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]