Responding to Violence, Restoring Justice
Table of Contents
Feminist anti-violence movement development towards incarceration
Criminalization and the feminist anti-violence movement
Intersectionality and the feminist anti-violence movement
Introduction
At a promising moment in the history of the feminist anti-violence movement, a number of activist organizations are carving new means to prevent violence out of broad visions of justice. This project offers profiles of some of these organizations, providing insight into their histories, visions, and organizing methods as well as information on past and present projects, interviews with organizers, and links to outside resources. For context, it also provides an overview of the history of the feminist anti-violence movement and some well-documented criticisms: namely, that it has focused on the role of gender to the detriment of other relevant factors, such as race and class, and that this has contributed to a harmful dependence on policing and incarceration. Operating with these criticisms in mind, the groups profiled here point to a broader paradigm shift occurring in anti-violence work that is revitalizing the movement. Community-based organizations not only provide culturally sensitive and linguistically appropriate services, but are also working to build a more inclusive and rounded movement; in recent years, a number of grassroots organizing projects have sprung up that recognize the harms of policing and incarceration and seek to build alternatives based in community and social transformation – to prevent violence and promote justice.
As a contribution to this ongoing effort, Sakhi for South Asian Women convened two meetings in 2011 and 2012, with feminist anti-violence activists. Led by Sakhi’s Executive Director at the time, Tiloma Jayasinghe, both meetings were co-sponsored with the Barnard Center for Research on Women. As an Activist Fellow at the Barnard Center for Research on Women, Tiloma Jayasinghe worked with BCRW and Research Assistant Erin Ward to document the anti-violence movements to which the Sakhi convenings make a contribution. This website includes video of the Preventing Violence, Promoting Justice Summit and brief interviews conducted by Tourmaline Gossett with community organizers about their innovative work. The website is inspired by the efforts of these community-based activists and their organizations.
Anti-violence activism in communities of color has demonstrated the need for an intersectional approach to address the inter-relations among interpersonal violence and issues such as immigration, employment, and incarceration. As noted by Shelby Chestnut of the Anti-Violence Project in her interview, for example, employment is itself a complex issue ranging from questions like access to education to discriminatory barriers to hiring trans people. Questions of immigration, police violence and vulnerability to homelessness and of transnational gender violence are all linked to questions of intimate violence, and as a result, efforts to prevent violence must address these issues. Cecilia Gaston of the Violence Intervention Project, which works to end domestic violence in Latino communities, recognizes the need to provide community members not just with linguistic interpretation (although this is important), but also with a road map to the systems and bureaucracies in the United States. Without knowledge of how systems work and the ability to access needed assistance, individuals and entire communities become particularly vulnerable.
Interviews with organizers also show the need for change in social movements and organizations. As Cecilia Gaston notes, current funding structures put community-based organizations in competition with each other for funding, thus undercutting possibilities for mutual support and solidarity. Similarly, several interviewees note the need for connections across areas of work that are often separated or even put into competition: services for survivors of violence, advocacy for new approaches and policies, and broad social changes to prevent violence and create justice. As Sally MacNichol says of CONNECT’s partnership model for social change, the effort is to build long-term relationship so as to model “ a whole other kind of society.”
These organizations are developing new methods of working to end violence that incorporate an intersectional analysis and that do not depend on policing and incarceration as a means of either defense or response. Several community-based initiatives are using storytelling as a method of recognizing the complexities of responding to violence and charting a way forward that attends to the voices of those who have survived violence without simplifying their stories for the sake of expediency. Organizations have also sought new sites for talking about the realities of violence and the possibilities for ending it. Whether through voluntary healing circles, or a campaign focused on restaurants and small businesses, or the production of short videos to highlight individual cases of women who have survived and yet been punished through incarceration, organizations are building on the traditional tools of conferences and campaigns to find new ways of promoting a more just world. Overall, these organizations are building an alternative future through the daily practice of addressing people’s needs holistically. As Loretta Ross states eloquently in her interview undertaking this expansive work also offers a vision of new possibilities: “Our work is to inspire people, show people that they can do something to make things better. I believe people have to be drawn to a vision of hope.”
Feminist anti-violence movement development toward incarceration
Understanding and addressing violence against women as a social and political problem began with grassroots organizing–women speaking out about the violence they had experienced in the intimate sphere of their lives, externalizing it through everyday discussion and in consciousness raising groups and protest, and meeting it with supports like non-hierarchical peer-run rape crisis centers and battered women shelters. Women’s self-defense and self-help groups and trainings worked to develop means for women to protect themselves and change the world simultaneously. This approach was initially intertwined with other strands of organizing. In revealing a widespread social problem, these grassroots organizing efforts also unveiled systematic indifference of state and social institutions to violence against women and even their hostility toward the women who experienced it. At this time, women who relayed their experiences of violence, or who went to the hospital after they were raped were virtually ignored or who called the police for protection from abuse met with blame and ridicule. The movement saw the systematic failure of institutions to respond to violence against women as another manifestation of gender subordination and began to demand improved institutional responses and state protection of women from violence.
