Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement

by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

So many people experiencing violence or other emergencies don’t want to call the police—or in some cases understand that they should not—but have no idea of what to do instead. In the years leading up to our decision to coedit this book, both of us witnessed many conversations where people would complain that there were “no resources” to explain how transformative justice or community accountability works. 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. Organizations don’t always stay around and are often under-resourced, so if you don’t know where to look, you may find only the remnants. At the same time, there’s been an upswing in the past five years of writing about transformative justice that sings its praises and talks about what a wonderful thing it is but is short on the specifics of how exactly you do it. This project began because we wanted to offer a resource that could help explain not why but how to do transformative justice.

we also wanted to fill in some of the million different ways “not 911” can look. So this book includes disabled-made toolkits for supporting people who are experiencing emotional crises without calling the cops; Trans Lifeline’s story of running a national crisis line by and for trans people that, unlike every other suicide prevention hotline, never calls 911 without an explicit request; Oakland Power Projects’ deep dive into how Black and brown people in Oakland deal with medical crises and overdoses; Audre Lorde Project’s detailed toolkit for creating safer club and party spaces without police; and Audrey Huntley’s descriptions of how she and other Indigenous women and Two-Spirit people led successful murder investigations into the deaths of Indigenous women when the cops failed to act, using ceremony and the skill of “just talking to people.” Addressing violence while not engaging with police, prisons, and courts is a beautiful task that can also feel totally overwhelming. These pieces show some of the many ways people can dive in.

1: Building Community Safety Practical Steps toward Liberatory Transformation Ejeris Dixon

The work of transformative justice can happen in a variety of ways. Some groups support survivors by helping them identify their needs and boundaries while ensuring their attackers agree to these boundaries and atone for the harm they caused. Other groups create safe spaces and sanctuaries to support people escaping from violence. There are also community campaigns that educate community members on the specific dynamics of violence, how to prevent it, and what community-based programs are available. As the powerfully inspiring movement to end anti-Black state violence continues to grow, we must ensure that our work toward community safety receives the same attention and diligence. As a person who has survived multiple forms of violence, I know that ending state violence alone will not keep me, my family, my friends, or my community safe. I’m excited by the campaigns that organizers are pursuing to divert money away from police departments and into community services. However, I want us to push this work one step further. I believe we can build community safety systems that will one day operate independently from the police and government. The process of building community safety poses some critical questions to our movements: What is the world that we want? How will we define safety? How do we build the skills to address harm and violence? How do we create the trust needed for communities to rely on each other for mutual support? I’d like to offer some answers to these que...

Time and time again, I’ve known people who were saved by the relationships they built. I’ve witnessed people selling drugs address and intervene in transphobic violence because of relationships. I know friends who’ve helped their neighbors escape from violent relationships based on the connections they have built together. If and when violence occurs, the people who live closest are most likely to help us, and vice versa. Relationship building doesn’t have to involve old-school door-knocking. It can be as simple as attending community events, saying hello and introducing yourself to your neighbors, or inviting your neighbors to events that you organize. It can be talking to your noisy neighbor about calling the cops. It’s about the necessity of meeting the businesses and store owners in your immediate areas and on routes that you frequently use. This strategy is not without complications. For many people, particularly women, trans, and non-binary people, the act of engaging with strangers can open us up to harassment and even violence. At the same time, these challenges shouldn’t prevent us from building relationships; they may merely shift the ways that we go about doing so. Additionally, we must also be cognizant of the way that class, educational privilege, and gentrification can impact relationship building. Gentrification is its own form of violence within many low-income neighborhoods. Many gentrifiers/newcomers act fearfully and avoid shopping, attending events, or ...

The Safe OUTside the System Collective started from the audacity of a small team of people who believed that we could prevent and intervene in violence without the police. For over a year, through weekly meetings, we discussed our experiences of violence and brainstormed responses. During these times, LGBTQ people of color were reporting physical attacks to us at least once a month, and two or three people were murdered each year in Central Brooklyn. Meanwhile, the NYPD was operating like an occupying army. It was common to walk home from the subway and see officers stationed on every block or large groups of police officers walking down the street. We had no choice but to create a community safety campaign. Our campaign recruited local businesses and organizations and trained them to recognize, prevent, and intervene in violence without relying on law enforcement. At first, we had no idea how to work on this, but we researched, experimented, and talked with the business owners themselves to understand how they already addressed violence and then worked with them to ensure that their strategies included LGBTQ people of color. At the time, we did not think we were doing something innovative. We just knew we needed to build new structures for our ultimate survival.

