THE DUAL ACCOUNTABILITY MANIFESTO

Demetrius Wright

AllDay Solutions LLC

— I —

There is a question that changed my life.

For decades, every system I encountered — foster care, the courts, social services, the therapeutic establishment — asked the same thing: What is wrong with you?

It is the question behind every diagnosis, every sentencing, every case file that reduces a human being to a set of deficits. It is the question that teaches wounded people they are the problem. And when you hear it enough times, from enough authorities, starting young enough, you begin to believe it. You stop looking for what happened to you and start accepting that something is simply, fundamentally wrong with you.

One question destroyed that belief: What happened to you?

That question did not excuse anything I had done. It did not erase accountability. It did not turn me into a victim. What it did was open a door that had been sealed shut since childhood — the door between who I had become and what had been done to me. Walking through that door did not make me innocent. It made me comprehensible. And comprehension is where healing begins.

— II —

I grew up in a system designed to protect children that instead delivered me into the hands of people who could not protect themselves, let alone a child placed in their care. I was beaten. I was sexually abused. I was emotionally starved of every nutrient a developing human being requires. This went on for the first fifteen years of my life.

The professionals assigned to monitor my well-being saw the scars and mistook them for the person. They responded to my behavior without asking what produced it. They diagnosed the symptoms and ignored the disease. And in doing so, they failed me in exactly the way the people who harmed me had failed me: they could not see the human being underneath the damage.

I say this not to indict them. I say it because this failure is still happening, right now, in systems across this country, to children who have no voice and no advocate and no one asking the right question.

— III —

Most frameworks for understanding trauma choose a side. They either emphasize personal responsibility — you made your choices, you bear the consequences — or they emphasize systemic failure — you were failed by systems beyond your control, and those systems bear the blame. Each side views the other with suspicion. Accountability advocates worry that acknowledging systemic harm creates excuses. Systems-focused advocates worry that emphasizing personal responsibility blames the victim.

Both are wrong. Not because their concerns are invalid, but because they are operating from a false premise: that these two truths compete with each other.

They do not.

I call this dual accountability, and it is the foundation of everything I do.

Dual accountability means this: I own everything I have done. Every choice, every harm, every consequence. That ownership is mine, and it is not negotiable. At the same time, the systems that failed me — the foster care system that placed me in danger, the institutions that looked away, the professionals who saw a damaged child and chose not to intervene — own what they did. Their accountability is theirs, and it is equally non-negotiable.

These two truths do not cancel each other. They complete each other. Personal responsibility without systemic accountability is cruelty dressed as character. Systemic accountability without personal responsibility is compassion that never asks you to grow. You need both. The person who was harmed needs both. The system that caused the harm needs both.

— IV —

I wrote my memoir, Landmines: What Happened to Me, because the story needed to be told in full — not the sanitized version, not the version that makes everyone comfortable, but the version that is true. The scars, the choices, the failures of others, and the failures that were entirely my own.

I wrote the companion processing workbook because reading a story is not the same as doing the work. Understanding trauma intellectually is necessary, but it is not sufficient. The workbook asks you to apply the dual accountability framework to your own life: to name what happened to you and to name what you have done. Both. Without flinching from either.

I speak and train because social workers, therapists, case managers, and community organizations are on the front lines of this work every day, and many of them are operating from frameworks that choose a side. They need a framework that holds both truths. I have lived inside that framework. I can teach it because I am the evidence that it works.

And I am building a tool — a decision-making app — because healing is not a one-time event. It is a daily practice. Every day, the people I work with face decisions shaped by their trauma. They need something in their hands, on their screens, that helps them pause, assess, and choose differently. The app is the daily expression of the same framework: What happened to you? What are you going to do about it? Both questions. Every day.

— V —

I chose to let go of bitterness, rage, resentment, and unforgiveness. Not because I had to. Because I chose to. That distinction matters more than almost anything else I can say.

Forced accountability is compliance. Chosen accountability is transformation. The difference between them is the difference between a person who has been managed by a system and a person who has reclaimed their own life.

I am not asking anyone to forgive what should not be forgiven. I am not asking anyone to accept what should not be accepted. I am asking this: Can you hold your own responsibility and the responsibility of those who harmed you in the same hand, at the same time, without dropping either one?

That is the work. That is the question this manifesto poses to every person who reads it, every professional who encounters it, every system that has ever claimed to serve people while failing to see them.

What happened to you matters. What you do next matters equally.

Both are true. Both are yours.

—

Demetrius Wright is the author of Landmines: What Happened to Me and its companion processing workbook, both available on Amazon. He is a speaker, trainer, and trauma recovery facilitator based in Oakland, California, working through AllDay Solutions LLC. His work centers on dual accountability as a framework for healing, prevention, and systemic change. He can be reached at demetriusawrightauthor.com.