As greater attention was paid to institutional and legal reform, the feminist anti-violence movement itself became increasingly institutionalized and professionalized–formal organizations came to replace grassroots organizing projects, employing professionals and formal expertise in the service of greater social service delivery. These organizations also came to rely almost completely on the criminal legal system to address violence, as earlier calls for legislative change were met with the passage of statutory rape laws, rape shield laws, mandatory arrest policies, and the establishment of specialized domestic violence courts. In 1994, the U.S. Congress passed the Violence Against Women Act. VAWA, as it is called, was aimed at improving criminal justice responses to violence against women through the development of coordinated community responses and tougher penalties for offenders. It also provided funding for services for victims of domestic violence, sexual assault, and stalking. The first federal law acknowledging domestic violence and sexual assault as crimes, VAWA is seen by many as the feminist anti-violence movement’s greatest success, and by others as emblematic of a solidified and harmful reliance on the criminal justice system. Critics argue that the increasingly punitive orientation of the anti-violence movement has been detrimental to women marginalized not only by gender, but also by factors such as race, class, sexuality, nationality, and immigration status. For example, VAWA recommended a mandatory arrest policy that made women of color, poor women, and immigrant women in particular vulnerable to arrest, welfare surveillance, and deportation. In this way, these activists and scholars have also been critical of the movement’s singular focus on gender in their analysis.
These different strands of social movement – grassroots self-empowerment and greater institutionalization with a focus on legal reform and, eventually criminalizing – took place in a context of growing neoliberalism. The economic and social policies instituted under the broad framework of neoliberalism have led to a reduction in the provision of state services, which have been replaced by policing as the state response to all social issues and social movements intertwined with the state, and thus dependent on policing. Thus, at the same time feminist activism called for state protection of women, mass incarceration was swelling the prison system, and critics have argued that many forms of anti-violence activism have played into this expansion of policing and incarceration.
In the midst of this complex field, efforts to connect prevention of violence with the creation of what Linda Burnham terms “social justice feminism,” have persisted but not always been predominant. These efforts have pushed back against dependence on the criminal legal system, and promoted community-based and intersectional approaches that are part of a wide range of efforts to create a less violent world.
(Kristin Bumiller and Beth Richie both chart this evolution from grassroots organizing to professionalized and law-and-order responses, see chapter 4 in both In Abusive State and Arrested Justice.)
Criminalization and the feminist anti-violence movement
As the feminist anti-violence movement has come to rely on the criminal justice system to address violence against women, feminist critics of mass incarceration have raised a number of concerns about this alliance. One such concern has to do with its efficacy in broad terms–while some women are made at least temporarily safer by laws that require police to arrest and detain assailants, it is not clear that enhanced law enforcement has resulted in lower rates of violence against women (Richie 2012). Critics of the carceral approach also take its differential impact into consideration. More specifically, they consider its repercussions for women of color and their communities. One major problem with relying on law enforcement to respond to domestic violence is the criminalization and incarceration of survivors themselves (Coker 2001). Harsher policies targeted at domestic violence such as mandatory arrest have resulted in the dual arrest of women defending themselves, and can also result in women’s threatened probation or parole status when they have a history of criminal offenses, heightened vulnerability to deportation when they are undocumented, and surveillance or unwanted intervention by child welfare departments (Richie 2012; Bumiller 2009; Coker 2004). Here, critics argue, the role of both race and class is paramount–poor women of color are particularly vulnerable to these forms of criminalization–yet is largely missing from the gender-focused analysis of the mainstream anti-violence movement. In her account of the evolving feminist anti-violence movement, Beth Richie points to this lack of race and class analysis as partial explanation for the alignment of the movement with the criminal justice system (2012, 2016). An exclusive focus on gender also produces an analysis that abstracts women of color from their communities, even as carceral responses to domestic violence play into the disproportionate criminalization and incarceration of Black and Hispanic men and women in the U.S. more broadly (Richie 2012; Bumiller 2009).
The neoliberal carceral state
The feminist antiviolence movement is not singular in this move toward the carceral, however. As sociologist Elizabeth Bernstein demonstrates with her study of the contemporary anti-trafficking movement, feminist campaigns have come to facilitate the law-and-order agenda of the neoliberal state in this way in a broader trend she describes as “carceral feminism” (2007, 2012, forthcoming). With her notion of a “prison nation,” Richie explains neoliberalism and the implementation of this agenda, a shift from state provision of social welfare to the management of marginalized groups further disenfranchised, and how it came to define the feminist antiviolence movement to the detriment of poor Black women in the U.S. (2012, 2016). Likewise, Kristin Bumiller attributes the movement’s reliance on the criminal-justice system to this shift in politics (2009). Conversely, she shows that its carceral focus had by the early 2000s entered into the human rights paradigm and policy of the U.S. to be disseminated abroad.
These accounts are part of a larger body of literature interested in a broad pattern of heightened criminalization and incarceration in the U.S. that dates to the 1970s–that along with Richie’s term, “prison nation,” has been referred to variously as mass incarceration or mass imprisonment, hyperincarceration, American gulag, the New Jim Crow, lockdown, and the prison industrial-complex. David Garland examines the social and economic conditions surrounding the “tough-on-crime” agenda of the political Right that began in the 1970s, arguing that increasing economic and racial stratification at this time contributed to its development into a project of mass imprisonment (2001). Similarly, Ruth Wilson Gilmore explains the boom in prison construction that occurred in California beginning in the early 1980s as a “geographic solution to socio-economic problems,” namely, “surpluses of capital, land, labor, and state capacity” (2007). Loïs Wacquant also demonstrates a causal relationship between political-economy and the trend of rising incarceration, which he terms “hyperincarceration” to indicate the disproportionate impact the shift from social state to penal state had on poor African-American men (2010). Another prominent analysis of mass incarceration that examines race is The New Jim Crow, in which author Michelle Alexander argues that US prisons function as a new “caste-like” system of racial domination, linked in U.S. history to chattel slavery, racial segregation sanctioned by Jim Crow laws, and the War on Drugs. Critical feminist scholars like Julia Sudbury examine not only the role of economy and race in rising incarceration, but also the place of gender; in her introduction to an anthology on these converging factors, she pays particular attention to recent trends of incarceration affecting women: the rapid growth in the number of incarcerated women overall (a 2,800% increase from 1970 to 2001 in the U.S.) and especially in the number of incarcerated women from the global South (many of whom, she notes, are criminalized for their emigration) and women of color, who currently make up the fastest growing prison populations.
