A Duty to Resist by Candice Delmas

Author:Candice Delmas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2018-01-11T16:00:00+00:00

Rescue through Reform

Samaritan perils generate duties of rescue. But when these perils are persistent, effecting rescue in every instance when it is needed is daunting, unending, and insufficient. It was certainly helpful and noble to assist assault victims under Jim Crow, but one-off rescue couldn’t undermine White-supremacist norms and systematic failure to enforce the equal protection of the law. The same goes with police brutality today: aiding assault victims one by one does not change the institutional and cultural conditions of policing in minority communities where brutality is common. Instead citizens need to push for reform. Unjust laws and institutions must be scrapped or revised in order to correct or impede systematic endangerment.

This is a novel idea. No one questions whether the Samaritan duty demands physical assistance, but structural reform is another matter. Indeed, in the biblical parable, the Samaritan need only help the wounded man. The Samaritan does not concern himself with the injustice that allows the assailant to go free and perhaps recidivate. That is all right so long as the victim rescued by the Samaritan is not a member of a persistently imperiled group. But when he or she is, the Samaritan duty demands more than a one-off rescue: it demands structural reform of the law or institution that generates persistent Samaritan peril, in order to reduce the latter.

In cases of humanitarian intervention, we are used to associating Samaritan rescue with serious, sometimes prolonged, intervention, for the basic purpose of preventing atrocities (and not, say, establishing just institutions). The same reasoning is at play in the present case of persistent Samaritan peril, but it concerns rescuing groups of people from dangerous situations enabled by unjust sociopolitical conditions, and so it demands rectifying those. The Samaritan duty can thus also support reforming laws or institutions that entrench persistent Samaritan perils.

So what does this look like in practice? I noted earlier that Native American women face structural Samaritan perils, given the staggering rate of sexual violence they are victims of. Eradicating these perils entails extensive legal, social, and moral reforms, some of which are underway. Some nongovernmental organizations such as Anishinabe Legal Services and Indian Law Resource Center exemplify Samaritan assistance, as they work to ensure safety and freedom from fear for Native women, through the establishment of rape crisis centers and the provision of legal resources for victims.39 One key issue is that 86 percent of rapes and sexual assaults upon Native women are perpetrated by non-Native men, and very few are prosecuted.40 In her novel The Round House, Louise Erdrich draws a vivid picture of the tangle of laws that hinder investigation and prosecution of rape cases on many reservations in the United States.41

In 2011, President Obama enacted the Tribal Law and Order Act (TLOA), a comprehensive law designed to fill key gaps in the criminal justice system and improve the federal government’s ability to work with Indian tribes in the investigation and prosecution of crime impacting tribal communities.42 The TLOA marked a crucial effort in the Samaritan rescue.

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