Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement

by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

for so many of us TJ is already in us, in our families and lived experiences, and is something that we just call life.

there’s been an upswing in the past five years of writing about transformative justice that sings its praises and talks about what a wonderful thing it is but is short on the specifics of how exactly you do it.

Those men stopped by the house to let the husband know that they wouldn’t tolerate his behavior and it needed to stop.”

Yet there are so many communities and families where abuse is hidden, downplayed, denied. The "community" is usually complicit in family violence.

If and when violence occurs, the people who live closest are most likely to help us, and vice versa. Relationship building doesn’t have to involve old-school door-knocking. It can be as simple as attending community events, saying hello and introducing yourself to your neighbors, or inviting your neighbors to events that you organize. It can be talking to your noisy neighbor about calling the cops. It’s about the necessity of meeting the businesses and store owners in your immediate areas and on routes that you frequently use. This strategy is not without complications. For many people, particularly women, trans, and non-binary people, the act of engaging with strangers can open us up to harassment and even violence. At the same time, these challenges shouldn’t prevent us from building relationships; they may merely shift the ways that we go about doing so.

Shift how?

Our campaign recruited local businesses and organizations and trained them to recognize, prevent, and intervene in violence without relying on law enforcement. At first, we had no idea how to work on this, but we researched, experimented, and talked with the business owners themselves to understand how they already addressed violence and then worked with them to ensure that their strategies included LGBTQ people of color.

I believe that bold, small experiments rise and fall based on two fairly simple ideas: planning and perseverance. We have to be accountable enough to continue our experiments, to measure them, to hold ourselves to high standards, and to believe in them. Even within projects carried out completely by unpaid volunteers, we are using a very valuable resource: time. Often, those of us with the least money, time, or privilege put a disproportionate amount of our time into movement work. So as we continue our experiments, we need to talk about our goals, the resources we need, and how we are going to distribute those resources equitably.

I do not need to dictate the strategies surviving family members should use. Instead, I find ways to support them that are in line with my politics because I know that just as punishment does not transform behavior, neither does judgment. When we make judgment into one of our primary organizing strategies, we reduce the trust needed to create safety. When we say “Don’t call the cops,” we usually assume that we’re talking to privileged, college-educated, upper-class, mostly white people who aren’t aware of the impact that calling the police has on communities of color. We also need to push back against our societal conditioning that tells us policing and prisons make us safer. Yet when people of color and particularly Black people choose to call emergency services, it is an inherent negotiation. We come from generations of state violence. Many of us have family members in prison. Most of us have either directly experienced police violence or intimately know people who have. These are not flippant decisions. Yet when we create a culture of judgment so thick that we make it impossible for people to admit that they have called emergency services or needed to, there are critical impacts. I’ve had many queer people of color survivors or witnesses of violence come to me for support, distraught that they called 911. “I heard my neighbor screaming. I couldn’t figure out how to safely intervene. Was I wrong to call 911?” When people who’ve experienced life-threatening injuries or pe...

Our intention was to provide information that could help to alert and protect future women who may have been at risk of experiencing the same thing we experienced.

Honestly, I'm doubtful that a guy who has abused so prolifically and unremorsefully can be transformed. The manipulative behavior means he will likely try to manipulate a TJ process.

Do not fund organizations that have unresolved allegations of harassment. When situations are unclear or messy, default to siding with those who are marginalized.

The project of building toward collective liberation is too important and too difficult to permanently cut people out when they make mistakes. We cannot afford it. Simply firing and excluding people who harass is a practice that mirrors the ultimately ineffective approach of the criminal justice system. Today, such an approach may be the best blunt instrument that we have to increase safety in our communities. I believe it is almost always a step in the right direction. Still, I am troubled by the lack of options we have for exercising accountability.

everyone said I needed to file a police report. They said it wasn’t about me. It wasn’t about my politics. It was about keeping other girls safe. And what I heard, and what a few people had the gall to say, was that if he raped another girl then it would be my fault.

But how do we warn others? Most rapists rape more than one person.

UBUNTU in Durham, North Carolina, whose members helped survivors of intimate partner violence by offering their homes as safe places to stay, providing childcare, researching legal options, and engaging in other supportive tactics; and the Safe OUTside the System (SOS) Collective of the Audre Lorde Project in Brooklyn, which created a network of “Safe Spaces” in Brooklyn for community members fleeing from violence, including local businesses in the community where employees were trained to counter homophobia and transphobia, as well as to interrupt violence without calling the police.

