Abuse through social standing in small communities
I’ve been reading a lot of anarchist zines and literature and history, but as someone who grew up in a rural area with a very close “community”which had a pretty robust gift economy, i have to wonder if this will really produce the results we want.
Like… in the town I grew up in, it was widely known that an adult man had SA’s a teenage girl. Her family knew, her church knew, I knew despite being pretty young; basically everyone knew. The guy was “confronted” by her family (I never found out what that entailed, but it was brief and ineffective, whatever it was) and then they publicly “forgave him” and the adults all publicly moved on. Her friends didn’t, but what could they do besides continue talking about it? When he continued being involved inappropriately with teenage girls, adults still didn’t stop him. He was popular, you see; a good musician, a good speaker, a generous gift giver, an active and involved member of the community, friends with many people, an absolute gentleman to the parents. He didn’t have or need to exercise any kind of institutional power to continue preying on girls in broad daylight. He wasn’t a politician, church leader, or even particularly wealthy. He was just talented and charismatic. He had social power, and that turned out to be enough.
I guess what gets me is how this describes a lion’s share of the abusers Ive known. They cultivate social capital and can be charismatic, generous, highly intelligent and involved people to everyone who knows them in every public sphere - who then turn around and privately exploit someone vulnerable - young, or disabled, or socially isolated.
It’s not like institutional power has a good answer for this kind of abuse and exploitation either, so my point here isn’t some kind of “gotcha” it’s just an issue that keeps bugging me. I see a lot of arguments that take for granted that a collective of people would inflict consequences on someone they like to deliver justice for someone they don’t, and in my experience in a small tight-knit community, that was just not the case. How severely the offense was treated correlated pretty directly with how much everybody already liked you and/or disliked the victim.
Is there any anarchist literature or philosophy that addresses this?