Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement

by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Transformative justice and community accountability are terms that describe ways to address violence without relying on police or prisons. These approaches often work to prevent violence, to intervene when harm is occurring, to hold people accountable, and to transform individuals and society to build safer communities. These strategies are some of the only options that marginalized communities have to address harm.

While I don’t believe that we can separate ourselves from our privileges, we can leverage them toward justice.

the current systems we have put in place to address harm are actually causing additional harm.

This extra load takes away from our work, work that is strategic, that is accountable to our communities, that is focused on changing the balance of power for marginalized communities and building frontline leadership.

When situations are unclear or messy, default to siding with those who are marginalized.

We never win when we expand the powers and resources of the state to control and punish.

Most of the community accountability processes also point to the concept of transformative justice—a process where the individual perpetrator, the abusive relationship, and the culture and power dynamics of the community are transformed rather than a process in which revenge, retribution, or punishment is enacted.

Healing requires an acknowledgment that there are wounds. Healing requires parties who actually want to heal.

I set out on my road trip with my camera gear and wolf dog in a little Ford Fiesta, with pink posters that I hung up in the communities where I stopped and an 800 number where people could call me. I had promised myself that I would let families come to me and not breach anyone’s privacy or ability to grieve by making cold calls. To my surprise, I was inundated with requests to share about community members’ missing and murdered loved ones on my way. Not a single community was unaffected.

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.”

Criminal justice is interested in assigning blame and executing punishment, while transformative justice challenges the notion that punishment is inherent to justice.

While consequences for harmful behavior are a necessary outcome of accountability, those consequences should not include actions that are themselves abusive.

In fact, using the process of “doing” accountability to manipulate or coerce someone into giving their forgiveness to you is an extension of the abuse dynamic. It centers the abuser, not the survivor.

Demands are the central document in our accountability process. In situations where we have a list of demands, they fundamentally drive the design for our process.

“Recovery from trauma requires creating and telling another story about the experience of violence and the nature of the participants, a story powerful enough to restore a sense of our own humanity to the abused.” —Aurora Levins Morales, Medicine Stories14

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

recognizing and attending to the humanity of those who harm is a central aspect of transforming our families, communities, and society.

A crisis is a moment of great tension and a moment of meeting the unknown. It’s a turning point when things can’t go on the way they have, and the situation isn’t going to hold. Could crisis be an opportunity for breakthrough, not just breakdown? Can we learn about each other and ourselves as a community through crisis? Can we see crisis as an opportunity to judge a situation and ourselves carefully, not just react with panic and confusion or turn things over to the authorities?

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.

In simpler terms, forcing any person in crisis to interact with armed police officers poses a risk of that person being harmed or killed.

Around one-third of trans people live below the poverty line, a rate twice that of the general population.

Harm reduction is a set of practical strategies and ideas aimed at reducing negative consequences associated with drug use. Harm reduction is also a movement for social justice built on a belief in and respect for the rights of people who use drugs.

No young person is doing nothing when they are surviving, 24-7.

We need to organize. When we say organizing, we are referring to the most classic definition: uniting people to fight back for a common goal.

Many members of communities and groups do not know that we have a constitutional right to not allow ICE, police, or federal agents into our homes, buildings, and spaces unless they file a court order signed by a judge.

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.

This is so important for building resilience. How you manage your agency in crisis really affects how much you are traumatized. To deal with crisis, you need to manage yourself, manage the situation, manage the aggressor. This is why “trauma-informed” solutions can be problematic. They can reinforce the person as a site of trauma, not agency.

Do your best, stay in your integrity, grow, learn, rinse, repeat.

Be accountable for your mistakes, but don’t immediately assume that your mistakes are harmful. We are all learning within this work.

We are doing the work of centuries. You don’t have to get it right in one process.

Solving violence is rarely as much about the moment at hand as it is about everything else that preceded it.

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

Therapist and author Harriet Lerner writes: “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?”

people who have done harm often need to share their experiences of being harmed themselves before they’re able to feel or acknowledge the impact of their own actions. And yet, what many survivors need first from the person who caused them harm is acknowledgment of the abuse. How do we develop responses to harm and TJ processes that anticipate and account for this ongoing tension?

Where we have experienced harm, we may sometimes need help in assessing our own capacity to perceive centered accountability.

The hard truth (hard because there’s no quick fix) is that long-term injustice creates most evil behavior.

we may have rushed towards that future in ways that were harmful for us and challenging organizationally. As in we were not, as our loved one adrienne maree brown would say, “moving at the speed of trust,” but instead moving at the speed of lust for the world that we deserve.

I share my mistakes all the time, but I feel like some mistakes are mistakes in the moment, but actually work in other situations, and that can be really difficult.

And that is the difference between TJ and restorative justice, that TJ is inherently outside the state.

“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.

We also have to stop acting like saying that somebody can’t be in a space is disposing of them. First and foremost, asking someone who has caused harm not to be in a space, particularly where the survivor would be, is actually a consequence of the action that they took that was harmful. It’s a consequence. It is not a punishment. A punishment would be taking this person’s liberty and locking them in a cage for three years, or a month, or ten days, because of the actions that they took. We are not taking people’s liberty through CA. We are just not. The idea of disposability in my mind is an idea that applies to the prison-industrial complex. OK? That’s it. It is not boundaries. It is not a sense of you are not allowed to do this here. It is not, you know, people say things like, “You can’t ban people.” Well, yes we can. If folks do the same thing over and over and over again, and refuse to take accountability for that, and don’t want to learn, they can actually be banned from a particular space.