Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement

by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Drugs are also a big cause of crisis.

Odd that they talk here about psych drugs and not recreational ones.

Police and hospitals are not saviors. They can make things worse. When you’re out of other options, though, you shouldn’t rule them out. Faced with a decision like this, get input from people who have a good head on their shoulders and know about the person. Have other options been tried? Did the hospital help in the past? Are people overreacting? Don’t assume that it’s always the right thing to do just because it puts everything in the hands of the “authorities.” Be realistic, however, when your community has exhausted its capacity to help and there is a risk of real danger. The alternative support networks we need do not exist everywhere that people are in crisis. The most important thing is to keep people alive.

If you know your crises get bad enough to get you into a hospital, you should use a psychiatric advance directive or power of attorney. Basically, it’s like a living will for crisis: it gives you power and self-control over what happens to you when you go into a crisis. If you start to lose your mind and have a hard time speaking for yourself, people will look at your advance directive to figure out what to do.

People need to hear things that might seem obvious: You are a good person. Your friendship has helped me. You are a cool person and you have done cool things, even if you can’t remember them now. You have loved life and you can love it again. There are ways to make your feelings change and to make your head start working better. If you kill yourself, nothing in your life will ever change. You will hurt people you love. You will never know what could have happened. Your problems are very real, but there are other ways to deal with them.

We will only call authorities in three circumstances: if a caller asks us to, if there is a credible threat to a third party, or to comply with laws regarding suspected child abuse and neglect.

Trans Lifeline does not engage in nonconsensual active rescue because, in our community, active rescue can place our community at increased risk for suicidality.

Depending on where a caller lives, a history of involuntary commitment can also preclude them from receiving gender-affirming medical treatment (such as surgery) in the future, or greatly decrease their chances.

Narcan is short-acting; it lasts forty to ninety minutes. You still need to monitor them or get them to a hospital within that time because naloxone will wear off and they could go back into an overdose.

Institutional violence within community centers, healthcare organizations, and social services, in concert with the “helping” industry’s increasing collusion with and reliance on law enforcement, fuels the prison pipeline.

Criminalization has never helped sex workers. Instead, it’s why cops can get away with committing about a third of all sexual assaults against sex workers.

Taking money doesn’t make sex dangerous.

This is untrue. Studies have demonstrated that men who buy sex are more violent and coercive than men who don't buy sex.

There is a way that survivors navigating recent trauma can process boundaries as rejection. And when this happens, I’ve witnessed and experienced survivors raising their voices, yelling, seemingly directing the entirety of their pain at the support team.

I began to think about the intensity of the rage TJ practitioners hold when the process doesn’t go exactly how a survivor expects. And the anger and hatred is not just directed at TJ practitioners, but at TJ as a practice itself. There’s a piece of capitalism in it. It feels like a terrible purchase. “I purchased a process, and you were supposed to give me salvation. This is not salvation.

we can’t return people to their lives before trauma, or before violence, and that realization can feel devastating.

How Do We Practice Belief in People’s Capacity to Transform with the Ability to See Them as They Are Right Now?

Both sides of this vent are oft-conflated with untruths that get in the way of transformative change. On one side, there is a conflation of belief in people’s capacity to transform with a belief in their transformation, regardless of evidence of behavior change. This often occurs when people (1) have not witnessed the harmful behavior themselves, (2) are struggling to reconcile it with their positive idea of the person who has done harm, and simultaneously are (3) trying not to wholly deny the survivor’s truth (or not be perceived as doing so, at least). On the other side is the conflation of present behavior with future behavior, a smart protective strategy and an understandable response when we have invested in people’s transformation and repeatedly been disappointed. But neither of these conflations are true. How do we practice belief in people’s capacity to transform with the ability to see them as they are right now? We can do so by building our accountability assessment skills and practicing in relationship with ourselves.

Honoring survivor contradictions makes transformative justice possible. Revenge fantasies and transformative justice are not mutually exclusive.

