abolish the DRC and rely purely on carceral measures outside of it, and against those who wish to reform the DRC to produce “better” carceral outcomes, both of which are fundamentally trapped in capitalist logic, and in fact mirror each other, a far cry from these revolutionary proposals that are worth heeding precisely because they are utopian and anarchist in nature.
