Deborah Tuerkheimer*
In Online Shaming and the Power of Informal Justice,[1] Hadar Dancig-Rosenberg and Anat Peleg examine a dynamic that has become ubiquitous since #MeToo sparked a global reckoning with sexual abuse.[2] Notwithstanding several high profile instances of both criminal[3] and civil[4] accountability, the #MeToo movement—as reflected in the hashtag—has been largely driven by the practice of “online shaming,” a type of unofficial reporting that names the alleged perpetrator.[5]
While survivors’[6] motivations for turning to informal (mostly online[7]) reporting channels vary considerably, these motivations are best understood against a backdrop of massive system failure, particularly on the criminal side, as Dancig-Rosenberg and Peleg observe. Their conceptual analysis, which is grounded in interviews of victims who chose to share their stories on social media,[8] highlights an urgent need to adapt the criminal justice system to become more “relevant” to survivors.[9] To be sure, even a survivor-centered criminal justice system cannot wholly supplant informal channels of accountability. Unofficial reporting must remain an option that, for some victims, will remain preferable.[10] But the disconnect between what the criminal justice system offers and what survivors want leads too many to turn online as a far-from-ideal workaround. Because many victims would prefer a responsive system to one whose defects are simply left intact, a next phase of reform will better embed survivors’ conceptions of justice in our criminal laws and processes.[11]
This Response sketches the broad contours of such a reform agenda. By leveraging Dancig-Rosenberg’s and Peleg’s insights about why survivors go online to seek justice, I posit that the formal system can be refurbished to provide many of the functions ostensibly served by online reporting. This argument raises three related inquiries. First, which facets of survivors’ justice should be advanced by the criminal justice system? Next, where do tensions exist between survivors’ justice and foundational tenets of the system? And last, how exactly can the system deliver those facets of survivors’ justice that are indeed within its mandate? I explore these questions to recast Dancig-Rosenberg’s and Peleg’s findings. This move can inform a post-#MeToo reworking of the laws, processes, and policies that operationalize the meaning of criminal justice.
Protection
The respondents in Dancig-Rosenberg and Peleg’s study repeatedly cited the desire to alert other potential victims to the abuser’s dangerousness as a rationale for online reporting.[12] Publicly naming a perpetrator can serve as a warning that is presumably meant to alter behavior on the part of would-be victims. The sharing of an allegation is a vehicle for advising others in the accused individual’s orbit—perhaps to not let one’s guard down or otherwise make oneself vulnerable.
The protection offered by the criminal justice system is directed instead at the offender, using the instruments of specific deterrence,[13] rehabilitation, and incapacitation. These are traditional justifications for punishment, thought to be core to the function of criminal law. In practice, the system fails miserably to deliver on these promises to survivors.[14] But to the extent survivors want their reporting to protect others, a turn to the criminal justice system is, in theory, wholly compatible with this desire, and perhaps even preferable to placing the onus on would-be victims.[15] Put differently, preventing an offender from hurting others is a function squarely within the ambit of the criminal justice system.[16] In this regard, survivors’ justice requires that the system simply do what it purports to do.
Police Assistance
Several respondents wished to use their online report to strengthen the case for criminal prosecution.[17] Surfacing additional victims might well prod the police into action.[18] This rationale, again, suggests profound inadequacies in the functioning of the criminal process rather than any fundamental incompatibility with survivors’ needs. Police investigations ought to turn up relevant evidence without victims being deputized in this manner. Moreover, multiple victims should not be needed for the police to make an arrest in a sexual assault case. A demand for “credibility in numbers”[19] reflects systemic biases that must be eliminated if law enforcement is to perform its assigned role.
Punishment
Some respondents viewed shame as a form of punishment that could substitute for the formal state censure represented by a criminal conviction.[20] Understood in expressive terms, shaming is a form of collective condemnation that can help to restore a victim’s social power relative to her abuser.[21] This conception resonates with a good deal of research showing that survivors tend to view punishment as a way for the community to recalibrate, however imperfectly, a wrongful status equilibrium.[22]
The criminal justice system is hardly incompatible with survivors’ insistence on punishment—indeed, the system is built to punish. But an expressive understanding of punishment shifts the focus away from excessive carceral sanctions and toward alternative ways of rebalancing the social standings of abuser and victim.[23] As I have written:
What does it mean to be vindicated by the criminal justice system? One survivor told me she simply hoped her allegation would result in a formal indictment rather than be folded into other pending charges. Even if it meant her abuser wouldn’t serve any additional jail time, what mattered was that he would be charged with her assault. Another survivor insisted that her abuser should be sentenced to some jail time for what he did to her—the length of incarceration wasn’t important at all. It could be one extra day, she said.[24]
Survivors seldom perceive hefty incarceration as the best metric of justice. Quite apart from any vindictive impulse, punishment is a mechanism for restoring power, dignity, and perceived value.