Tips for Allies and Supporters Don’t equate vengeful feelings with a move toward vengeful action. If you’re concerned or confused about discerning the difference, ask.

Tips for People Who Have Done Harm Accept that a consequence of your behavior is that others may wish you harm.

One of the very hardest things about preventing and ending violence is that most of our work isn’t really about getting someone to stop being violent. Most of the time, that’s not the heart of the thing. The even-more-rigorous struggle is to cultivate all of the awareness and skills that would have been necessary for the violence not to have happened in the first place. Which is why, when we talk about violence, we always end up talking about everything: slavery, binary gender, the original disconnection of humans from the rest of life on this planet, and so on. Solving violence is rarely as much about the moment at hand as it is about everything else that preceded it.

So what do you do in the meantime to stop violence?

Shame is different than guilt. While guilt focuses on our behavior (“I did something bad”), shame creates an identity: “I am bad.”

Overaccountability and underaccountability are two sides of the same coin: “I can’t stand how bad I feel and can’t imagine making it right (overaccountability) so I’m going to hide that it (whatever it is) even happened, or lie about it or blame someone else (underaccountability).”

“If identity—who you are—is equated with your worst behaviors, you will not accept responsibility or access genuine feelings of sorrow—because to do so would invite feelings of worthlessness. How can we apologize for something we are, rather than something we did?”

Any of us choosing to engage in a process or supporting another individual within a process need to maintain a big enough view of the situation to assess the capacity of the person who has caused harm for accountability before putting parties together. One of the most critical questions for us to engage with is the capacity and motivation of the person who caused harm to face the impact of their actions.

Saying sorry can definitely be a starting point for accountability, but it can also be a way to avoid facing consequences.

feeling bad doesn’t inherently make us more capable of stopping our harmful behavior, nor does it magically provide us with the skills to be able to do something different when presented with a similar scenario.

Doing sorry means that we are taking specific actions toward repair—even if these occur largely separately from the person we’ve harmed. For example, one person with whom I worked made monthly financial contributions to two women he had abused while in relationships with each of them.

Transformative accountability means that when we apologize, there is congruence between our words, emotions, and actions. We’re not just saying the words, but we can also name what it is that we’re sorry for—recognizing the harm we’ve caused and being able to acknowledge its impacts. Feeling remorse. Taking action toward repair and restitution and demonstrating a commitment to stopping the harm and to changing.

When we are able to face it, shame lets go to reveal pain. This includes both the pain of being hurt as well as the pain of remorse.

Folks within community accountability work have described this dynamic in a variety of ways and have developed tools to tease out responsibility and fault. Communities United Against Violence’s (CUAV) “Gems of Change” Pendulum offers a “middle path” between retaliation and minimization. The NW Network of Bi, Trans, Lesbian and Gay Survivors of Abuse’s “Find Your 6” tool supports users in finding the “six” on a scale of responsibility from one to ten rather than flip-flopping between “zero fault” and “one thousand percent responsible.” This language for describing shame, “overaccountability, underaccountability, and centered accountability” comes from the work of Generative Somatics and generationFIVE.

We are real about how long things really take. We also know that you can do things really well slowly in slow time, in ten-minutes-of-spoons time in slow time, ten-minutes-of-spoons/energy time.

But often time is of the essence when getting a perpetrator to stop harming.

If the only thing I can learn from a situation is that some humans do bad things, it’s a waste of my precious time—I already know that. What I want to know is: What can this teach me/us about how to improve our humanity?

at the beginning of the process for me, I hoped that the kids who were part of the families who were involved with us, like, the children of my fellow cofounders, would not experience interpersonal or state violence, and would not be impacted by that in their families, and some of them have. Which is something that has been really hard. Just how pervasive it is. Not just in the world we live in, but just for even those of us who are directly convening to transform. The intergenerational time scale is different than what I thought it would be.