Prison abolition
Informed by such analyses, anti-prison activists such as Angela Davis make the case for the abolition of prisons. In her own analysis of the “prison-industrial complex” and representative book Are Prisons Obsolete?, Davis argues that imprisonment and prisons are inherently violent and as such, cannot be reformed into a just practice or institution. Recognizing that a world without prisons is difficult or impossible for most people to imagine, Davis points to slavery, lynching, and segregation as racist social institutions that were once thought impossible to abolish. Davis provides these historic examples to illustrate that ideas of what is just are shaped by their socio-historic context, and that organized social movements can help to shift these ideas. This is the goal of Davis and anti-prison activists more broadly, who seek the abolition of prisons and propose community-based alternatives.
Community-based alternatives
Restorative and transformative justice are the most commonly discussed alternatives to incarceration. In the case of sexual or domestic violence, survivors work with family members, friends, and other members of their communities to address the violence they have experienced and can involve the person who has harmed them if they wish. Some models of restorative justice are based on the Navajo mediation practice of peacemaking circles (Coker 1999), while some work in affiliation with the criminal justice system (for example, restorative justice is sometimes adapted for child welfare cases in the U.S. and Canada and is used with juveniles convicted of minor crimes in Australia and New Zealand (Braithwaite 1999)). Alternatively, transformative justice (sometimes called “community accountability”) is always conducted outside of the criminal justice system. Transformative justice is a mode of community-based justice that can be used to address gender violence. As its denomination is meant to suggest, however, transformative justice is aimed at transformation of the social relations and conditions that gave rise to the violence in question, rather than conflict resolution or the restoration of peace alone (Generation Five 2007; Kelly 2011). The concept of transformative justice was developed by the grassroots organization Generation 5 as a way to address child sexual abuse, and has been implemented by several others in response to sexual and domestic violence.
Though community-based justice is meant to provide alternatives to criminalization and incarceration, its practice has run into problems familiar to the criminal justice system. In particular, community-accountability circles that make use of coercive or punitive measures to hold a wrongdoer accountable may actually end up resembling the criminal justice system, especially when the person in question does not wish to be held accountable (as is often the case). Thus, the practice can be harmful rather than helpful to survivors of violence, who often do not benefit from continued interaction with the person who has harmed them. And although restorative and transformative justice is meant to facilitate validation of the harm that a survivor has experienced, its implementation is not always successful in this way. As described by Mimi Kim and other facilitators of restorative and transformative justice, community members involved sometimes end up supporting the perpetrator of violence rather than its victim, pressuring the victim to reconcile with the wrongdoer, or minimizing the harm done (Kim 2011; INCITE! 2006). In addition to concerns about their effectiveness in condemning violence, assessments of community-based responses to violence raise the question of whether they provide sufficient concern for safety (Bumiller 2009; INCITE! 2006). For this reason, restorative and transformative justice programs may be best suited to specific situations, such as those in which the threat of recurring violence is minimal or well after the violence has occurred. Restorative and transformative justice can also be useful when the person harmed wishes to continue their relationship with the person who has harmed them, offering an alternative to the separation-focused mainstream response by giving them control of the agenda. That it provides some measure of control for the survivor in processes of responding to violence is one the greatest strengths of the community-based justice. In addition, processes can provide survivors with social, emotional, and material support and help to bring about community change. To empower those who have experienced violence, the feminist anti-violence projects documented in this website are working to focus on bolstering these forms of support, both through direct assistance and community organizing, including advocacy for systemic policy change and protest of state action that inhibits them.
Intersectionality and the feminist anti-violence movement
Led by women of color anti-violence activists, one strand of critique of the feminist anti-violence movement has been focused on the strands of activism organized around a singular focus on gender. Alternatively, an “intersectional” approach also considers others like race, class, sexuality, and nationality as they meet in situations of violence. The concept of intersectionality (now descriptive of a broad theoretical approach to feminism that has made its way into the mainstream) was actually developed through discussion about violence against women of color. In her landmark essay, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw used her concept of intersectionality to demonstrate that gender, race and class inequality shape experiences of violence. Drawing on fieldwork at battered women’s shelters in Los Angeles in 1980s, Crenshaw describes the additional barriers many poor nonwhite women face when attempting to address their situations of violence (e.g. the burdens of poverty and child care responsibilities) and argues that the failure of institutions to address these consequences of converging gender, class, and race oppression ultimately limits their ability to meaningfully intervene.
