Solidarity and Community Accountability for Systemic Harm

Sor Juana's silencing occurred through community participation: institutional authorities, religious hierarchies, intellectual circles that could have supported her but often did not. Punitive justice often isolates accountability to individual perpetrators, leaving communities absolved of complicity. Restorative justice, especially addressing systemic harm, requires community members to recognize their own participation in or benefit from injustice and commit to change. This concept draws on Sor Juana's example to ask: who knew? Who benefited? Who had the power to intervene and did not? In contemporary applications, communities address police violence not by punishing individual officers alone, but by examining how community members have accepted or normalized that violence, how institutions have protected perpetrators, and what collective transformation is required. Solidarity becomes not abstract sympathy but active participation in accountability. Communities that benefited from women's intellectual exclusion must actively create space for women's voices. Those who accepted institutional authority without question must become critical. This concept recognizes that restorative justice cannot succeed with harmed individuals and perpetrators alone; it requires communities to examine their own complicity and commit to new ways of being together that prevent future harm.