I did have a hope that, like, OK, we had to go through all this stuff, but at least we can have this set of children that we can see from here, this set of children that we are raising in this context and they will not have to go through things that are very similar. And they have gone through things that are very similar, and that is something that—you know, intellectually, we understand that these things are intergenerational cycles of violence, and it’s really hard to accept that it will be incrementally different, but not totally gone within the span of a decade or two.

Like, the way that you do make change is you have some workshops, and you have some conversations, and then we’re not as fucked-up anymore, right? But, in fact change happens really slowly over time, and we have to have compassion for ourselves and each other in the long term, and that there’s painful, painful setbacks. I went into this—I mean, I don’t think we really thought it was “Two-Year Plan, and there won’t be any more sexual assault,” but that was, like—there was an optimism that was maybe, well, you know, it was optimistic.

I definitely had a sharp vision of how prisons would be, like, totally unnecessary within maybe ten years, you know, like in long term. [laughter] I think, in a more specific way, I really thought that once people got wind of stuff, maybe by like drenching the streets in zines or something, about how freeing it was to actually do the work to heal wounds, especially wounds around toxic masculinity and patriarchy, that folks would understand that this was such a gifted opportunity that we all had, like that it was a gift to get to be accountable and not a punishment. And that kind of core heart sense of, I can get closer to my humanness, and my own connection would be so alluring that it would not only stop violence in its tracks but kinda also just shift the shape of how people wanted to move through it after violence had happened, and people had enacted harm.

I saw abolition and transformative justice as a project that was beyond my lifetime.

when we were doing the work with Safe OUTside the System Collective, out of the Audre Lorde Project, I was really just hoping that we could provide another option for folks who had been completely dropped by the system, folks who could not rely on police enforcement, and who we knew would not go to the cops—because of the trauma that they had experienced, or the distrust, or the ways in which cops were really violent to trans and queer people of color in Central Brooklyn at that time. My hope was that we could at least provide another option for folks who are experiencing this kind of violence, racialized transphobic and homophobic violence. I do think that we were able to provide another option. Not for everyone, necessarily, but we were able to open that space. I was really stressed-out when I first engaged in this work, and pretty critical and frustrated—there was a lot of theoretical and not enough implementation, praxis, practice, humanness, care and love and healing. Contemplative or spiritual work, depending on how you engage.

I’ve been in a lot of spaces and doing a lot of work where it feels like the language of TJ is being weaponized between people. “You’re not TJ enough, you’re not abolitionist enough,” and you know, the twenty-five-year-old self who started this work in 2005, who talked to people over and over again and no one understood it, doesn’t understand how it’s become that, right?

I feel like that sometimes with TJ, because I think people are just getting glimpses of it on social media, and haven’t necessarily been in deep practice. We get the residue of the core ideas that end up being, as you framed, Ejeris, weaponized against folks. So, I definitely have heard the critiques of TJ work being this almost Christian forgiveness, what’s it called, apologist, frame. And I think that’s because folks are engaging with the residue of what people understand as transformative justice, versus the idea of it being survivor-centered healing,

What is hard? When folks who have committed harm refuse to take accountability and threaten survivors and their support network with defamation lawsuits or worse. What are survivors’ legal recourses in these situations? We still see a lot of backlash by people in power and the outing of survivors who wish to remain anonymous.

Articulating justice on new terms is having direct impact on the people most impacted by state violence in our communities right now.

What was hard: Sometimes at the end of an accountability process, people don’t feel much better. That is painful, confusing, and sometimes heartbreaking to see and witness. Accountability processes don’t delete the harm and violence that has been done and the echoes of past acts of violence and repression that ring throughout the bodies of survivors and communities. How can accountability processes effectively make behavioral and institutional change while still centering healing?