Vindication
Several respondents viewed informal reporting as a path to obtaining a cluster of therapeutic benefits.[25] I have previously suggested that these benefits encompass several related dynamics: catharsis (emotional relief), validation (affirmation of worth and lived experience), and solidarity (group-based empowerment).[26] While online reporting can deliver on this promise,[27] it can also do just the opposite. As Dancig-Rosenberg and Peleg describe, “some survivors who shamed their assailants online experienced firsthand the replication of the rape culture in the virtual sphere,” leading to feelings of loneliness, anxiety, and loss of control.[28]
Despite the possibility of negative repercussions, online reporting may seem more likely to vindicate survivors than the alternative. The criminal justice system is widely known for setting back survivors’ healing.[29] But this is not an intractable feature of the system. Rather, responding to survivors’ needs around vindication requires reform along two dimensions: credibility and control.
Credibility discounting is rampant throughout the criminal process—at arrest, charging, plea bargaining, fact finding, and sentencing.[30] As a matter of course and without warrant, victims (especially those most marginalized) are distrusted, blamed, and treated with indifference. To the survivor, this credibility discounting can be even worse than the abuse itself.[31] By contrast, a fair credibility determination affirms the survivor’s truth and her value, reinforcing not only that the abuse happened, but that it was wrong and that it matters.
Like credibility, control is key to victims’ healing.[32] Yet when the need for empowerment is arguably at its greatest, survivors seeking criminal justice must navigate a system built to implement someone else’s conception of justice.[33] The centrality of control to survivors’ needs demands a shift in the balance of decision-making authority between prosecutors and survivors.[34] Throughout the criminal process, prosecutors make decisions that potentially diverge from the victim’s desires—how quickly to proceed, what crimes to charge, which witnesses to involve, whether to negotiate a plea deal, what sentence to recommend. At each of these stages—charging, plea negotiations, trial-planning, sentencing—a victim’s expressed preferences should not only be considered but presumptively pursued. To alleviate the burden of decision-making and reduce constraints on survivors’ choices, prosecutors must offer robust support services.
There are, of course, limits to what this reorientation might accomplish. Prosecutorial discretion is bounded by a host of ethical constraints, including a broad duty to “seek justice” on behalf of the state.[35] This justice-seeking mission might initially appear at odds with centering survivors. But moving survivors from the periphery toward the core of decisional imperatives hardly requires the abandonment of longstanding precepts that undergird public prosecution. A systemic reassessment of the value of control to abuse victims who so desperately need it remains faithful to the meaning of justice.
Functional Divergences
Thus far I have identified important overlaps between the perceived benefits of online reporting and those that a survivor-centered criminal justice system could provide. But each reporting channel also has indelible features that diverge from the other’s.
For instance, as several of Dancig-Rosenberg and Peleg’s respondents mentioned, victims who name their abusers online can be sued for defamation.[36] In the post-#MeToo era, this prospect is a meaningful deterrent to informal reporting.[37] And while the weaponization of defamation law may be partly neutralized,[38] “online shaming” will invariably subject victims to this threat in ways that make informal reporting more risky than its criminal justice counterpart (i.e., police complaint).
The comparative advantages also run in the other direction. Informal reporting may be more suited than the criminal justice system—even a survivor-centered system—to advance goals that extend beyond the individual case. One example is “the public’s right to know,” which motivated several of Dancig-Rosenberg and Peleg’s respondents to name their abusers online.[39] I have written elsewhere about institutional change,[40] norm evolution,[41] and epistemic justice[42]—all examples of functions better served by unofficial reporting channels than by the formal system.[43]
Conclusion
Informal reporting takes place in the shadow of the law and its shortcomings. While the emergence of a two-tiered reporting regime has been the subject of much hand-wringing, “online shaming” is rarely seen for what it is: an imperfect workaround. Online Shaming and the Power of Informal Justice makes survivors the authority on the question of why unofficial complaint seems attractive and the extent to which it delivers on its promise. From close engagement with victims’ accounts, Dancig-Rosenberg and Peleg identify “an increased need in the digital age to make the criminal legal process more accessible to survivors.”[44]
Despite the proliferation of stories of abuse, the #MeToo movement has mostly left intact the criminal justice system’s deficiencies. By accounting for the current benefits of the main alternative (apart from non-disclosure), I have begun to think here about the design of a survivor-centered system. Though not a complete substitute for informal reporting channels,[45] this move would greatly diminish reliance on “online shaming”[46] while serving as a needed corrective. Since inception, criminal law and processes have mostly overlooked gender violence. The rise of unofficial reporting provides powerful impetus for systemic change.