A number of feminists have since taken up the concept of intersectionality to address violence against women in this way. In 2000 the “Color of Violence Conference,” organized by INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, brought this approach to a broad constituency. INCITE!’s eventual publication of these ideas in a 2006 anthology examines federalism, the criminal justice system, globalization, militarism and colonialism, and economic exploitation as forms of violence against women, among others (e.g. federalism leaves Native women vulnerable to abuse on reservations, the INS and border patrol perpetrate sexual assault). Calling attention to these forms of state violence, INCITE! complicates the gender-focused analysis of the feminist anti-violence movement and challenges its ensuing reliance on the criminal justice system. In the 2005 edited volume Domestic Violence at the Margins, for example, feminist activist-scholars contemplate the impact of gender and various other structures of oppression and discrimination such as race, class, and sexuality. This type of analysis demonstrates the need, they explain, for varied responses–backed by broad social transformation. For example, consideration of class and poverty calls for the procurement of safe and affordable housing, the consideration of nationality and immigration, services specific and sensitive to culture, language, and religion (Abraham, chapter 16; Dasgupta, chapter 5; Horsburgh, chapter 14); likewise, attentiveness to sexuality would manifest LGBTQ friendly services (Kanuha, chapter 6). Also putting the experiences of women of color at the center of analysis, in its 2006 anthology, the national grassroots collective INCITE! Women of Color In her most recent work, Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America’s Prison Nation, prominent activist-scholar Beth Richie recounts the development of the movement in this way and the harm it has caused poor Black women in the United States. Stories of their false imprisonment, surveillance, and physical and sexual assault by police officers serve to illustrate this harm and the need for rounded understandings of violence that recognize and address, not further, social degradation and violence against marginalized women.
Organizational Directory: Practices for Preventing Violence, Promoting Justice
Intersectional Approaches
Sakhi for South Asian Women is an organization in New York City that seeks to end violence against South Asian women and to support those affected by it. There are nearly 30 South Asian women’s organizations that exist for this purpose (a list of organizations and their locations can be found here: http://www.sakhi.org/resources/sawos/).
Sakhi, which means “woman friend” in Hindi, was founded in 1989 as an organization by South Asian women for South Asian women. Among many South Asian cultural and religious centers in New York City at the time, there was no space for women to address their experiences of interpersonal violence. Sakhi changed this–as Margaret Abraham describes in her book on South Asian women’s experiences of domestic violence, “What Sakhi did was bring together issues around ethnicity and gender, which were previously not discussed in our communities.”
Today, Sakhi continues to merge issues of ethnicity and gender, among others. The organization offers culturally sensitive and linguistically specific services for South Asian women in situations of domestic violence, including crisis response and safety planning, advocacy and translation assistance in court and at public benefits agencies, and a weekly support group. Sakhi also has programming to address matters of sexual assault, economic need, immigration and citizenship, mental and reproductive health, and youth experiences. Sakhi’s work in each of these areas is a vital contribution to achieving the broad and intersectional vision of “gender justice” they see as necessary to end violence against South Asian women.
Sakhi’s definition of “gender justice”:
Gender justice envisions and fights for a world in which people of all gender identities and expressions have the support and resources they need to live safe, healthy, and fulfilling lives. These might include, but are not limited to, safe and loving homes and families, comprehensive and accessible healthcare, material security (i.e. job security and food security), cultural expression, education, and political agency. Gender justice recognizes that realizing this vision cannot be done without considering issues of gender, race, socioeconomic class, sexuality, nationality, ability, age, and other factors that inform identity and power, and thus, consistently works with an intersectional approach to its activism. –Tiloma Jayasinghe, previous Executive Director of Sakhi, “VAWA @20”, 2014:63
Sakhi resources:
- Preventing Violence, Promoting Justice: A Conference held on October 10-11, 2011
- Jaysinghe, Tiloma. 2014. “VAWA @ 20: The Gender Justice Movement: The Fullest Expression of the Former Battered Women’s Movement and the Domestic Violence Movement.” CUNY Law Review 18 (1).
- Munshi, Soniya. 2011. “Multiplicities of Violence: Responses to September 11 from South Asian Women’s Organizations.” Race/Ethnicity: Multidisciplinary Global Contexts 4 (3): 419–36.
- Munshi, Soniya. 2013. “Negotiating Violence, Navigating Neoliberalism: Domestic Violence Advocacy Efforts in South Asian Communities in Post-9/11 New York City.” Order No. 3561232, City University of New York.
“AVP empowers lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and HIV-affected communities and allies to end all forms of violence through organizing and education, and supports survivors through counseling and advocacy.”
Founded in 1980 as a grassroots response to violent attacks on gay men, the Anti-Violence Project (AVP) has since expanded to address violence both against and within LGBTQ communities. Today, AVP advocates and provides support for LGBTQ people experiencing anti-LGBTQ, intimate-partner, sexual, police, and HIV-related violence. This work is comprised of community organizing, research, education, policy advocacy, and financial and legal services. The largest anti-LGBTQ violence organization in the country, AVP also organizes the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs–a coalition of organizations and groups across the US that use data analysis, policy advocacy, and education to prevent and respond to violence within and against LGBTQ and HIV affected communities–and the the New York State Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender & Queer Intimate Partner Violence Network–a network dedicated to ensuring that domestic violence related services are LGBTQ inclusive.
