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or you can throw men under the bus and say that there can't possibly be a justification to kill tens of thousands of women and children (leaving unsaid the implication that every Arab man is suspected to be an abuser/murderer/etc).

but all those ripostes are red herrings, they accept the underlying assumption which is the moral blackmail of punitive justice: to be against rape means you want horrible suffering to be inflicted on rapists, and if you question that logic, "ah so you're opening space for abusers in our movement then"? set aside the fact that punitive justice has never remotely worked to actually stop, remedy, or prevent abuse, or any other social ill; set aside the fact that punishment is so easily coopted and therefore always weaponised against the most oppressed classes; the question at the core is the substitution of action for symbolic allegiance. because everyone is terrified of being ostracised forever in the Activist Offender Registry as an -ist, they have to jump at every opportunity to loudly and publicly denounce everything accused of the -ism.