Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement

by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Both of us knew that there were resources, but you need to know where to look to find them. Accessing so many of the resources that we knew about required knowing who to ask, what workshops to take, where and when they were happening, and what terms to Google—and if you were outside a particular generation or movement context, knowing all that didn’t come easy.

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.

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.

Sometimes people have a misconception that abolition is entirely about firing the cops and burning the prisons. It is actually about knowing that the current systems we have put in place to address harm are actually causing additional harm.

Accountability includes naming the behavior and impact of our actions, issuing an apology, and taking specific steps toward reconciliation or restitution.

My work as a prison abolitionist has taught me that as much as we try to “throw away” people—through the prison industrial complex, through deportation, through violence—people do not simply “go away” when it is convenient or desired. Further, when somebody is “outside”—unaccountable, invisible, not a part of—there is very little possibility of reconciliation, transformation, or healing.

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.

Criminal justice is interested in assigning blame and executing punishment, while transformative justice challenges the notion that punishment is inherent to justice. I feel strongly that as long as punishment remains at the center of our thinking around accountability and justice, survivor-led processes are doomed to fall into the trap of individuals desperately trying to avoid accountability out of fear.

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

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.

When we say that we work to hold people who have perpetrated sexual assault accountable10 for the harm they have done, this means that we strive for them to do the following: Recognize the harm they have done, even if it wasn’t intentional. Acknowledge that harm’s impact on individuals and the community. Make appropriate restitution to the individual and community. Develop solid skills for transforming attitudes and behavior to prevent further harm and make contributions toward liberation. We conceptualize roughly five phases to an accountability process: the Beginning, Designing the Structure, Life Process, Tools We Use, and Closing a Process.

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.”

We see that abuse happens when one person believes, consciously or unconsciously, that their needs, wants, and preferences take precedence over others. People engaging in abusive behaviors are often numb to, or seemingly unable to feel, the impacts of their behaviors on others.

It is important to center the needs of those most directly impacted by the harm in a situation. We also hold that recognizing and attending to the humanity of those who harm is a central aspect of transforming our families, communities, and society. Seeing and dignifying the healing needs of people who abuse also runs counter to the idea that some people “out there” are “monsters” who are expendable or need to be “weeded out.” By standing for everyone’s need for healing, we challenge the dehumanizing logic that is central to systems of oppression, domination, and abuse.

Feeling suicidal is not giving up on life. Feeling suicidal is being desperate for things to be different.

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.

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

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?”

Disabled survivors who are other than cis women—who are men, trans, non-binary, intersex, or Two-Spirit—are never included in these discussions. There’s rarely any discussion of the sexual, physical, and emotional abuse that is ableism—from medical stripping in hospitals to medical experimentation to the genital mutilation of intersex people; from forced treatment, restraints, and chemical or psychiatric surgery to forced sterilization, or to simply never being asked before being touched by a medical provider.

I want to talk about how ableism pushes us into isolation, strips us of social capital, and thus so many of us stay in abusive relationships of all kinds—or sometimes act in ways that cause harm—because finding love, sex, and companionship as a disabled person is so goddamned hard, and we feel like we have to take what we can get, or because we haven’t had any role models of other disabled people loving and dating well. I want to write about how disabled people of all kinds are targeted by abusers, not because we are disabled, but because abusers target people who are seen as less credible because of ableism, knowing we are less likely to be believed—for reasons ranging from “that person’s crazy” to “who would rape you?” I want to write about how survivors being dismissed as “crazy” is ableism.

I want anti-ableist forms of accountability that don’t throw disabled people who cause harm under the bus, into every stereotype about “crazed autistic”/“psychotic”/“multiple personalities abusive killers.” Instead, I want us to create accountability recommendations that are accessible to our disabilities and neurodivergence.

Even—especially—when we are scared of the answer. It’s easy to decide a person or group is shady, evil, psychopathic. The hard truth (hard because there’s no quick fix) is that long-term injustice creates most evil behavior. The percentage of psychopaths in the world is just not high enough to justify the ease with which we assign that condition to others.

One thing I’d like us to do more of is have realistic conversations with survivors about what a TJ process can and can’t do. I think that another place that this politic has led us is to the idea that TJ can somehow undo a harm, or that the harm can somehow be healed, and that really, unfortunately, those of us who are survivors know that it’s an ongoing lifelong process, and what I want a community accountability process to do is set everyone up for the best possible healing, and set everyone up for the best possible transformation.