What we need now is good practice, and we need people to feel safe to make mistakes. We’ve created a politics of purity around transformative justice that’s making it really difficult for people to just try things. It’s setting up this feeling that we can’t make mistakes. But the truth is that every single mistake moves us forward, and that all the conflict that we have is a resource for our next spot, and we have to really figure out how to give ourselves the space to make mistakes.

Harm reduction has created an opportunity for social workers to stay radical in their practice of social work. So many radical people get into social work because they’re already doing the work of being a resource or a support in their community and the letters from the social work degree makes the work sustainable. So, how do we have the conversations about holding to our radical politic when social work makes us complicit with the state so often? I don’t actually think TJ can be practiced in social work, because so much social work is inherently complicit with the state. And that is the difference between TJ and restorative justice, that TJ is inherently outside the state. I think we can use the values of TJ to guide our practice. And, we can turn to RJ [restorative justice] practices, which can be really useful for social workers, who are already complicit with the state. So there’s no risk of co-opting the TJ movement—because we can reach for RJ. A lot of what we talk about is when to reach for RJ because it reduces harm in that system. And then how do we hold our larger values so that we are not in conflict with the radical practice that brought us to social work, but instead like trying to figure out how to stay sustainable in the work, while holding the value of not being complicit with the state.

The dilemma with mandated reporting is that we have mass sexual abuse, and we have mass childhood sexual abuse. And what makes sense is a mass system to address it. And the truth of that mass system is that it doubles down on the violence. And it doubles down on the harm. And the other truth is that we don’t have an alternative to it. And so, the problem is that we want to stop what’s happening to children, and we want to stop sexual violence. And we’re in these roles where the solution is supposed to be making a report. And that report is supposed to make a change that’s measurable in someone’s life, towards safety. And so much of what we see is that does not happen, or it increases the risk. So then you have this tension of like, I don’t believe in activating the state, but I’m witnessing horrific violence, and I need to take an action that doesn’t lead to violence against me as the worker, and that doesn’t increase the violence against the people who are being harmed, and so now I’m in this conflict because I don’t believe in being complicit with the state, and this is the only solution that I have going, and I need to sit with how I resolve this effectively, but the truth is that there is no effective resolution for that tension. That tension exists because it’s a giant-ass problem that we need more creativity around, and we need that tension to keep us creative. If we were looking at that from just a purity politic point, it would just be “Never participate in mandate...

There are a lot of armchair anarchists who would be like “Don’t report, man!” But that leaves out the massive numbers of kids who are being sexually abused, and the person who’s just like “I can’t not make the fucking call, so how do I harm reduce that, and if they stay here, they could die?” And the People’s Court of INCITE: Women of Color Against Violence is not gonna roll up in a bloodmobile and fix things and have a guillotine, it’s not gonna happen.

“Trauma creates change you don’t choose. Healing is about creating change you do choose.” That’s, I feel like, what we can offer in a community accountability process: the beginning of healing and a feeling of the power being back in your hands. And, also, I feel like we can offer people who have caused harm the opportunity to truly be in transformation, and to truly sit with that, and the gift of being accountable. And that is a gift that we deserve, all of us deserve.

we have circles, which, now we’re like, circling for everything, and circles are really ineffective for certain things. Leah: Like with organized crime, I don’t know if a CA process is gonna work. Shira: A CA process not only would not work, but would increase danger. Like, when the power differential is—you can’t have a community accountability process with your abusive boss in a nonprofit. The power differential is too wide. We can use transformative justice practices in those examples. And, we can think about restorative justice, and the ways it is helpfully complicit with the state in order to reduce harm from the state in certain instances. And then there’s mediation, which, everyone thinks a community accountability process is mediation. Or, not everyone, but it’s a common misconception that we can somehow mediate an experience of sexual violence. Like, actually, mediation may never have anything to do with it. Mediation is a very specific skill set that I don’t have. I do know lots of great mediators. And that’s really great for interpersonal conflict. That can be really useful with your abusive boss in a nonprofit.