Another round of 'Kill Your Local Rapist' (KYLR) discourse has veered its head and once again it has shown just how ingrained patriarchy still is in the left. The Foucauldians and the Leninists and the rational centrist Socdems have all come together in blissful harmony to mob a group of mainly transfeminine people - just as Marx intended. Patriarchy wants to maintain power and nothing will help it more than legions of the supposedly most progressive of us running out for it and protecting it from those it oppresses the most. These people's reaction to KYLR is almost entirely unique in the discussion of fighting back against oppression. No one bats an eye at Palestinians killing Israeli settlers; everyone loves to argue over just how much the Romanovs deserved it; and who doesn't feel cathartic when Django unloads two revolvers and a stack of dynamite into the people and structure that tortured him and his wife.
But then, if all of this action historical, fictional and in present day is celebrated as anti-oppressive violence - the fight of the downtrodden against their masters and abusers - why is the mere concept and discussion of survivors of abuse being able to think and act for themselves so immediately treated with disgust and dismissed as "mob violence" and "lynchings".
To no ones surprise it all comes down to the patriarchy.
Patriarchy requires the force of rape to keep itself around, rape is a tool of power and discipline in the same way prisons and cops are (which is why to no ones surprise, prisons and cops love doing rape). Basically everyone can understand on its surface that rape is bad but in many cases people either don't realise or don't want to realise rape's function as a tool of oppression and this leads to the decentreing of survivors. If rape isn't an oppressive relationship but a criminal relationship then that means it can be dealt not like an oppression but as a criminal issue and criminal issues are far more easy to view as purely individualistic things. Bob raped Alice because Bob can't control his sexual urges, because Alice was already performing oral sex so what's the issue with vaginal sex etc. Because of this rape doesn't have to be seen as a tool of oppression and so actions typically associated with anti-oppression are now extremist and immoral.
Think about how other oppressions are also spoken about in similar ways by more obviously liberal people. "Why are you advocating for revolution, Kier Starmer just released his workers pledge." "That police officer was just a bad apple. There's no reason to burn a precinct." "Stop punching fascists that gets nothing done, instead you should focus on electing Joe Biden."
The way these oppressions are defanged and abstracted is obvious and most communist and anarchists can - thankfully - easily see how. Patriarchy and abuse however are still very strong forces that inject their justifying ideologies into any cracks and communities they can in part i would assume because of how easy it is for anyone to become a patriarch or an abuser. There's no capital requirement to being abusive, any power one gets - especially with how gendered society is - is capable of being a reason someone might abuse someone else for. Seeing survivors as an actually oppressed group means fighting abuse as a structure and fighting things as structures is how you destroy those structures. The goal of the abuser is to alienate survivors and erase them from the conversation. How can someone fight collectively against you if they cannot be heard?
Getting back to twitter discourse then, phrases like 'Kill Your Local Rapist' make people angry because they showcase a radical solution to a problem they see as non-structural. 'Kill Your Local Rapist' is an expression of a radical potential solution. It is the survivors form of the Marxist "we shall not make excuses for the terror" and just like the Marxist phrase, people who see it as the be all and end all of politics are dishonest hacks.
One of the ways rape apologists (I will not shy away from calling these people what they are) view survivor autonomy through legalisms is through assuming all positions and actions and slogans of survivors are policy positions that should be implemented into either the current state structure or some future hypothetical society. This leads to accusations of being pro-carceral; trying to assume that suggesting lethal violence as a solution to abuse is giving the state or racists or transphobes or some other group permission to roam the world lynching people deemed rapists. Panics about false accusations are brought up and suddenly your feminists are speaking almost identically to men's rights activists.
This legalistic equivocation fails on three fronts:
1) The assumption that a legalistic form of 'KYLR' is even plausible, as if a patriarchal state would suddenly come and swoop in to adopt a radical position and start taking rape seriously or that a most typically anarchist group of people would even want that.
2) The assumption that advocating for 'KYLR' puts minority groups at risk of roving bands of false accusers. This is a form of victim blaming and assumes that a future that listens to survivors is the same as the ongoing present of racism or transphobia. I would go as far to say its an expression of the 'RVO' in 'DARVO'. Suddenly the violence enacted on minoritised peoples is caused by very often minoritised survivors trying to fight back and not - you know - the structure of racism and transphobia and patriarchy.
3) The assumption that it recreates the same structures as cops or prisons or anything like that. An oppressed group rising up against an oppressor in fact does not use the same tools as their oppressor.
The way to defeat oppression is through the autonomy of the oppressed. Therefore to defeat abuse and rape survivor autonomy must be centred. Survivor autonomy means actually listening to survivors. Listening to what they actually say about their experiences and listening to what they want to happen. "Kill Your Local Rapist" does not in fact mean hunt down everyone suspected of rape, its a showcase of what is possible in an anti-oppression framework. Listening to survivors means not overtaking them and speaking for them at all times and not assuming you know what is best for them.
Kill your local rapist and centre survivor autonomy. Anyone with any consistent anti-oppression or class based framework should easily see why survivor autonomy is necessary and anyone concern trolling about false accusations or not understanding how rape fits into patriarchy is either stupid or malicious.
When a woman does actually kill her rapist in the real world it is met with two extreme responses. The patriarchs hate her and want her dead, imprisoned or raped again. Those who want to see a world free of rape and abuse celebrate her.