Shelby Chestnut, Director of Community Organizing and Public Advocacy at AVP, explained their work in responding to domestic violence in an interview with Tourmaline Gossett in 2016:
I was socialized to think DV was a straight people issue that didn’t happen in LGBTQ communities. Unfortunately so many DV service providers still think that way. A lot of the work we do is responding to the lack of services inclusive to LGBT folks; we are constantly harping at more mainstream providers and organizations to understand: “women” is not the term for survivor people. If I’m not welcomed in a place offering services I am going to not engage and seek alternatives or stay in relationship that is harmful to myself.
We have to exist in intersections of multitude of oppressions and that’s where we see a lot of cross coalition organizing especially with immigrant communities where police are about the last people who are safe building an infrastructure rather than tearing communities apart, where we know where we as a group can find these solutions outside of the state sanctioned mayhem serving no one.
There’s a mentality in the DV movement that says you are not a good survivor if you don’t leave your partner and we need to do work around the fact that sometimes the person just wants the violence to end. They love the person they are with but they just don’t want it to be a violent relationship. How do we create services where you can learn about healthy relationships and warning signs of violence? If you are experiencing hate violence every day on the street is your defense mechanism to act it out towards a person you love and care about?
It took us 2 years to convince anyone that funds us that if you want to address violence you need to address systemic issues like employment. There are 6 people in the community room right now who if they could get a job their lives would be forever changed and it’s not for lack of trying. For real reasons kicked out of home at young age, in need of GED programs, life skills programs, money thru HRA, economic empowerment specialist working with intimate partner survivors on ways to regain financial self determination: bank account, credit score, GED program external raising awareness and also internal education.
Our big joint campaign that we will be launching is on social barriers that trans folks are facing. We want cis people to understand issues facing trans people for employment, looking at both increasing employment but also the barriers that folks facing when trying to access employment. We are also partnering with businesses or orgs to create jobs for trans people. It’s funny what people think AVP does depending on when you learned about AVP. So…in the 80s you think we only do hate violence…in the 90s you think we only do domestic violence, and like now as we continue to grow you might just be the one stop shop, we jokingly say we should just open a shelter because it’s the one thing to complete the AVP puzzle.
Violence Intervention Program (VIP) is a nonprofit organization devoted to ending domestic violence in New York City’s Latino communities. Founded in 1984 as a public health project, funded by the East Harlem Council of Human Services (EHCHS), VIP first provided public education on the issue and crisis intervention assistance. It was later established independent of EHCHS, and moved to a Manhattan office that expanded services to include a Spanish-English bilingual hotline, counseling, and advocacy. In 1988, at a time of high rates of homelessness, VIP established the first shelter for immigrant Latinas experiencing domestic violence in New York City with the understanding that immigrants who experience violence are especially vulnerable to homelessness. In 2005, VIP created the first domestic violence transitional housing program in the city for undocumented women. Today, VIP has locations in Manhattan, Queens, and the Bronx that offer culturally sensitive services for Latina women in situations of violence. In addition to a bilingual hotline, counseling, and temporary housing, VIP offers financial counseling and education workshops, as well as assistance for those who apply for financial relief from the Office of Victim Services. The organization also does community organizing and public education, distributing bilingual educational material on domestic violence and offering workshops and training for community-based and social service organizations like schools, police departments, and child protective services.
Cecilia Gaston, Executive Director of VIP:
We work with the community because anti-violence work happens through violence intervention. It is the bystanders, medical practitioners, people at organizations, people on the street who can intervene and make a difference and we are asking them to take a stand. We know that every family that goes into crisis is a brick we lose in the foundation, ultimately putting the whole community at risk.
We do this through community education and outreach and keeping a focus on how we ourselves treat each other. We hire women from the community and we need to pay living wages in our own organizations, develop institutions that treat our staff as empowered. To that end we do financial empowerment training with the staff.
Right now we are training workers at Mexican, Colombian and Ecuadorian consulates about immigrant community and domestic violence so that people working with organizations working with immigrant communities can identify domestic violence and know what to do. Research shows that people know who has to deal with domestic violence but don’t know what to do. Slowly we are changing that.
We also play the role of systems interpreter for immigrant communities fleeing normalized gender violence, a community that doesn’t understand the systems here, a community constantly told that they can lose their children at any moment. How do you give them the concept of right to self determination? How do you make them understand about informed consent at the doctor?
In New York State we have state police demanding show me your papers like in they do in Arizona. Someone I know, a Puerto Rican man was stopped 7 times by state troopers, finally he said “I’m Puerto Rican, I don’t have papers!” And police said “Where in Mexico is Puerto Rico?” If you think it doesn’t take courage to get out of your house every day, you have no clue. All immigrants are Mexicans now and “rapists” and bad and are having “anchor babies.” Another woman recently told me that she works in a Chocolate Factory in Staten Island and there they have three tiers of pay: US citizen, legal immigrants, and undocumented. Totally normalized – so we must hold up the torch. We are the megaphone.
But it is hard, in this culture my status depends on my fundraising and not on how I work, you don’t get extra brownie points for being a collaborator, you get it for fighting for revenue. But that is counter to our culture and what we need. Capitalism is not the best for our community, we are told to compete against each other as opposed to strengthening each other for the good of all. But that’s not a model that is honored in this country, the grants are all competitive. You try to fight as smartly as possible and make sure you treat everyone right, you have to institutionalize care and decency.
SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Collective is a Southern-based national collective dedicated to reproductive justice for women of color. Sistersong has been a leader in developing “reproductive justice” (RJ) as a framework for organizing that extends beyond the idea of “choice” as a basis for reproductive rights. Because a focus only on rights does not sufficiently address the needs of women of color, who are often denied not only legal rights, but also the ability to exercise rights that are nominally available, the concept of reproductive justice seeks to expand the framework and focus on organizing. Groups like SisterSong working toward reproductive justice acknowledge a need to fight not only for the legality of abortion, but also its accessibility–as many women of color cannot afford it–and for the right to bear children. As SisterSong founder Loretta Ross noted in 2006, reproductive justice: “offers a new perspective on reproductive issue advocacy, pointing out that as Indigenous women and women of color it is important to fight equally for 1) the right to have a child; 2) the right not to have a child; and 3) the right to parent the children we have, as well as to control our birthing options.” SisterSong names contraception, comprehensive sex education, STI prevention and care, alternative birth options, prenatal and pregnancy care, domestic violence assistance, and livable wages, for example, as resources that women of color have trouble accessing and important components of reproductive justice. SisterSong promotes reproductive justice today by organizing conferences for women of color in the field, working with activists and activist groups outside of it to incorporate RJ into their own work, and engaging policy makers and mainstream organizations.
Loretta Ross, co-founder of SisterSong:
For 20 years I’ve been talking about human rights and now seeing more and more people who are doing anti-violence work using the international human rights framework. This creates a quilt of people working in different arenas that are sharing a sense of values. So right now I see domestic violence as less isolated than it has been in the past and that means I’m seeing people talking about violence against not just women but also queer people, talking about violence happening along economic lines, and against immigrant communities. This is so important.
Our work is to inspire people, show people that they can do something to make things better. I believe people have to be drawn to a vision of hope. If all you can offer is dread and despair people won’t be drawn to your message. Fear mobilizes momentarily but is not a sustainable organizing strategy against violence over the long haul. Fear based strategies mean you have to keep changing objects, people are only going to believe the sky is falling so many times. That is why I believe in hope and optimism, one thing I believe that we have to get away from is cynicism.
We are doing more popular education storytelling, disclosing our experiences and encouraging people to tell their stories in simple ways that are also revolutionary and allow for the more structured forms of popular education. And we combine that with stringent critique, community organizing and grassroots mobilization. I am one of those people that goes ballistic when the focus becomes only policy without people and power because it sucks the life from the movement. It creates an elite caste within a grassroots organizing who do policy work and that is antithetical to building movement. You don’t create social change by begging elected officials, you create the social conditions where they have no damn choice.
Resources
Loretta J. Ross, Lynn Roberts, Erika Derkas, Whitney Peoples, and Pamela Bridgewater Toure, eds., Radical Reproductive Justice. New York: The Feminist Press, 2017,
INCITE! Women, Gender Non-Conforming, and Trans People of Color Against Violence
INCITE! was created in 2000 after its founders organized a conference for women of color activists who felt limited by the singular focus on gender in existing anti-violence organizations. These activists wished to expand the anti-violence movement to address the varied forms of violence women of color experience and their related issues, including immigrant rights, indigenous treaty rights, prisons and incarceration, reproductive justice, medical experimentation, homophobia and hate crimes, neo-colonialism, and institutional racism. The conference, planned as a gathering for a small group of activists, quickly expanded as word of it spread and more and more activist women of color grew interested; over 2000 activists attended and more had to be turned away. To address this demand and sustain the conference’s momentum, the creators of the conference founded INCITE! as a long-term forum and grassroots campaign.
Today, INCITE! is a national network of affiliates and grassroots chapters working across the U.S. to end violence against women and trans people of color. Importantly, INCITE! understands this violence as a combination of “violence directed at communities” (such as police violence, war, and colonialism) and “violence within communities” (such as sexual and domestic violence). INCITE! in this way works at what they call the “dangerous intersections” of multiple oppresssions, including sexism and racism to address the violence resulting from these oppressions. INCITE! seeks not only to end sexual and domestic violence against women and trans people of color, but also state and institutional violence. This approach is described in a statement INCITE! produced in collaboration with the prison abolitionist organization Critical Resistance in 2001, illustrated here.
INCITE! operates through a combination of grassroots organizing projects–some examples include community accountability projects, a radio show produced by women of color, rallies against street harassment, self-defense training for women of color, and organizing “mothers on welfare.” INCITE! also organizes conferences and national projects (e.g. against police violence, sterilization abuse and the Hyde Amendment, and militarism) and publishes anthologies and other media on ending violence against women of color.
Preventing Violence without Incarceration
Beyond the Bars is an annual conference that brings together activists, advocates, service-providers, scholars, students, the formerly incarcerated, and others connected to the criminal justice system to discuss its injustices and alternative visions for creating safety and justice. Held at Columbia University, the conference is put on by the Beyond the Bars Fellowship, the Center for Justice at Columbia University, and the Criminal Justice Caucus at the Columbia School of Social Work. Its panels and workshops address various components of prison abolition, from the “root causes” of violence to responses that do not rely on criminalization and mass incarceration. An outline of topics covered (e.g. violence against women and the criminalization of survivors of violence, criminalization of immigrants, criminalization within schools, violence within prisons, higher education programs for prisoners, charitable bail funds, recidivism and reentry, prison divestment, activism through art, restorative and transformative justice practices) can be found in conference programs archived here: 2017, 2016, 2015. These topics can be explored greater detail through archived conference speaker and panel videos, such as this vital presentation by longtime anti-domestic violence activist Beth Richie on a feminist prison abolition at Beyond the Bars 2014.
