The other fantastic part of the NO! screening on Thursday night was the panel discussion that followed. The four panelists were Aishah Shahidah Simmons, the filmmaker, Ejeris Dixon, the Program Coordinator of the Safe OUTside the System Collective, Ebony Noelle Golden, poet and organizer, who worked with UBUNTU and other groups in the Durham area after the Duke lacrosse case, and Michael Simmons, who has worked on many human rights issues all over the world. They spoke about ways they had each used the film to further their activism and they also addressed audience questions.

I’ve been dwelling on one question in particular since the panel. A woman asked what she should do, if she was raped, if she didn’t want to send the person who attacked her to jail, because too many black men are already in jail. Michael Simmons pointed out that sometimes predators need to be removed from the community, and I think this is an important point to keep in mind. Most drug users and most first time drug dealers don’t belong in jail, but most rapists do. We should be very worried and very outraged by the number of young black men in prison, but the solution is not to not press charges against dangerous people just because it would mean sending one more black man to prison. This woman’s question ultimately reaches back to the cultural construct that black women’s suffering matters less than black men’s—that black men shouldn’t be made to suffer in prison for years, although the women they raped may suffer for years in the prisons of their minds and memories.

All of that said, the other members of the panel raised equally important alternatives. Both Aishah Simmons and Golden talked about the more important concern being the survivor’s healing process and that the survivor has to determine for herself (or himself) whether pursuing prosecution will ease or exacerbate her (or his) pain. Although Simmons did also make the telling point that survivors should also not be asked to shoulder the burden of concern for their attackers’ well being, which suggests a strong community responsibility to pursue rapists, an idea that led directly to Dixon’s perspective. SOS operates from the premise that change cannot be imposed from outside a community, so that hate crime legislation, for instance, will not actually make LGBT people any safer because such laws have no impact on the values of the community that tolerates anti-gay actions. Their belief is that communities have to be educated and have to decide to socially punish violence against women and gays before such violence will really abate. So in SOS’s conception, the best punishment for a rapist would not be jail time, but the weight of his (or her) community’s disgust, because this kind of social disapproval is more likely to cause him (or her) to rethink the attitudes that allowed him (or her) to commit such a crime in the first place.

I think there is a lot of truth to that idea, although I think there are people who are too much of a menace for such a long term therapeutic solutions to be enough. (And I don’t just mean the movie-style crazies here, I mean mostly the people who are so self-centered and feel so entitled that others’ disapproval is not a strong enough tool against them.) For most people though, we know that their violence is often begotten from violence done against them. Those who were abused as children are likely to abuse others as adults, and that is why ideas of breaking the cycle are so important. Apparently at least one of Megan Williams’ attackers was seriously abused as a child and an adult, and while that does not excuse her behavior, it points to the fact that an earlier intervention might have saved Williams a lot of pain.

So I was very impressed with Golden and Dixon and their organizations because they seem to be tackling the problem at some of its roots. Helping those who were violated heal helps keep them from violating others. Developing strong community sanctions against violence discourages people from committing violence. SAFER promotes grassroots organizing by students, not nationwide campaigns, because we know that real change takes campus community conversations, not imposed new rules. The idea of Simmons’s film seems to be in large part to get the dialogue going, to get communities all over the world talking about violence against women and coming towards a consensus that it is unacceptable. Because only a widespread consensus that a person’s sexual being belongs to her or him, and only to her or him, will really end rape in this country. So I urge you again to see the film and share it with your friends and campuses. And take the time to learn about the anti-violence work being done by different groups around you; the pain of the experiences recount in the film were somewhat balanced by the hope I felt hearing these four activists speak.