Stories

How does community accountability actually work?

What does it look like? 

Your situation is different from every other situation.  It can be hard to imagine anything working, or getting people to help, or even believe you.  It can help to hear what other people have done.

Each of the stories below are examples of people stopping violence with community help—even when it seemed like there was no-one to help.  They are all different.  Some come from the person who was being hurt, some from people who helped, and one is from the person who was causing harm.  There is audio of several stories, so you can listen to them.  All of the stories contributed to this toolkit.   

Most of these examples are from the US.  We would love to add your story to this list to help people see things we can do to get safer, respond to and end violence.

The Story Telling and Organizing Project and the Living Bridges Project have more stories of people coming together to end violence.