“Project NIA’s mission is to dramatically reduce the reliance on arrest, detention, and incarceration for addressing youth crime and to instead promote the use of restorative and transformative practices, a concept that relies on community-based alternatives.”
Project NIA organizes against carceral responses to violence and advances community-based alternatives through a combination of advocacy, organizing, public education, research, and capacity-building. In 2016, for example, Project NIA mobilized against and helped defeat former Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez in the 2017 Democratic primary with their informational material and #ByeAnita campaign, which highlighted her “complicity in state violence against Black and brown people in the City of Chicago.” In particular, the campaign focused on Alverez’s prosecution of a domestic violence victim seeking to report police officer misconduct, along with her refusal to investigate and charge police officers responsible for misconduct, abuse, and murder of unarmed civilians. Project NIA also organized a day of action to close youth prisons in Illinois and a project collecting posters that illustrate questions meant to foster discussion about harm and restorative justice responses. In 2015, Project NIA organized events and campaigns highlighting instances of police violence, including a screening of “End of the Nightstick” (a 1994 documentary on the Chicago Police Department torture of over 100 Black suspects from 1972 to 1991) followed with a successful campaign in solidarity with organizations pushing for a reparations ordinance for the torture survivors (#RahmRepNOW and http://chicagotorture.org/), a conference and teach in about the U.S. Department of Justice investigation into the Chicago Police Department after Officer Jason Van Dyke murdered Laquan McDonald, and events highlighting police violence against Black women like Rekia Boyd and Sandra Bland and against Black youth like Tamir Rice. Project NIA has existed since 2009, and information about more of their projects can be found at https://niastories.wordpress.com/.
The Survived and Punished Project is a grassroots organizing project that protests the incarceration of survivors of violence. The project organizes to free and provide support for survivors of violence who have been criminalized for their methods of survival, including “self-defense, ‘failure to protect,’ migration, removing children from abusive people, being coerced into acting as an ‘accomplice,’ and securing resources needed to live.” Survived and Punished works with the understanding that women of color, along with undocumented, poor, transgender, queer, disabled women, and those in the sex industry or with a criminal record more often seen as criminals than as victims deserving of support.
Survived and Punished calls for the release of all survivors of gender violence, but supports campaigns that seek the release of individual survivors as a way to make this demand concrete and visible. Recently, for example, they participated in the Free Marissa Now Mobilization Campaign, which successfully campaigned for the release of Marissa Alexander. Alexander was found guilty of three counts of assault with a deadly weapon and sentenced to a mandatory minimum 20 years in prison for firing a non-deadly, non-injurious shot as a warning to stop a violent attack by her husband. Survived and Punished is currently involved in a number of campaigns to support survivors who have been incarcerated, including the #FreeBresha campaign in support of Bresha Meadows, a 14-year-old girl charged with aggravated murder after shooting her father in defense of herself and her family from his violent abuse. Information about other campaigns Survived and Punished supports can be found on their website homepage and in videos created in collaboration with the Barnard Center for Research on Women.
CONNECT is an organization in New York City that seeks to end domestic violence through community engagement. To this end, CONNECT has partnered with nearly 200 community-based organizations, faith-based groups, and social service agencies. Through their Community Empowerment Program, CONNECT offers education and capacity-building programming and research assistance for these organizations to help them better understand, respond to, and prevent domestic violence in their communities. CONNECT also offers social service providers, activists, teachers, and other community members courses on the dynamics of intimate-partner violence and training on working with those affected. Other programs offered by the organization are customized for youth, faith-based organizations, women affected by violence, and men who work with survivors of violence or who wish to provide support. CONNECT also offers legal advocacy for immigrants and for survivors to receive services and reimbursement through the Crime Victim board. Finally, the organization works to raise awareness about the link between intimate-partner violence and animal cruelty, and to create pet friendly shelters and foster care for the pets of people forced out of their homes by violence.
Sally MacNichol, PhD, Co-Executive Director of CONNECT, in an interview with Tourmaline Gossett on CONNECT’s partnership model that seeks to shift and share power as part of creating a world without domestic violence:
Connect NYC has a multifaceted approach to preventing domestic violence. We work with all different kinds of community-based organizations, faith-based institutions, schools, using a partnership model that centers long-term relationship building with people. One important principle is that we are not dictating anything to our partners, we call it a midwifery model. We are present and finding the resources and liberation strategies our partners already have, using that to create responses and prevention strategies. We are operating out of the commitment to people having strategies that are their own but they haven’t yet uncovered.
Good intervention is part of prevention, so our legal advocacy supplies information and a supportive place for women facing domestic violence to call and figure out what the best plan for them is. We aren’t judgmental. Sometimes times the best plan might be using the criminal legal systems so we want to make sure they know how to negotiate those systems & we support them directly in that way. We also work with men, building groups of men who are allies and thinking this through violence and masculinity to really work with changing the attitudes and behaviors of men and boys. Our work with trans people is new but an area we want to strengthen and try to include a way for people to talk about gender and create a web of space to young people to tell all of their experience.
One thing that is really important is that we have recently done more healing work with the intention of having trauma not to be passed on. We hosted a really important holistic healing fair for women in October 2015, which included healing circles, education about alternative healing modalities such as Japanese reiki, community acupuncture, and had yoga classes, self defense, polarity, a health coach, childcare, food and a place for people to just hang out!
