The quandary at the heart of The Recall: Reframed (Rebecca Richman Cohen, 26 mins, SDFF 2023) is at the center of a four-part collaborative series of articles appearing in The Boston Globe, which explore how to increase justice for survivors of gendered violence without contributing to a criminal justice system that disproportionately harms vulnerable communities and people of color.
The series examines the ways in which these two goals: justice for survivors of sexual violence and mitigating the harms of a racist criminal justice system are frequently positioned at odds, as calls for increased attention to sexual assault are frequently answered with increased sentencing. The collaborative journalistic series scrutinizes how these issues are positioned in relation to one another, and posits alternative approaches.
The Boston Globe‘sracial inequality section The Emancipator is among the collaborators on the film’s impact campaign, and has so far published two pieces in this series. The first, The Cognitive Dissonance of Brock Turner, is a conversation between The Recall: Reframed filmmaker Cohen and documentarian Yoruba Richen about how the recall of the judge in the Brock Turner rape trial, which was intended to support victims and condemn white privilege, ended up leading to a 30% increase in sentences across California. The second, How Do We Address Sexual Violence Without Contributing To The Harms Of Mass Incarceration?, is an interview with Sonya Shah, founder of the restorative justice advocate group, The Ahimsa Collective, and examines what an attempt to address both the harms of mass incarceration and sexual violence might look like. The final piece in the series, Reckoning with Carceral Feminism in the Fight to End Mass Incarceration,comes from legal scholar Aya Gurber who argues that the feminist impulse to respond to gendered violence by imposing harsher sentences on perpetrators of sexual violence ultimately divert attention from the larger task of creating structures and support that prevent gendered crime in the first place.
While the series is running in The Boston Globe’s Emancipator, it is the product of a cross-platform collaboration organized by The Recall: Reframed’s impact campaign, that also includes contributions from two other mission-based platforms: Inquest(decarceral) and Lux Magazine (feminist). As part of the collaboration, the full film will be available via Youtube through Summer 2023.