We all know the internet helps foster mob mentality, and it's oh-so-easy to get caught up in a social justice scandal. And I don't think that behavior is useless or even mostly bad--it helps us create social norms against stuff like rape and racism.
But focus on punishing an individual for a transgression also fails pretty badly on a number of fronts. First, it upholds a taboo on wrong/abusive behavior that prevents people from confronting such behavior in our society. For example, if admitting to abusing a partner means someone is ejected from the society of nice people, it becomes too horrible for someone to analyze their own behavior or sit a friend down and tell them what they've observed them doing. This becomes a huge problem in things like discussion of rape culture, because the majority of people have done something that qualifies as sexual abuse/assault in the most stringent definition--examples include assuming a man wants sex (as young women are socialized to do), having sex with someone who's been drinking or consuming other drugs, sex where consent was given out of a sense of obligation rather than enthusiasm, taking some behavior as implied consent (as all young people are socialized to do), and many others. Most people can't accept both that sexual abuse is one of the most horrible things you can do to someone, and that it's something they and/or many of their loved ones have committed.
This leads to the next major flaw with the punishment focus: It can reduce political and cultural issues to individual morality. It's hard to talk about how we're all doing really terrible things when our heads are stuffed with memes about how only monstrous people deserving of ostracism or other vengeance do really terrible things. We can never get to constructive critiques of cultural and structural injustices if 7 billion individual egos and reputations are in the way.
And the third thing is pretty simple: People are limited, but messing up doesn't suddenly make them no longer worthy, equal human beings. People deserve and need compassion and forgiveness. We're going to make mistakes in morality the same way we make mistakes in math--and we'll never grow past them if we're too paralyzed with fear of the consequences to learn. We're stuck, like the rest of the world, not just the humans in it, in historic cycles that grew out of amoral systems of physics--energy has to come from somewhere--and natural selection. There are no easy answers for achieving moral perfection--there is quite possibly no path to righteousness. We deserve to treat each other like we're walking through the perilous landscape that we are, both physically and morally, and understand that doing our best isn't enough to prevent us from ever doing harm, but it is better than nothing. We need each other.
Each of us can and should participate in trying to uncover, understand, and heal the wounds of our culture. I tend to shake my head at the idea of "slacktivism"--what more effective and sustainable way of making a better world is there than starting conversations that shift public opinion? You can't fight the culture without acknowledging that it's in you and in the people you spend your days with. All those social justice scandals end up being a great way to understand the issues, but once it turns into an "us" versus "you" thing, we've lost most the battle. It's an all-of-us thing.
Some people are really into retributive justice, but I'm not one of them. Yes, there are some people who knowingly and willfully harm others when there's an easy alternative, and something needs to be done to stop those people. Yes, you absolutely should turn your back on a friend who's victimized another friend in order to support the survivor. But all of society doesn't need to give up on everyone who's ever done anything that harms someone, because that's every single one of us and we're each people anyway. We need to focus on things like prevention, and finding people who are falling through the cracks. We need people who are willing to say, "No, that's not a family matter," when they suspect a child or adult's in trouble, and we need even more urgently strong, effective education to undo the cultural scripts that promote and justify abuse of all sorts before someone ever gets their hands red. And after. We need scripts that say, "Okay, you messed up and hurt someone. Take a big breath and go forward to make amends." We need to look at how all of our institutions are part of the systems of abuse that make up much of our culture, and we need to be able to name the problems with them without having supporters make the discussion into a duel to defend their honor. It's about fixing the future, not further entrenching the past.
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