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.

At its core, the work to create safety is to build meaningful, accountable relationships within our neighborhoods and communities.

We have to be accountable enough to continue our experiments, to measure them, to hold ourselves to high standards, and to believe in them.

The crucial questions are: What can you help build? What conversations can you start to increase the safety of your community? What new structures or collaborations will you create to decrease your reliance on the criminal legal system?

When we make judgment into one of our primary organizing strategies, we reduce the trust needed to create safety.

When people who’ve experienced life-threatening injuries or people witnessing violence decide to call an ambulance, we must acknowledge that we have yet to build an alternative to 911.

Remembering that one of the primary goals of our work is relationship building, we must ask ourselves who wins when we shame survivors for using the available options when all such options are violent.

Abolition is a hopeful vision that means each moment where harm happens is an opportunity to transform relationships and communities, build trust and safety, and grow slowly toward the beautiful people we are meant to be, in the world that we deserve.

I believe our wider movement community is capable of holding a process of accountability where we (1) protect community members when the potential for harm from specific people exists and (2) hold open a door to a transformative healing process, including people on both sides of the harm.

Start by believing survivors and allying with us. We are not the problem because we came forward with information about someone’s abusive behavior.

When you hear a rumor about harassment or assault, make it your job to approach the people who have committed harm or their organizations directly.

Make it your job to approach people that you see working with people who have committed harm or their organizations when there is a history of harassment or assault.

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

Our first priority always has to be to protect people at risk of harm, but if we hope to build communities that are truly safe, we need to understand and transform the source of harm. Francisco’s personal story is complex.

Simply firing and excluding people who harass is a practice that mirrors the ultimately ineffective approach of the criminal justice system.

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 social justice communities, so many of us have histories of trauma that come from generations of people forced from our land, bent and twisted by patriarchy, slavery, and genocide.

Missing from the #MeToo conversation about blacklisting was the decades-old conversation in social justice communities about how to protect people who experience harm and abuse while creating a transformative path to wholeness—for the person harmed, the person who harmed, and the community as a whole.

Community accountability emphasizes the belief in people’s ability to transform and grow and does not deem people disposable.

At the same time, we do not accept the notion that any member’s growth should ever be at the expense of another member’s physical, mental, or emotional well-being or sense of safety, especially in cases where there are significant power imbalances between the members in conflict.

not your partner, not patriarchy, not mental illness, not society, not the Devil—is responsible for the violence that you do to another person.

But survivors can be abusers, too. Anyone can be abusive, and comparing or trivializing doesn’t absolve us of responsibility for it.

When having a dialogue with someone who has been abused, it’s essential to give the survivor the space to take the lead in expressing their needs and setting boundaries.

We live in a culture that demonizes and oversimplifies abuse, probably because we don’t want to accept the reality that abuse is actually commonplace and can be perpetrated by anybody.

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

Being accountable is not about earning forgiveness.

Rather, self-accountability is about learning how we have harmed others, why we have harmed others, and how we can stop.

Most of our accountability processes last between nine months and two years, and they could potentially continue ad infinitum.

“When is it time to wrap up a situation?” Much like therapy, there is no objective answer to this, but here are some indicators for when it might be appropriate to wind things down.

One obvious signal that it’s time to close out a process is when both the letter and the spirit of the demands have been met.

Usually, “ending” a process looks more like phasing it out. Over time we go from meeting each week, to twice a month, to once a month, until finally we are only meeting to check in periodically.

By standing for everyone’s need for healing, we challenge the dehumanizing logic that is central to systems of oppression, domination, and abuse.

Your pod is made up of the people that you would call on if violence, harm, or abuse happened to you; if you wanted support in taking accountability for violence, harm, or abuse that you’ve done; if you witnessed violence; or if someone you care about was being violent or being abused.

In general, pod people are often those you have relationship and trust with, though everyone has different criteria for their pods.

would be larger than it actually was. Most people have just one or two people in their pod. We reassure people that this is not a popularity contest, but rather a chance to reflect on why we have so few relationships with the deep trust, reliability, and groundedness we need to respond well to violence.

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.

To deal with crisis, you need to manage yourself, manage the situation, manage the aggressor. This is why “trauma-informed” solutions can be problematic.

Accountability can look many different ways—stopping harmful behavior, naming harmful behavior, giving sincere apologies, stepping down from leadership roles, developing daily healing and reflection practices to address root causes of harmful behavior, building a support pod,28 providing material repair, contributing to community efforts to end intimate and sexual harm.

Dodging accountability can look many different ways—denying, avoiding, minimizing, shifting blame, manipulating, disconnecting, waiting it out without taking genuine action.

CI’s Staircase of Accountability is a helpful tool for assessing levels of accountability.29

The steps are to (1) stop the immediate violence; (2) recognize the violence; (3) recognize the consequences of violence without excuses, even if unintended;

(4) make repairs for the harm; (5) change harmful attitudes and behaviors so that violence is not repeated; and (6) become ...

Transformative accountability means that when we apologize, there is congruence between our words, emotions, and actions.

By facing our shame, we can begin to free ourselves from the inferiority we have internalized, reclaiming our agency and taking bolder actions for social justice and right relationship with our planet.