[1] Hadar Dancig-Rosenberg & Anat Peleg, Online Shaming and the Power of Informal Justice, 47 Harv. J. L. & Gender 1 (2024).
[2] The “Me Too” campaign was founded in 2007 by activist Tarana Burke. Sandra E. Garcia, The Woman Who Created #MeToo Long Before Hashtags, N.Y. Times (Oct. 20, 2017), https:// www.nytimes.com/2017/10/20/us/me-too-movement-tarana-burke.html.
[3] Perhaps most notable in this regard was the criminal conviction of Harvey Weinstein in 2020. See Jan Ransome, Harvey Weinstein’s Stunning Downfall: 23 Years in Prison, N.Y. Times (March 11, 2020), https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/11/nyregion/harvey-weinstein-sentencing.html.
[4] See, e.g., Erica Orden, Trump Found Liable for Sexual Abuse in E. Jean Carroll Case, Politico (May 9, 2023), https://www.politico.com/news/2023/05/09/trump-e-jean-carroll-trial-verdict-00096009.
[5] I have previously offered a taxonomy of informal reporting that defines four distinct categories: the Traditional Whisper Network, the Double Secret Whisper Network, the Shadow Court of Public Opinion, and the New Court of Public Opinion. See Deborah Tuerkheimer, Unofficial Reporting in the #MeToo Era, 2019 U. Chi. Legal F. 273 (2019). “Online shaming” falls within the latter classification.
[6] I use the terms survivor and victim interchangeably throughout this discussion.
[7] While social media is the dominant distribution channel for informal complaints, legacy media has also played an important role in galvanizing and sustaining momentum around #MeToo, particularly when the accused men are prominent or otherwise powerful.
[8] This methodological approach is itself a contribution, as survivors rarely drive legal discourse around sexual assault reform. The survivors in Dancig-Rosenberg’s and Peleg’s study are Israeli; for thoughts on the generalizability of their findings to Western democracies, see Dancig-Rosenberg & Peleg, supra note 1, at 7–8. Contextual variations notwithstanding, the central conclusions of the study resonate with my own work on survivors and systemic failures in the U.S., which remains my focus here.
[9] See id. at 43; see also id. at 44 (noting the challenge of “increasing ‘survivor-friendliness’”). Dancig-Rosenberg and Peleg aptly note that this imperative does not obviate “the parallel need to make the system more humane and respectful toward the accused and the defendants;” “these two needs are not contradictory but complementary, and one should not come at the expense of the other. Id. at 46.
[10] See id. at 8 (observing that “the criminal legal process is not suitable for every survivor”); id. at 46 (asserting that “[s]urvivors need both formal and informal alternatives to be open and accessible”).
[11] See id. at 44 (“Improving the formal channel by removing its current barriers for survivors is an essential step toward increasing the options available to survivors.”).
[12] See id. at 21; see also Deborah Tuerkheimer, Beyond #MeToo, 94 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 1146, 1177–79 (2019) (discussing “group member protection” in a functional analysis of unofficial reporting).
[13] See Dancig-Rosenberg & Peleg, supra note 1, at 44 (underscoring the significance of enforcement rates, rather than punishment severity, for optimal deterrence) (citing Kinneret Teodorescu, Ori Plonsky, Shahar Ayal & Rachel Barkan, Frequency of Enforcement is More Important than the Severity of Punishment in Reducing Violation Behaviors, 118 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118, 1 (2021)).
[14] For an overview of how the criminal justice system fails survivors, see Tuerkheimer, supra note 12, at 1153–59. A major impediment to the system performing this function is the patterned distribution of credibility discounts. See infra notes 27–28 and accompanying text.
[15] See Deborah Tuerkheimer, Credible: Why We Doubt Accusers and Protect Abusers 223 (2021) (describing one victim’s expression of relief when her rapist was incarcerated because, as she put it, “I know there’s nobody being hurt by him right now and that I don’t have to worry about it, even though it shouldn’t be my responsibility,” while adding, “I think a lot of victims end up feeling that responsibility very deeply . . .”).
[16] The system can ordinarily perform this function without imposing lengthy periods of incarceration. See supra note 13 and accompanying text.
[17] See Dancig-Rosenberg & Peleg, supra note 1, at 22.
[18] By contrast, several of Dancig-Rosenberg and Peleg’s respondents recounted that law enforcement officers perceived online complaints as “disrupt[ive],” raising larger concerns about the negative effects of informal reporting on evaluations of victim credibility and, more generally, on criminal prosecution. See id. at 34–35.
