What Does Justice Look Like for Survivors?

Summary

In a profound talk by the Barnard Center for Research on Women, the limitations of traditional justice systems for survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault are discussed. Advocating for a transformative approach, the talk emphasizes the need for community accountability and creative solutions that resonate with survivors' actual needs. Highlighting the often-ineffective nature of legal systems, the speaker argues for alternative methods focused on healing, accountability, and substantial support from within communities rather than incarceration.

Highlights

• The speaker criticizes limited traditional justice options for survivors. 🚫
• Emphasizes transformative justice and community support. 🌍
• Survivors often don't want separation from homes and partners. 🏡
• Space for imagining desired justice leads to creative solutions. 💡
• Traditional systems often fail marginalized communities. 🤷‍♀️
• Accountability and healing need community collaboration. 🤝
• Justice isn't merely incarceration but transformation and acknowledgment. 🔄

Key Takeaways

• Transformative justice offers more options than traditional systems. 🤔
• Survivors need space and voice to articulate their true justice desires. 📣
• Community support can be vital to the healing and accountability process. 🌍
• Incarceration isn't always the justice or healing that survivors seek. 🚫
• Creating a space for transformation and accountability is essential. 🔄

Overview

In this compelling discussion, the speaker delves into the inadequacies of traditional justice systems for survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault. With years of experience in advocacy, they reflect on the limited options typically provided, such as police intervention or shelters, which many survivors do not find suitable. The insight shared emphasizes that true justice for many needs to be survivor-centered, allowing individuals to define what justice looks like in their context.

The speaker passionately argues for community accountability and transformative justice. They highlight how survivors often look for justice that aligns more closely with their lived realities and needs, examples being the desire to stop violence while staying in a relationship or leaving safely without legal intervention. Emphasis is placed on giving survivors the space to envision and articulate their concept of justice, which might require creative community-driven solutions rather than traditional punitive systems.

Further, the speaker explores societal misconceptions about incarceration as the ultimate form of justice. They suggest that for many survivors, particularly from marginalized communities, the desire for healing, acknowledgment of harm, and behavioral transformation of the perpetrator outweighs the need for traditional legal recourse. The advocacy is for a shift toward spaces where accountability, long-term community ties, and personal transformation are prioritized over conventional views of crime and punishment.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction and Background The chapter "Introduction and Background" delves into the author's extensive experience in domestic violence and sexual assault advocacy. It highlights a critical observation: while service providers often champion the concept of being 'survivor-centered,' there is a noticeable gap between intention and actual practice. The author notes that the options provided to survivors are frequently limited and not aligned with their desires. For instance, many domestic violence survivors express reluctance to seek refuge in shelters or to involve law enforcement, indicating a need for more nuanced and individualized support options.
• 00:30 - 01:00: Limitation of Current Options This chapter delves into the limitations of existing solutions available for survivors of violence, emphasizing that many individuals prefer solutions that allow them to maintain certain aspects of their relationships or leave them safely. It highlights the dissonance between existing survivor-centered options and the actual needs and desires of those affected. The author narrates their journey into transformative justice and community accountability, driven by the realization that conventional approaches often don't align with what people are actually seeking.
• 01:00 - 01:30: Need for New Approaches The chapter 'Need for New Approaches' discusses the necessity of rethinking strategies for intervening and preventing violence. It emphasizes the importance of truly understanding what survivors of violence want and need. The approach taken at Creative Interventions involved engaging deeply with survivors to comprehend their desires.
• 01:30 - 02:00: Imagining New Solutions The chapter 'Imagining New Solutions' discusses the common reactions individuals have during a crisis, particularly the consideration of calling the police or seeking shelter even if they're unwilling to do so. It explores how people often struggle to make traditional emergency responses suitable for their immediate needs and highlights the quest for alternative solutions that might better address their situations.
• 02:00 - 02:30: Building Survivor-Centered Responses The chapter titled 'Building Survivor-Centered Responses' encourages individuals to envision the type of world they desire and the responses they wish to receive following experiences of violence. The emphasis is on providing people with the space to imagine their needs and wants, even if they initially consider them impossible. This process allows survivors to articulate their desires for themselves and others in similar situations.
• 02:30 - 03:00: Justice Beyond Incarceration The chapter explores the concept of reimagining societal structures beyond traditional incarceration. It emphasizes the importance of creative thinking, community organization, and collaboration to build systems that reflect what people truly want. By harnessing collective imagination and effort, communities can create alternative ways to achieve justice and social change, even if it's not immediately possible to achieve everything envisioned. The focus is on initiating change that may not benefit the current generation but can pave the way for future improvements.
• 03:00 - 03:30: Rethinking Justice and Accountability This chapter discusses the need for a re-evaluation of justice and accountability frameworks to better support survivors. It highlights the limitations of the current criminal legal system, noting that many survivors do not engage with it due to distrust, marginalization, or criminalization of their communities. The discussion emphasizes the importance of broadening the concept of survivor-centered approaches to include alternatives to traditional legal pathways, recognizing diverse needs and desires for justice among survivors.
• 03:30 - 04:00: Space for Healing and Transformation The chapter titled 'Space for Healing and Transformation' delves into the importance of addressing issues within their respective groups, such as families, schools, or friendship networks. It highlights the common query about how to deal with perpetrators like rapists and murderers, acknowledging the deep feelings of despair, rage, and upset these questions can evoke based on personal experiences and worldviews.
• 04:00 - 04:30: Conclusion on Justice and Transformation This chapter explores the concept of justice, particularly through the lens of personal experiences. It questions traditional notions of justice, such as punitive measures, and opens a dialogue about what justice represents for different individuals. The chapter uses the example of child sexual abuse survivors to illustrate these ideas, pondering whether justice would be served by imprisonment or if it should be defined by addressing the needs and healing of survivors. It invites readers to reconsider their understanding of justice and contemplate what transformation might look like in this context.