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? Perhaps you want to think about one form of violence to work on and build your knowledge from there. You could start simply by having a dinner with your friends, family, and chosen family to discuss how you all can better support each other. Or you could raise the issue of police violence and harassment at your next tenants’ association meeting and see if there’s a way that your neighbors want to engage with each other rather than with the police. Next, you could research ways people can get emergency medical assistance outside of 911. The possibilities are endless. No matter how small they are, our experiments should aspire to center the experiences of the most marginalized folks within our communities. One of the major challenges of the movements of the 1960s and 1970s was their inability to fully hold and implement an intersectional analysis. We need to make sure that our bold experiments center the experiences of Black people, Indigenous people, people of color, disabled people, trans people, poor people, low-income people, migrants, and all marginalized people. Starting small gives us the opportunity to collectively imagine community safety responses without telling anyone to wait their turn.

When we make judgment into one of our primary organizing strategies, we reduce the trust needed to create safety. Some of the people with the most practice working on violence are deeply embedded within the criminal legal system or other punitive structures. I’ve had enlightening conversations about trends in homophobic and transphobic violence with prosecutors. I’ve also learned about de-escalating violence from bouncers and from school counselors. I deeply wanted to learn from people who had held down more incidents than I had. This new experience expanded my knowledge and deepened my practice. I coordinated organizers in their efforts to implement advocacy and community-organizing strategies in response to more than forty murders of queer and trans people. I had the opportunity to refine my process developing and presenting community-organizing options to recent survivors of violence and to surviving family members. Through this intense practice I created a process of rapid-response organizing in the aftermath of violence. I was able to use all the skills I had developed while doing community safety campaigns, and I gained a deeper, more nuanced understanding of organizing around trauma. The ability to work with survivors of intimate-partner violence, sexual violence, homophobic and transphobic violence, and police violence was invaluable, as was my experience working with survivors and organizers around the country. I also want to acknowledge that in these times, takin...

Beyond Firing How Do We Create Community-Wide Accountability for Sexual Harassment in Our Movements? Amanda Aguilar Shank

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. It is about realizing that we have a responsibility to align the ways we relate to each other with our values—from the most intimate relationship up to larger systems like the criminal and immigration systems. Abolition is the visionary process of imagining and building the structures that we want to see replace the ones we are dismantling today. Yes, I want to see an end to the criminal and immigration systems as we know them today. I want to see the end to cops, prisons, imperialism, and militarization. I have seen how these systems harm me and my family and the families of millions in the name of safety for the few. Yet interpersonal harm is a basic fact of human reality. We can’t avoid being harmed and harming others. It’s just that current systems we have in place perpetuate harm and increase suffering, while claiming to do the opposite. 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.

Isolation Cannot Heal Isolation One Survivor’s Response to Sexual Assault Blyth Barnow

I don’t regret it. It was a choice that honored my own dignity and his. But it was not perfect. It was hard and ugly and devastating. It was also powerful. I didn’t get the accountability I had hoped for, but I learned. I grew. I noticed patterns and coping skills. I saw the harm caused by my own isolation and sense of responsibility. I grew up working class, the girl child of a single mother struggling with addiction. I learned early about responsibility. My life, my mother’s life, depended on it. By age three I had been put into foster care after the violence of her boyfriend’s hand was no longer ignorable. I learned to be silent but strong. I made myself invisible and never questioned my ability to survive alone. In the end, that was most damaging. Doing it alone. Believing it was all my responsibility. Not the assault. But the healing. The justice. The protection of nameless other girls. I leaned heavy into the skills I learned as a child, over responsibility, independence, sharp analysis, and self-sacrifice. Which meant I never asked for the support I was so desperate for. Because what I needed, maybe more than his apology, was a community of people who could help me hold and honor all the stories that led to this one, who could help me uproot the layers of silence learned through too much violence. I needed to be asked what I wanted and what I was hoping for. I needed someone to help me craft those letters, someone to remind me that I could list expectations. I neede...