Sometimes accountability processes are not resolved through restorative justice. Sometimes our people are dealing with mental health needs that cannot always be met within the organization. Sometimes our struggles are practically, structurally, strategically, and politically too real for us to know how to deal with in real time.

what happens when people are both survivors and abusers? And if we don’t work with abusers, who does?

The question of whether a relationship can be mutually abusive is probably an important one to address, for the practical reason that many violent relationships break down into a debate over which person is the abuser and which is the survivor. Sometimes, the distinction is very easy to make because one person clearly has more power than the other. Often, however, things are more complex—for example, when both people in a relationship experience high levels of social oppression or marginalization.

“Listen to the survivor” may seem to imply that there can only be one survivor in a given situation, or that the first person who calls out the other has to be the survivor of an abuse dynamic. This is not necessarily true. Today, I might give this section the title “Learn to Listen When Someone Says You Have Hurt Them.”

When someone, particularly a partner or loved one, tells you that you have hurt or abused them, it can be easy to understand this as an accusation or attack. Very often, this is our first assumption—that we are being attacked. This is why so many perpetrators of abuse respond to survivors who confront them by saying something along the lines of, “I’m not abusing you. You are abusing me, right now, with this accusation!”

no one, and I really mean no one—not your partner, not patriarchy, not mental illness, not society, not the Devil—is responsible for the violence that you do to another person. A lot of factors can contribute to or influence one’s reasons for committing abuse (see the point below), but in the end, only I am responsible for my actions, as you are for yours.

In fact, very, very, very few people who abuse are motivated to do so by sadism. In my experience as a therapist and community support worker, when people are abusive, it’s usually because they have a reason based in desperation or suffering. Some reasons for abusive behavior I have heard include: “I am isolated and alone, and the only person who keeps me alive is my partner. This is why I can’t let my partner leave me.” “My partner hurts me all the time. I was just hurting them back.” “I am sick, and if I don’t force people to take care of me, then I will be left to die.” “I am suffering, and the only way to relieve the pain is to hurt myself or others.” “I didn’t know that what I was doing was abuse. People always did the same to me. I was just following the script.” “No one will love me unless I make them.” All of these are powerful, real reasons for abuse—but they are never excuses. There is no reason good enough to excuse abusive behavior. Reasons help us understand abuse, but they do not excuse it. Accepting this is essential to transforming culpability into accountability and turning justice into healing.

I find that social justice or leftist communities also tend to misapply social analysis to individual situations of abuse, suggesting that individuals who belong to oppressed or marginalized groups can never abuse individuals who belong to privileged groups (that is, that women can never abuse men, racialized people can never abuse white people, and so on). But neither of the above ideas is true. Survivors of abuse in one relationship can, in fact, be abusive in other relationships. And it’s easier for privileged individuals to abuse others because of the extra power social privilege gives them, but anyone is capable of abusing anyone given the right (or rather, wrong) circumstances. It can be easy, when confronted with the abuse we have perpetrated, to play “survivor Olympics.” “I can’t be abusive,” we may want to argue, “I’m a survivor!” Or “The abuse I have survived is so much worse than what you’re accusing me of!” Or “Nothing I do is abusive to you because you have more privilege than me.” But survivors can be abusers, too. Anyone can be abusive, and comparing or trivializing doesn’t absolve us of responsibility for it.

If you have abused someone, it’s not up to you to decide how the process of healing or accountability should work. This doesn’t mean that you don’t get to have rights or boundaries, or that you can’t contribute actively to the process. It means that you don’t get to say that the person you have hurt is “crazy” or that what they are expressing doesn’t matter. Instead, it might be a good idea to try asking the person who has confronted you questions like these: What do you need right now? Is there anything I can do to make this feel better? How much contact would you like to have with me going forward? If we share a community, how should I navigate situations where we might end up in the same place? How does this conversation feel for you, right now? At the same time, it’s important to understand that the needs of survivors of abuse can change over time, and that survivors may not always know right away—or ever—what their needs are. Being accountable and responsible for abuse means being patient, flexible, and reflective about the process of having dialogue with the survivor. Having been witness to many community accountability processes that have seemed to create more harm for those involved, I must emphasize that survivor-led does not mean that those who identify as survivors are necessarily experts in transformative justice, nor that the identified survivor in a dynamic of abuse should get to dictate what happens to the identified abuser. Survivors, understandably, may wi...