What Does Justice Look Like for Survivors? Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 I come from many years of experience working in  the the world of domestic violence and sexual   assault advocacy what I found in the kind of  provider world is that we talked a lot about   survivor centeredness and we genuinely believed  in it but that what we offered was very limited   options for survivors and a lot of survivors did  not want what we offered. For example if we look   at domestic violence they didn't want to go to  a shelter, they didn't want to call the police,
• 00:30 - 01:00 they didn't want to be separated from homes. Many  times what they wanted was to stop violence in   relationship but perhaps stay in that relationship  or to leave the relationship but to leave safely   and so one of the ways I came to doing the  work of transformative justice or community   accountability is really coming to understand a  very deep way that so many people in my community,   through my work and my own life did not want the  options that we were calling survivor centered.
• 01:00 - 01:30 And that we really really needed to think  differently about what that meant in terms of   how we approached intervening in violence but also  preventing violence. So I'd say that one of the   ways in which in the work that we did at creative  interventions that we first questioned that was to   really deepen the process through which we asked  survivors what they wanted and that seeing that
• 01:30 - 02:00 people and many of us are this way in a moment of  crisis or when you think your only option might   be to call the police or to go to a shelter even  if you didn't want to do those things might think   how do I make those types of options fit? How do  I make the police respond in a you know in a more   immediate way? For example, but what I have found  I think many of the phone is if you actually ask
• 02:00 - 02:30 people, What kind of world you want to live in?  What kind of responses would you really want to   the violence that you have experienced? what would  you want for other people in your position? They   will come up with other kinds of things. It  might take them a while but a lot of what we   do and I think a lot of what we do in this work  is we give people space and we give people space   to imagine what they really want even if they  think it might be impossible and what you find
• 02:30 - 03:00 is when people really imagine what they really  want we start thinking creatively about how you   might actually be able to build those things you  might actually even be able to get them in your   immediate world with a little bit of thought  a little bit of organizing with a little bit   of community coming together in a different way  or at least we can think of ways in which maybe   we're not going to get that but we ways in which  we can change things so that other people will be
• 03:00 - 03:30 able to in the future I think that's been a really  important part of this work and a important part   of expanding what we think survivor-centered  means the reality is most people don't use   the criminal legal system most people do not go  to the police most people do not go to external   resources for a whole variety of reasons and big  reasons are because people are often coming from   marginalizing criminalized communities and also  people what people really want is to be able to
• 03:30 - 04:00 address it within whatever group of people it's  happening you know within their family within   their school within their friendship networks  within their religious whatever whatever the   situation is people always ask me what about the  rapist you know and what about the murderers and   and I really get that why that question comes up  and I also get the feeling of despair and rage and   upset because views of our own experiences and  what we see in the world and I also think that
• 04:00 - 04:30 a lot of times when people say that they aren't  thinking about what does justice really look like   for people like I think about like well what does  justice look like for me as a child sexual abuse   survivor was justice put it with justice have  been putting my father in prison would meant   that he would I don't know if you would ever  been put in prison but you know or you know like   that would even work but what what is what what  do we need what what do survivors need what are
• 04:30 - 05:00 those impacted really need what would justice  really look like and I think when we really   ask those questions and have the space to ask  those questions I'm not sure that most people   would say they want to incarceration even you know  there's so many people who've had egregious harms   against them and they're they still do necessarily  incarceration and that whole legal process never   feels like justice it never feels like healing  it never feels like you know you could really
• 05:00 - 05:30 move on from that you know so what would you  need to feel like justice was done and I think   for a lot of survivors it's like the people if  the people around them really believe that we   cared for them and sat with them and you know  it's it's also about the person who caused the   harm but it's also everybody around them and so I  think that that question what does justice really   what would that look like for you or for anyone  who's been harmed in that way I think we don't ask
• 05:30 - 06:00 that question and also I don't think incarceration  it's never gonna it's not going to change anyone   it's not gonna there's no space for accountability  there's no space for really reconciling with the   harm that you've caused there's no process for  you to really even have to face it we're just   so steeped in a culture of crime and punishment  and so part of supporting accountability is also   being able to have a connection long enough to  actually and building enough amongst groups of
• 06:00 - 06:30 people to actually foster the idea that know what  real justice might look like is actually creating   space for survivors to have agency and around what  actually happens to the person that caused harm   for survivors that have space for healing right  to have space to be safe and for the people that   caused harm to actually have to do those steps of  accountability have to do those steps of actually
• 06:30 - 07:00 owning up to what what you've done owning up to  the actions that need to be taken in order to make   things as right as possible and then transforming  yourself most people really what we want if we've   survived harm is for somebody to acknowledge that  harm was done to make some kind of commitment   to transforming their behavior and to give some  assurance that they will not harm anybody again   right and that takes a lot of work and that takes  a lot of commitment and that takes a lot of labor
• 07:00 - 07:30 and it calls for fundamental transformation for  a lot of people and so I don't think it's fair   to say it's you know prison or it's nothing I  think it's prison or its transformation and so   I would really prefer to see human beings  have the opportunity to transform them [Music]