From Breaking Silence to Community Control Community-Controlled Databases, Murder Investigations, and Ceremony to Find Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit People Audrey Huntley

Once we got started, I discovered that investigating a murder isn’t that hard. It just involves a lot of talking to as many people as you can. In the course of about a year, I got tons of information about Norma’s life. I was able to find and get her Bible and give it to her mother after fourteen years. She had this Bible that she made a lot of notes in throughout her young life that was really important to her. From talking to people, I found out that she used to stay in a rooming house in the Downtown Eastside with a man, and he was still living there. He was reluctant to talk; I never did get him to open the door to his room, but I stood outside and we talked through the closed door, and after three visits he slid the Bible out. (It also involved a six-pack of beer, but I never told my executive producer about that.) I was able to give Norma’s Bible back to her mother, and that was a beautiful thing. All kinds of things like that happened. If you just start talking to people, it’s amazing how much stuff will come out and how suddenly you will unearth things. I put down a lot of tobacco during that year. I had also learned on the Traces of Missing Women trip to feast the women on the other side, so I continued that practice. I made sure to give them water to drink. I hadn’t done this on the research trip, and it was startling when at the sweat to close off the journey Wanda received a message that the women were thirsty and that I had neglected that piece—they weren’t an...

One family’s experience in investigating the murder of their loved one stands out. I met Kaykaitkw Harron (Syilx and Nlaka’pamux) in Vancouver, and she shared about how they mobilized community in the interior of BC to find her cousin, Roxanne Louie, when the police were failing. This young woman explained that they were pounding on the RCMP’s door every day, occupying the space to ensure they were doing their job. They also contacted everyone they knew in Roxanne’s circles and encouraged them to share with police. The family encountered a typical racist response by police who thought that Roxanne “was out partying,” and this was also reported in the media. Kaykaitkw stresses how important it is to stop reinforcing those stereotypes and talks about how even community members who had internalized this view took a step back from looking for her because of this. She notes, as do many others in the video, that when a loved one who is usually in contact with folks everyday stops being in touch, something is wrong and action is required right away. The importance of public vigils to create media presence cannot be understated. Roxanne’s family held a Walk of Faith and ceremony in the hopes that she would come back to them safely. They actually marched through the neighborhood of Roxanne’s in-laws, who they suspected were involved in her disappearance. This applied pressure to those who had committed the crime to come forward. This incredible community effort led by her family le...

What to Do When You’ve Been Abusive Annotated Edition Kai Cheng Thom

When one has been abusive, the very first—and one of the most difficult—skills of holding oneself accountable is learning to simply listen to the person or people whom one has harmed: Listening without becoming defensive. Listening without trying to equivocate or make excuses. Listening without minimizing or denying the extent of the harm. Listening without trying to make oneself the center of the story being told. When someone, particularly a partner or loved one, tells you that you have hurt or abused them, it can be easy to understand this as an accusation or attack. Very often, this is our first assumption—that we are being attacked. This is why so many perpetrators of abuse respond to survivors who confront them by saying something along the lines of, “I’m not abusing you. You are abusing me, right now, with this accusation!” But this is the cycle of violence talking. This is the script that rape culture has built for us: a script in which there must be a hero and a villain, a right and a wrong, an accuser and an accused. What if we understood being confronted about perpetuating abuse as an act of courage—even a gift—on the part of the survivor? What if, instead of reacting immediately in our own defense, we instead took the time to listen, to really try to understand the harm we might have done to another person? When we think of accountability in terms of listening and love instead of accusation and punishment, everything changes. Listening without becoming defensiv...

There is an awful, pervasive myth out there that people who abuse others do so simply because they are bad people—because they are sadistic, or because they enjoy other people’s pain. This is, I think, part of the reason why so many people who have been abusive in the past or present resist the use of the terms “abuse” or “abuser” to describe their behavior. 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. 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.” All of these are powerful, real reasons for abuse—but they are never excuses. There is no reason good enough to excuse abusive behavior. Reasons help us understand abuse, but they do not excuse it. Accepting this is essential to transforming culpability into accountability and turning justice into healing.

