From Taking to Giving Account: Narrative Frameworks of Accountability in Transformative Justice Responses to Gendered Violence

How do community-based responses to gender-based violence (GBV) imagine and implement perpetrator responsibility outside the criminal legal system? Drawing on participatory research with the transformative justice movement, I articulate a model of accountability called giving account , a narrative, qualitative approach that contrasts with the retributive, quantitative logics of taking account . I compare how these two models define harm, attribute responsibility, and proscribe desistance for GBV. Giving account repurposes a method often relegated to ‘individual’ desistance theory – narrative – as a vehicle for integrating individual agency and structural forces. Insodoing, it brings a feminist and anti-racist lens to narrative criminology.