[19] See Deborah Tuerkheimer, What If Only One Woman Had Accused Harvey Weinstein?, The Guardian (Oct. 22, 2017), https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/oct/22/harvey-weinstein-bill-cosby-allegations (explaining that an insistence on “credibility in numbers” means that “[t]he accounts of multiple women are needed to corroborate one another—that is, to show that an accusation which, on its own, would likely be discredited can be believed when considered along with a constellation of similar allegations.”).
[20] See Dancig-Rosenberg & Peleg, supra note 1, at 22–23.
[21] See id. at 24–25.
[22] For groundbreaking empirical work in this area, see Kenworthey Bilz, Testing the Expressive Theory of Punishment, 13 J. Empirical Legal Studies 364 (2016).
[23] See Tuerkheimer, supra note 15, at 215–27 (summarizing research showing that survivors prioritize restoration of power vis a vis the abuser over vengeance).
[24] Id. at 221.
[25] See Dancig-Rosenberg & Peleg, supra note 1, at 32.
[26] See Tuerkheimer, Beyond #MeToo, supra note 12, at 1174–77.
[27] See Dancig-Rosenberg & Peleg, supra note 1, at 32–33.
[28] Id.
[29] To heal, victims must reestablish and assert the authority to govern their lives. But the law imposes “a complex set of rules and bureaucratic procedures that [victims] may not understand and over which they have no control.” Judith Herman, Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice 64 (2023). The contradictions mount:
Victims need time for recovery; the court sets the timetable for justice, which repeatedly disrupts their lives and is often protracted over many months or years. Victims need an opportunity to tell their stories in their own way; the court requires them to respond on the witness stand to a set of direct questions from the prosecutor and then to endure cross-examination by the defense attorney. Victims often need to control or limit their exposure to specific reminders of the trauma; the court requires them to relive their experiences in great detail. Victims often fear direct interaction with their perpetrators; the court requires a face-to-face confrontation with the accused.
Id. Together, “[t]he requirements of legal proceedings seem almost perfectly designed to aggravate the symptoms of posttraumatic stress.” Id.
[30] For a fuller explanation of credibility discounting, see Tuerkheimer, supra note 15, at 9–12.
[31] See Tuerkheimer, supra note 15, at 175.
[32] Dancig-Rosenberg’s and Peleg’s respondents repeatedly referenced “control.” See Dancig-Rosenberg & Peleg, supra note 1, at 24, 28, 32.
[33] See Herman, Truth and Repair, supra note 29, at 45. (“In our system of criminal law, the state, not the victim, is actually considered the injured party, and it is the state, not the victim, that has the exclusive right to take action against a criminal offender. In this conception of justice, the person who is actually harmed has very little part to play in the process. Her role is simply as a witness.”).
[34] Judges and juries also exercise control over criminal justice outcomes.
[35] American Bar Association, Standards for the Prosecution Function § 3-1.2(b) (“The primary duty of the prosecutor is to seek justice within the bounds of the law, not merely to convict.”). See also supra note 10 and accompanying text.
[36] See Dancig-Rosenberg & Peleg, supra note 1, at 7, 28–29.
[37] See Tuerkheimer, supra note 12, at 1189–90 (discussing the activation of defamation law to silence victims).
[38] See, e.g., Kim Elesser, California Now Protects Sexual Assault Survivors from Frivolous Defamation Suits, Forbes (Oct. 10, 2023), https://www.forbes.com/sites/kimelsesser/2023/10/10/california-now-protects-sexual-assault-survivors-from-frivolous-defamation-suits/?sh=4e1700d6470c (describing a new law that raises the bar for proving defamation and allows prevailing defendants to recover attorney’s fees).
[39] See Dancig-Rosenberg & Peleg, supra note 1, at 22–23. Some of the sexual misconduct that victims seek to publicize are not crimes, and some crimes are time-barred by the statute of limitations.
[40] See Tuerkheimer, supra note 12, at 1184–85.
[41] See id. at 1181–84.
[42] See id. at 1179–81.
[43] For discussion of how certain kinds of criminal prosecution might advance these functions, albeit imperfectly, see Deborah Tuerkheimer, Victim, Reconstructed: Sex Crimes Experts and the New Rape Paradigm, 2024 U. Ill. L. Rev. 55, 100–05 (2024).
[44] See Dancig-Rosenberg & Peleg, supra note 1, at 46.
[45] See supra note 10 and accompanying text (suggesting survivors should have access to both formal and informal mechanisms of accountability).
[46] For reasons for caution about the relative merits of unofficial reporting, see Tuerkheimer, supra note 12, at 1188–91.