Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement

by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

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...