It’s hard to quantify the changes you can really see, feel, partners with different areas, challenging for instance people say “let’s measure” domestic violence. We would like to be able to do more transformative justice work circles and responses and we do that informally, we aren’t formal about it. We have an organic to our work, supporting those who come to have space to have their own experience and feel safe in their experience, all the while modeling a whole other kind of society. I think the partnership model is an answer to that, sharing power and shifting power, slow and deep work happening in circles, modeling the kind of environments we seek to create: non judgmental, and where we come up with the new ideas together.
The founding of Creative Interventions was inspired by the initial Color of Violence Conference, and the critique produced by the conference of institutional responses to gender-based violence. Led by Mimi Kim, a founding member of Incite! Women of Color Against Violence, Creative Interventions was established to imagine, think through, and test out community-based alternatives for responding to violence. In 2004, the organization began facilitating a pilot model of community-based intervention into interpersonal violence. After two years, they created a toolkit on community accountability informed by this experience and the observations that came out of it. A series of charts, question guides, concept explanations, tips, and checklists, the toolkit helps users to think through how to organize and follow through on their own intervention and accountability process. Creative Interventions also developed their StoryTelling & Organizing Project (STOP), collecting and documenting stories of community accountability to illustrate what people do to carry out interventions and lessons taken from them. Creative Interventions now serves a resource center housing their toolkit, STOP stories, and other resources on community accountability online and offering workshops on community accountability and transformative justice.
Founder Mimi Kim has published extensively about the work of Creative Interventions and the complexities of preventing violence and creating justice. Her essays and articles include:
Kim, M. (2010). Alternative interventions to intimate violence: Defining political and pragmatic challenges. In Ptacek, J. (Ed.), Restorative Justice and Violence against Women (pp. 193-217). New York: Oxford University Press.
Kim, M. (2010). Alternative interventions to violence: Creative interventions. In G. Kirk & M. Okazawa-Rey (Eds.), Women’s Lives: Multicultural Perspectives (pp. 291-296). New York: McGraw Hill.
Kim, M. (2012). Moving beyond critique: Creative Interventions and reconstructions of community accountability. Social Justice, 37(4), 14-35.
Kim, M. (2014). The mainstreaming of the criminalization critique: Reflections on VAWA 20 years later. CUNY Law Journal. VAWA @ 20. Online publication.
Formed in 2000, Generation Five developed out of years of community-based organizing around the issue of child sexual abuse. The founders of Generation Five convened community leaders and organizers, social service agencies, and adults who had experienced sexual abuse as children—in a series of community meetings, using the information they gathered from these meetings to develop the concept of transformative justice as a response to child sexual abuse. Generation Five describes their concept of transformative justice as liberatory in that they seek not only individual justice but collective transformation of the social relations that allow child sexual abuse to occur. An engine for this concept, Generation Five began by training activists in a yearlong program and creating a vision to end child sexual abuse within 5 generations through community organizing. They worked to build community-based responses nationally, sharing this vision and their model of Transformative Justice with other groups in conferences and workshops. Although Generation Five is no longer active, their model has inspired the launch of other transformative justice groups, such as the Challenging Male Supremacy Project in New York City and the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective.
16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence Campaign
The 16 Days Campaign is a global campaign that takes place every year between November 25th (International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women) and December 10th (International Human Rights Day). The Campaign emphasizes that violence against women is a human rights violation, while highlighting the systemic nature of militarism and gender-based violence, which encourages inequality and discrimination and prioritizes weapons spending over funding for quality education, healthcare, and safe public spaces. The culture of militarism builds on and protects systems of power by controlling dissent and uses violence to settle economic, political, and social disputes. Militarism draws on and perpetuates patriarchal models of political, economic, and social domination of people by a small number of elites and privileges violent masculinity as acceptable behavior. The 16 Days Campaign’s focus on the intersections of gender-based violence and militarism is an effort to work toward a more equitable and peaceful world.
The Center for Women’s Global Leadership (CWGL), as global coordinator of the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence Campaign, seeks to mobilize actions and awareness of issues related to gender-based violence and linkages with militarism and economic and social rights. The Campaign promotes “Peace in the Home and Peace in the World.”
Savi Bisnath, Center for Women’s Global Leadership: 16 Days of Activism to End Gender-Based Violence Campaign
Domestic and intimate partner violence (IPV) affects every society, culture, and community. IPV flourishes because of economic dependence, gendered social norms, and inadequate and gender blind policies. Economic independence and transformative shifts that eliminate the current social acceptance of gender inequality and violence is necessary for an end to domestic and intimate partner violence. The presence of small arms, such as guns in the home, increases the risk of murder by 41%, but in domestic and IPV situations for women the risk becomes even greater (272%). Not surprisingly, experts estimate that approximately 900 million small arms are in the global market, with women three to four times more likely to be victims of threats and deaths compared to men. The use of and the proliferation of small arms is an extension of the normalization of violence, violent masculinity, and militarism. To curb these rates of violence, action must go beyond lip-service, legislation, or reform and toward focused implementation of prevention, protection, justice, and services for survivors.
Within this context, and taking an intersectional approach, which appreciates that women are positioned differently because of their class or caste, gender, geographic location, race or ethnicity, religious affiliation, and sexual orientation among other categories of analysis, the 16 Days Campaign highlights the complexities of addressing the root causes of gender-based violence and the need for feminist mobilization toward its end.