And the distinction is the whole point of everything I did, so let me try to explain it.

Revenge and accountability can look similar from the outside — in both, someone who did a terrible thing suffers a serious consequence.

But they are opposite in their nature, and the difference is everything.

Revenge is personal, and private, and it operates in the dark, and it answers violence with violence, and it makes the avenger into a version of the very thing he is avenging.

It also settles nothing, because it exists outside any system that anyone else can trust; it is simply one person’s power imposed on another, which is exactly the crime those three boys committed against my daughter in the first place.