Guilt is feeling bad about something you’ve done; shame is feeling bad about who you are. People who have been abusive should feel guilty for the specific acts of abuse they are responsible for. They should not feel shame about who they are because this means that abuse has become a part of their identity. It means that they believe that they are fundamentally a bad person—in other words, “an abuser.” But if you believe that you are an “abuser,” a bad person who hurts others, then you have already lost the struggle for change—because we cannot change who we are. If you believe that you are a fundamentally good person who has done hurtful or abusive things, then you open the possibility for change.

Being accountable is not about earning forgiveness. That is to say, it doesn’t matter how accountable you are—nobody has to forgive you for being abusive, least of all the person you have abused.

You do have to forgive yourself. Because you can’t stop hurting other people until you stop hurting yourself.

He got five years’ probation and no jail time.

But he continued to abuse others in the community. How does that stop?

I remember wondering whether we had a moral obligation to warn this woman. I quickly decided—no. She was a grown woman in her mid-thirties. My father stopped stalking my mother as soon as he started pursuing his new wife. He was someone else’s problem now.

What about her children?

She was upset the cycle had repeated itself, but glad that Sulakshmi wouldn’t have to face the healing process alone.

Honestly this is an enraging statement. If state involvement can stop one child from being abused, it seems worth it, in this case at least.

She was also clear that she didn’t want our father locked in a cage; she just didn’t want to see or talk to him again.

Again, this is a serial predator. What about the next child he abuses?

Despite my clear commitment to prison abolition and transformative justice, I would be lying if I said I didn’t feel a tinge of regret at a missed opportunity for revenge.

It's not about revenge, but protecting other children.

We wanted people to understand transformative justice can be practiced even when intervening in the case of a minor who has been sexually assaulted or raped by a parent with whom they still live.

The perpetrator was not transformed. Does he continue to abuse women and girls?

If I’d cooperated with those prosecutors all those years ago, my father would have been incarcerated—and Sulakshmi would never have been born.

He's still actively going around trying to prey on young girls. What about if the person at the next gurudwara doesn't have "spidey sense?" I don't think this is the triumphant story it's supposed to be.

“Disclose to all the people you are sleeping with or dating that you sexually assaulted someone and are in an accountability process.”

This is an excellent idea for a teenage or adult survivor. But these tips don't really work for child survivors.

For example, the survivor may express goals such as the following: I wish the person doing harm were dead or experience the same harm they did to me. I wish the person doing harm could be publicly humiliated or hurt so that they would know they could never do this again. I wish this had never happened to me. I wish that I would feel the same as I felt before this ever happened. Allies may express ideas such as the following: I wish the survivor would have walked away. I wish the survivor would cut off all contact with the person doing harm. I wish the survivor would just move on. I wish someone else would deal with this. The person who did harm may want things like these: I wish everyone would just forgive me and forget about this. I wish everyone would understand that I was under a lot of pressure and cut me some slack. I wish everyone would know that the survivor deserved it—anybody would have done the same thing if they were in my shoes. I wish this had never happened.

People: We need ongoing TJ processes and formations that are made up of folks who have these skills. These formations need to be surrounded by others, who have their backs and can add to the resources and skills. This is no small practice, and we need thousands of us.

the children currently experiencing sexual abuse, children and young people who were sexually abused in the past, and adults who experienced sexual abuse during childhood or adolescence.

It seems most important that children currently experiencing abuse, above all else, are able to be free of abuse.

Children cannot and should never be expected to prevent abuse they experience. The responsibility for abuse lies with the person or people doing the harm, and with the adults in a child’s life who can stop it.

Assure the child that you will do whatever you can to prevent the abuse from happening again. It is vital for adults to demonstrate to the child that they deserve protection, including by limiting contact with the person who has been abusive.12 “Be careful though, not to make absolute promises that the abuse will stop,” caution advocates from Stop It Now, an organization working to prevent child sexual abuse (CSA), “Broken promises are harmful to any child—especially one who is already feeling betrayed.” But we can strive to eliminate all opportunities for the abuse to occur again, such as preventing the person doing the harm from being alone with the child or with other children in the family or community.

