Alexandra Brodsky > Quotes

“But we can care about multiple things at once. We must.”
― 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

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

“Under American legal theory, the four purposes of a criminal prosecution are supposed to be retribution (making sure the wrongdoer gets what he deserves), rehabilitation (helping the convicted become a law-abiding member of society), deterrence (discouraging the defendant and others from violating the law in the future), and incapacitation (separating the defendant from society so he can’t offend again for some time). The welfare of the victim simply is not in that mix.”
― 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

“All of us should want H. to understand that what he did was wrong and, yes, to be held accountable. But if all we did was punish him, we would lose the chance to provide Darbi with what she needed to learn and thrive in the wake of the assault. We would also lose an opening to teach students to treat each other with respect—a lesson that would serve H. and his friends well as they become adults.”
― Alexandra Brodsky, Sexual Justice: Supporting Victims, Ensuring Due Process, and Resisting the Conservative Backlash

“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

“proper procedures do not depend on the specific allegation”
― 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

“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

“ONE OF VINSON’S attorneys was Catharine MacKinnon, a pioneer in trying to convince scholars and courts that sexual harassment was a form of illegal discrimination.”
― 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

“This combination of prevalence and ignorance means most of us, I think, have had a flash of a nightmare question: What if someone I love were accused of harassment? Of rape? What would I do, how would I feel, if someone named my college roommate? My husband?”
― Alexandra Brodsky, Sexual Justice: Supporting Victims, Ensuring Due Process, and Resisting the Conservative Backlash

“We are guided not by the state’s simplistic thirst for punishment, but by what victims need to ameliorate the harm and build a more just world.”
― Alexandra Brodsky, Sexual Justice: Supporting Victims, Ensuring Due Process, and Resisting the Conservative Backlash

“very few sexual assault reports lead to arrest (20 percent) or are referred to prosecutors (4 percent). Even fewer—only about 2 percent—result in felony convictions.”
― Alexandra Brodsky, Sexual Justice: Supporting Victims, Ensuring Due Process, and Resisting the Conservative Backlash

“Because the story stops when the assault is done, those lasting ramifications rarely factor into our understanding of the harm wrought by sexual harassment.”
― 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

“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

“Survivors tell us what they want. We should listen.”
― 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

“a proportionate response, rather than an overly punitive one, is necessary for fairness.”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“Over and over again, in all these different contexts, abuse operates in the same ways: it targets the vulnerable and keeps them vulnerable. Inequality ensures its own survival through violence.”
― Alexandra Brodsky, Sexual Justice: Supporting Victims, Ensuring Due Process, and Resisting the Conservative Backlash

“men are more likely to be sexually assaulted than falsely accused of sexual assault.”
― Alexandra Brodsky, Sexual Justice: Supporting Victims, Ensuring Due Process, and Resisting the Conservative Backlash

“We must continue to match the creation of space for those who have been historically marginalized with purposeful restraint by others.”
― Alexandra Brodsky, The Feminist Utopia Project: Fifty-Seven Visions of a Wildly Better Future

“Those accounts, among others, inspired what eventually became MacKinnon’s first book, published just two years after her graduation from Yale Law. Sexual Harassment of Working Women introduced lawyers and legal academics to a new vision of workplace abuses as a civil rights violation.”
― 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