After writing about upstanding, I couldn’t shake a bigger question that sits underneath a lot of our conversations about harm. Not whether harm exists. Not whether it should be taken seriously. But what we actually do once harm is named, and whether those responses make anything safer.
I keep seeing the same pattern play out across community spaces, activist circles, creative industries, and online. Someone is named. Concern moves quickly into certainty. Nuance drops away. A decision gets made, often publicly, often fast, and usually without much room to breathe.
That process is often described as accountability.
In reality, it’s often punishment taking the lead because it’s clearer, faster, and more immediately satisfying.
Punishment can feel decisive, and at times it can be protective. Accountability asks something different. It asks for responsibility, proportion, and a pathway toward change.
Harm is real. Survivors deserve to be believed and supported. Accountability matters. None of that is up for debate. The question is whether the way we respond actually reduces harm, or whether it just helps us feel like we’ve done something.
Calling out harm has been necessary. Silence has protected abuse for generations. Many people only spoke publicly because private options were unsafe, ignored, or closed to them. That context matters, and pretending it doesn’t is dishonest. At the same time, a lot of what we’re seeing now isn’t about change. It’s about alignment. It’s about being seen on the right side. It’s about drawing a hard line between “good” and “bad” people and standing firmly on the correct side of it.
And I need to be honest about my place in this.
There was a time when I believed calling out was the most ethical response available. I was good at it. I was sharp, certain, and convinced that public naming equalled accountability. In many ways, it made sense to me then. It felt protective. It felt principled. It felt like action.
The shift for me didn’t happen overnight. It started when I listened to Calling In by Dr Loretta Ross. That book unsettled me in the best way. It challenged some of my assumptions about power, punishment, and what real accountability actually requires.
I didn’t stop there. I later attended an online training with Dr Ross and went deeper into the practice. Not just the theory, but what it looks like to stay in relationship, to hold harm without rushing to verdict, and to centre outcomes over optics.
Through that process, and through my work in violence prevention, I started to see the limits of how I had been operating. I saw how quickly certainty could harden. How easily power could shift hands without changing anything underneath. How often the loudest response became the final one, and how rarely that led to repair, learning, or safer conditions.
I’m not writing this from a distance. I’m writing it as someone who had to unlearn some things. Consider this my own call-out recovery.
That journey eventually led me to join Survivors 4 Justice Reform as our national representative, but I’ll save that part for another post.
At its best, calling in is about responsibility and proximity. It recognises that harm doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It happens in cultures, systems, and norms that shape behaviour. Calling out can interrupt harm, especially when other options have failed or aren’t safe. Used carefully, it can be protective. Cancel culture is different. It skips process. It treats removal as resolution. It assumes that exclusion equals accountability.
From a prevention lens, the question is simple. What response makes future harm less likely?
Public punishment usually doesn’t. What it often creates instead is fear. People comply outwardly and disengage inwardly. They hide. They stop asking questions. They step away from prevention work altogether because the cost of getting something wrong feels too high. It also lets communities focus on individuals while leaving the conditions that enabled the harm completely untouched.
I’ve seen what happens when belief stabilises someone at a critical moment. I’ve also seen what happens when belief hardens into judgement, when people are talked about instead of talked to, and when certainty replaces curiosity. Harm doesn’t disappear in those moments. It just shifts shape.
Prevention work asks different questions than punishment does. Who holds power here? What behaviour are we actually trying to change? Does this response increase safety and responsibility, or does it just satisfy a need to be seen as righteous?
Accountability requires proportion. It requires context. It requires the possibility of repair. Without those things, it becomes spectacle.
This isn’t a call for silence. It’s not a defence of harm. And it’s not asking survivors to carry the burden of restraint or education. It’s a call to stop confusing intensity with impact.
Care is slower than punishment. It’s messier. It doesn’t perform well online. But it’s the only thing I’ve seen actually change behaviour over time. If prevention is the goal, not performance, then we need responses people can stay inside of, not just survive.
Accountability is not exile.
And justice that can’t imagine repair isn’t justice.