#MeToo apology blunders, silences victims and puts accused in spotlight
With a political and social climate fraught with sexual assault awareness and survivor support emerges the antithetical essays of John Hockenberry and Jian Ghomeshi. These men’s essays contain accounts of their struggles, their victimization, and as Hockenberry puts it, their “exile” and “public shame.” One very important narrative is missing — that of the victim.
Even with reference to the #MeToo movement, Ghomeshi absents the very core of the movement by calling himself a “#MeToo pioneer,” completely removing the victim from a discourse that is and should be their own.
In response to these essays, Meaghan Morris, senior training officer at the Office of Diversity and Human Rights at the University of Guelph, told me that “as a society facing how we move forward in the era of #MeToo, we are called to give space and voice to survivors, recognizing that these abusers have been using their voice, privilege, and platforms as a tool for abusing women for years. To continue to give them a platform to speak without accountability is to support their abuse and support them in maintaining a position of power that will allow them to continue to abuse women.”
If forgiveness was the purpose of these essays, it is completely lost in claiming their own defence and the justification of their own actions with discussion of “the sexual norms of the Seventies, Eighties, and Nineties” from Hockenberry and the mention that “sex became another measure of status” for Ghomeshi, while continuously absenting that neither norms nor status forced them to perpetrate their actions nor does it justify them. Rather, it seems that Hockenberry and Ghomeshi are grappling with the absence of a socio-political sphere that no longer revolves around them and gives voices to those victimized. In response they have tried to re-inject themselves into the culture with these inappropriate and transparent pieces of work.
In his discussion on The Current, Harper’s Magazine publisher Rick MacArthur echoed the complete silence of the victims’ struggles in his defence of Hockenberry. He did this through his repeated mention of Hockenberry’s paraplegia, in his suggestion that this somehow provides evidence that Hockenberry could not have perpetrated enough harm to warrant this public outcry, and in his apparent ignorance of the fact that degrees of sexual misconduct do not result in different degrees of harm or trauma. This control of the impact of harm and trauma should solely be left in the control of the victim, not the perpetrator.
There is certainly the ability for the reintegration of perpetrators into our society as the gains of retributive justice are extensive, however as detailed by Morris, this must include “accountability, responsibility, repairing harms, and rebuilding trust with survivors and communities. And it is certainly not done in a way that is directed by the perpetrator and continues to shame, humiliate, and deny experiences of survivors.”
The ultimate issue with these essays is the blatant disregard of victims and their struggles, rather eclipsing it with their own victimization, framing it as a “two sides to every story” situation even while they simultaneously silence the other side, who are at last being heard. After reading their essays, the idiom that best fits these two seems to be: “Sorry, not sorry.”
Photos obtained via Wikimedia Commons