I read through it with an as open mind as possible. I agree that the current justice system is lacking in some aspects, especially the focus on punishing crime rather than helping the victim or preventing further crime. But I quickly lost any faith in the system proposed in the first part.

The AT acknowledged that Tom’s intention and experience might be different than Diane’s.

The AT had clear goals for Tom, i.e., that he admit to rape

These two things don’t add up. How can a “neutral” mediator have the goal for one of the parties to confess to something? I already have issues with the concept of survivors being involved in the process of who gets selected in the AT but I could somehow understand it. It makes sense that in a process that focuses on the survivor’s healing, the survivor should trust the mediators involved. And I can understand that forming a non-authoritative mediator is a challenge. And the process of selecting the team seemed to be as genuine of an attempt at forming a good council as it gets. But mixing the victim selecting the council, and having the council’s goal to get a confession is a system bound for disaster and abuse.

But how can any ‘perpetrator’ enter the process if the only way to resolve it is to admit to the allegations? That sounds more like the Spanish Inquisition than an Accountability Team.

Yes, the document goes into this issue a bit later on but has no solution to it. Heck, it even suggests group vigilantism as a valid solution. I understand that a group with 0 authoritative institutions or persons has a difficult time dealing with troublemakers. But I don’t think we need to further explain why vigilantism doesn’t work.