LISTENING TO EMOTION AND AFFECT: A REPLY TO PROFESSOR ABRAMS'

This Article is a response to Kathryn Abrams' response Article to my qualitative study, titled "Online Shaming and the Power of Informal Justice" (co-authored with Anat Peleg).

Kathryn Abrams provides an illuminating and powerful analysis of the survivors' narratives in "Online Shaming and the Power of Informal Justice," utilizing emotion and affect as her lens. She explains that glimpsing the emotional undercurrents in survivors' explanations "may help us better understand the position from which survivors approach the law, and gain greater insight into the shortfalls, benefits, and opportunities for change, in both formal legal and alternative regimes." 

In my short response to Abrams's enlightening comment, I would like to make three points. 

First, I embrace Abrams' call for integrating law and emotion-oriented analysis into our endeavor to better understand survivors' needs and wants and improve their available responses. I will support Abrams's analysis by providing more examples of survivors' interview quotes, which reflect various manifestations of emotions. Moreover, I will build on Abrams's analysis to show how, by listening to survivors' narratives through the lens of emotions, we will often find that their emotional experiences with the criminal legal system appear to be the opposite of their experiences with social media. 

Second, I will suggest a more optimistic yet realistic vision of the potential of the criminal legal system (or, more accurately, a reformed version of it) to address survivors’ emotional needs and desires. Using the metaphor of “wine” and “bottle,” suggested by therapeutic jurisprudence scholar David Wexler, I argue that pouring a more survivor-friendly “wine” into the existing “bottle” of the criminal legal process might not be enough to make the criminal process an attentive path for most survivors. As Abrams rightly recognizes, the structural, institutional characteristics of the adversarial, formal, professional-led criminal legal system create inherent barriers for most survivors to feel that they can achieve justice. In other words, the current “bottle” is limited. However, a significant reform that will design a new “bottle”—a criminal procedure explicitly accommodated for sexual assault cases, such as Sex Offenses Courts—might minimize the gap, even if not close it completely, between survivors’ needs and the responses currently given in the mainstream criminal courts. A model can be considered a new “bottle” even if it operates within the state-run system, as long as it adopts significant accommodations beyond softened practices to include a designated, special legal procedure. 

Third, building on Abrams’s analysis of restorative justice as a potential path for accommodating survivors’ emotional needs, I suggest a tentative overview comparison between four alternative settings for survivors—the current criminal legal process, specialized sex offense courts, restorative justice, and social media channels—according to central parameters emerging from Abrams’s emotion-oriented analysis and my own studies.