Seek additional support, resources, and help. Intervening in child sexual abuse is not a single event, but requires an ongoing commitment to keep showing up over time to support healing, accountability, and transformation. Start identifying potential allies, resources, and supports early.

It would be helpful to know where to look besides police. This info isn't exactly widely known.

Sometimes those closest to the abuse are not the most resourced to help.

The vast majority of people who sexually abuse children deny their behavior. Given current punitive interventions, there is very little incentive for any of us to acknowledge sexually abusive behavior to others. It is vital that we create spaces and encouragement for people who have sexually abused children, or who feel they might sexually abuse children in the future, to be able to share and come forward.

Most of us have been deeply shaped by the false notion that in order for people to behave better they need to feel worse and be punished. In practice, we see that humans are, in fact, far more likely to change in desirable ways when they are more resourced, not less. For example, at this time, there is no existing support within the United States for treating people with pedophilic urges. Individuals who self-identify as having these desires have had to self-organize their own anonymous online support groups for nonoffending pedophiles. In contrast, Prevention Project Dunkelfeld developed a program in 2005 in Berlin, Germany, that offered treatment and support to anyone who stepped forward to seek help with pedophilic urges. By March 2018, 9,515 people sought help from all over Germany, 2,894 people traveled to one of the sites for diagnosis and advice, 1,554 were offered a place in a therapeutic program, 925 participants have started the therapy, and 360 have successfully completed it. More than half reported having previously attempted to find therapy without success. Since 2011, the project has grown into a nationwide network called “Don’t Offend” with twelve centers that provide free weekly group therapy. The project’s slogan is “You are not guilty because of your sexual desire, but you are responsible for your sexual behavior.”

Nigh developed a support group model within which four to six trained volunteers from the community form what they call “an inner circle” around the person who caused harm. This circle meets regularly to facilitate getting the practical needs of the core member (the person who caused harm) met (such as finding housing and other services), to provide emotional support, and to challenge behaviors that may be associated with a risk of reoffending. CoSAs currently exist in several countries, as well as six U.S. states.

We see that abuse happens when one person believes, consciously or unconsciously, that their needs, wants, and preferences take precedence over others.

For many people, the idea of giving attention to the healing needs of a person who has been sexually abusive is difficult to tolerate, particularly when there are limited resources available for survivors.

Many people have fewer people they could call on to take accountability for harm they’ve done than to support them when they have been harmed. Though competent support for surviving violence is rare, accountable support for those taking accountability for harm they have done is even harder to find. More often than not, people end up colluding with abusers or reinforcing the shaming and blaming of survivors in their attempt to support someone in taking accountability for harm—if they stay in relationship with people who have harmed or been violent at all.

Asking people to organize their pod was much more concrete than asking people to organize their “community.” The shared language and concept of “pod” made transformative justice more accessible. Gone were the fantasies of a giant, magical “community response,” filled with people we had only surface relationships with. Instead, we challenged ourselves and others to build solid pods of people through relationship and trust. Doing so pushes us to be specific about what those relationships look like and how they are built. It places relationship-building at the very center of transformative justice and community accountability work.

Relationship and trust, not always political analysis, continue to be two of the most important factors in successful TJ interventions, whether in supporting survivor self-determination and healing or in accountability processes. Though shared language, values, and political understandings can be very useful in responding to violence, these are easier to build where relationship and trust already exist. By building where there are already authentic relationships and trust, rather than trying to piece together shallow versions, we help to set the conditions for successful TJ responses and also for the likelihood that people will respond to violence at all.

What if the people you trust perpetuate rape myths?

We hope that by beginning to build and grow pods where they already exist (or could exist), we can build the conditions to support people who do not have pods. By growing the number of people in the Bay Area who can recognize, talk about, prevent, and respond to violence, we hope to make it more likely that people in need of support will find it in their daily lives. We also believe that orienting from a place of growing pods can help us gradually move away from the structures that keep people isolated. In this way, building our pods is useful for ourselves and the people in our immediate circles, but it is also part of building a network of pods that could support anyone experiencing violence.

If you’re the one going through crisis, reach out to multiple people and swallow your pride. The more good help you can get, the easier the process will be and the less you will exhaust your friends.

Study after study has shown that if you react to someone in crisis with caring, openness, patience, and a relaxed and unhurried attitude, it can really help settle things down.