Sexual Justice Quotes

“Once we start down the road of special procedures, we’re more likely to bring along our cultural baggage about sex and gender, and invite others to do the same.”
― Alexandra Brodsky, Sexual Justice: Supporting Victims, Ensuring Due Process, and Resisting the Conservative Backlash

“The gravity of the underlying harm does not dictate a higher standard of proof.”
― Alexandra Brodsky, Sexual Justice: Supporting Victims, Ensuring Due Process, and Resisting the Conservative Backlash

“proper procedures do not depend on the specific allegation”
― Alexandra Brodsky, Sexual Justice: Supporting Victims, Ensuring Due Process, and Resisting the Conservative Backlash

“good procedures can only do so much when the rules themselves are bad, or when decision-makers are incompetent and malicious.”
― Alexandra Brodsky, Sexual Justice: Supporting Victims, Ensuring Due Process, and Resisting the Conservative Backlash

“The procedural protections that the American legal system holds so dear do not deserve our absolute faith.”
― Alexandra Brodsky, Sexual Justice: Supporting Victims, Ensuring Due Process, and Resisting the Conservative Backlash

“The obvious solution, then, both to the sexual violence and to the dangers of vigilantism, is to provide a better alternative so victims know they can safely report through more structured paths.”
― Alexandra Brodsky, Sexual Justice: Supporting Victims, Ensuring Due Process, and Resisting the Conservative Backlash

“I still fear retaliation from the Shitty men I know.”
― Alexandra Brodsky, Sexual Justice: Supporting Victims, Ensuring Due Process, and Resisting the Conservative Backlash

“processes that engender community trust—that victims see as legitimate authorities to resolve conflicts—also reduce the likelihood of the wronged turning to vigilante options that put everyone at risk.”
― Alexandra Brodsky, Sexual Justice: Supporting Victims, Ensuring Due Process, and Resisting the Conservative Backlash

“without consistent fair processes for individuals, the perceived legitimacy of an authority deteriorates system-wide.”
― Alexandra Brodsky, Sexual Justice: Supporting Victims, Ensuring Due Process, and Resisting the Conservative Backlash

“participants are more likely to buy into the result of a process when they feel it’s fair—even when they do not like the outcome.”
― Alexandra Brodsky, Sexual Justice: Supporting Victims, Ensuring Due Process, and Resisting the Conservative Backlash

“To be treated fairly is to be treated as a human who matters.”
― Alexandra Brodsky, Sexual Justice: Supporting Victims, Ensuring Due Process, and Resisting the Conservative Backlash

“Some of the most powerful writing on due process and dignity comes from Jerry Mashaw,”
― Alexandra Brodsky, Sexual Justice: Supporting Victims, Ensuring Due Process, and Resisting the Conservative Backlash

“Because fairness is about more than the outcome.”
― Alexandra Brodsky, Sexual Justice: Supporting Victims, Ensuring Due Process, and Resisting the Conservative Backlash

“PART OF WHY fair procedures matter—in harassment cases and all others, both in and out of legal settings—is that they help decision-makers come to more accurate conclusions, untainted by bias or other forms of irrationality”
― Alexandra Brodsky, Sexual Justice: Supporting Victims, Ensuring Due Process, and Resisting the Conservative Backlash

“Let me be clear: I’d never expect a survivor to sit around empathizing with the plight of someone accused of doing what was done to them. That burden does not fall on victims’ shoulders. But for those of us who have taken on the task of grappling with tough policy questions, we should take to heart that we can honor both our commitment to survivors and our commitment to procedural fairness.”
― Alexandra Brodsky, Sexual Justice: Supporting Victims, Ensuring Due Process, and Resisting the Conservative Backlash

“Just because some critics abuse the principles of due process in their quest for male impunity does not mean that we, as feminists, should reject the truer, better version of those same principles. To do so would be ethically wrong and an abandonment of the commitments—to justice, freedom, equality, human dignity—that drive us to care about harassment in the first place.”
― Alexandra Brodsky, Sexual Justice: Supporting Victims, Ensuring Due Process, and Resisting the Conservative Backlash

“an abandonment of the commitments—to justice, freedom, equality, human dignity—that drive us to care about harassment in the first place.”
― Alexandra Brodsky, Sexual Justice: Supporting Victims, Ensuring Due Process, and Resisting the Conservative Backlash

“Just because some critics abuse the principles of due process in their quest for male impunity does not mean that we, as feminists, should reject the truer, better version of those same principles.”
― Alexandra Brodsky, Sexual Justice: Supporting Victims, Ensuring Due Process, and Resisting the Conservative Backlash

“Caring about two things at once is hard. It’s certainly harder than caring only about one. But it’s important to say as plainly as possible that there is no conflict between caring about harassment and caring about fair treatment of those on both sides of an accusation”
― Alexandra Brodsky, Sexual Justice: Supporting Victims, Ensuring Due Process, and Resisting the Conservative Backlash

“People accused of sexual harm are ostracized, except when they are celebrated and protected.”
― Alexandra Brodsky, Sexual Justice: Supporting Victims, Ensuring Due Process, and Resisting the Conservative Backlash

“Whatever the law requires, our ethical commitments to fairness scale up as the stakes grow higher.”
― Alexandra Brodsky, Sexual Justice: Supporting Victims, Ensuring Due Process, and Resisting the Conservative Backlash

“The law sets the floor, not the ceiling, for what processes must look like.”
― Alexandra Brodsky, Sexual Justice: Supporting Victims, Ensuring Due Process, and Resisting the Conservative Backlash

“There is no perfect formula for fairness. There is just hard work, done in good faith, to try to get it right.”
― Alexandra Brodsky, Sexual Justice: Supporting Victims, Ensuring Due Process, and Resisting the Conservative Backlash

“Survivors tell us what they want. We should listen.”
― Alexandra Brodsky, Sexual Justice: Supporting Victims, Ensuring Due Process, and Resisting the Conservative Backlash

“Maintaining a healthy distance from an institution you’re trying to improve takes conscious effort.”
― Alexandra Brodsky, Sexual Justice: Supporting Victims, Ensuring Due Process, and Resisting the Conservative Backlash

“The one thing of which I am sure is that the criminal legal system does not deserve the public’s collective faith. It does not deserve the monopoly it has over our thinking about sexual violence—the unquestioned belief that rape is first and foremost a crime, that the solution will always come through law enforcement, that cops and courts will keep victims safe.”
― Alexandra Brodsky, Sexual Justice: Supporting Victims, Ensuring Due Process, and Resisting the Conservative Backlash

“A study in New York City concluded that mandatory arrest policies exacerbated two dangerous patterns: retaliatory arrests, where abusers call the police on their victims, and dual arrests, where police arrest the victim along with their abuser.”
― Alexandra Brodsky, Sexual Justice: Supporting Victims, Ensuring Due Process, and Resisting the Conservative Backlash

“When the only assaults brought to trial are those that conform to popular notions of what a “real” rape is, those assumptions get solidified.”
― Alexandra Brodsky, Sexual Justice: Supporting Victims, Ensuring Due Process, and Resisting the Conservative Backlash

“No matter how strongly you disagree with their prejudices, they can pose real obstacles to conviction.”
― Alexandra Brodsky, Sexual Justice: Supporting Victims, Ensuring Due Process, and Resisting the Conservative Backlash

“For many survivors considering whether to report, a trial that calls their credibility and moral fiber into question is simply too bleak a prospect.”
― Alexandra Brodsky, Sexual Justice: Supporting Victims, Ensuring Due Process, and Resisting the Conservative Backlash