When Your Money Counts on It Sex Work and Transformative Justice An Interview with Monica Forrester and Elene Lam, by Chanelle Gallant

When I first started working with the sex workers’ community in Hong Kong, there were lots of serial robbers and sexual assault. Sometimes they’d attack a sex worker three times in a single day or five times a week. People were being tied up during the assaults and sometimes not found for up to forty-eight hours. We had problems with serial rapists, people causing serious injury, and gang rape. The politicians and the police were no help. The politicians would announce a crackdown on sex workers before elections to get votes, so sex workers would be dealing with abusers and increased police harassment. Police would drag sex workers into the station and force them to sign a document saying that they would leave the area. Sometimes they would, or they’d stand right in front of the workers’ business to scare away clients. If the cop was extra mean or lazy, he would fuck with the locks to the business doors so sex workers couldn’t get back in. If sex workers called the police because of these attacks, they would be strip-searched by the police, told to leave, and threatened with arrest. Because of this hostile situation, no one called the police. It was a very dangerous situation and we needed to respond urgently, so we started to develop solutions.

At first sex workers didn’t trust us because they didn’t feel comfortable with surveillance and worried it would scare off clients. But eventually they began to trust us more and preferred to screen out known abusers even if they couldn’t call police. Sex workers would let their clients see that they had surveillance to deter problems. If we had video of an aggressor, we’d take a shot of his face and make a poster and share it with everyone. If the aggressor was spotted in the neighborhood, we’d follow the guy, get a picture, and send to others. We wanted them to feel watched and afraid of getting charged with possession of weapons and stolen goods. We used our position as a “social service organization” to negotiate with police. The sex workers couldn’t call police, but we could call and report someone with a weapon. We arranged with police so that sex workers could make a collective complaint without identifying themselves and giving their work addresses. Sex workers would call the organization in front of the client and pretend that they were calling their boss. We would be the workers’ safe call. We would wait for their call at the end of the service and if they didn’t call us back, we would contact a friend of the workers (pre-arranged) who would go to their workplace to check on them.

We focused on restoring agency and sense of power to sex workers. If they can avoid the abuser, they already feel empowered. We learned about how to emotionally manipulate abusers and police to reduce harm. For example, make the police feel like we appreciate their protection and make thieves feel like you understand their story and are on their side. Workers being robbed would say, “I know you’re in desperate need. Don’t worry. I understand. Here, take the money!” and give him one stash of money. While doing that, she would tell him a sob story about how she hoped he would just leave her enough money to get home and her ID—all while noticing all his features so she could later report him. He thinks it’s all your money and sometimes feels bad for you. Sex workers also learned to negotiate with a rapist to use a condom or, if not, to reduce injury, or get him to cum quickly and leave. The most important thing though isn’t how these self-defense strategies affect the aggressor. It’s that this makes the sex worker feel powerful. Facing a rapist or thief can be mentally destroying, but this approach gives agency back to the sex worker, gives the sex worker the time to collect evidence, and connects the sex worker to the aggressor’s humanity. 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 “trau...

Sex workers who’ve been harmed can get justice in many ways without police: They can share their experiences with others to protect them. They can train others. They can work to change the system. All of these forms of justice can restore agency to the sex worker. Sex workers have to move through sexual trauma—or they can’t work or survive. Sex workers are targeted because the perpetrator knows that they are criminalized and they are not protected. So sex workers are forced to develop tools and ways to protect themselves, due to the failures of the justice system. It is important to recognize that sex work is work and sex workers should be respected and be able to work safely.

Most of us have plenty of examples of how easy it is to say the word “sorry” without meaning it. And we also probably have at least a few examples that reveal how radically different that is from when we say “I’m sorry” and mean it wholeheartedly. Saying sorry can definitely be a starting point for accountability, but it can also be a way to avoid facing consequences. Feeling sorry can mean a lot of different things—and it is another place where unpacking shame can be very relevant to TJ. Feeling bad is not the same as feeling sorry. And 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. Feeling remorse—the pain of regret for actions we’ve taken that violate our own values—can be an important part of the work of becoming accountable. It usually requires some level of “un-numbing,” or developing our compassion for the experience of the person or people we’ve harmed. 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. Another person eventually was able to ask two members of their broader network of friends to support them in understanding the impact of their violence toward their ex-boyf...

When we start digging into the conditions around an incident of harm, we usually discover that there were other harms that preceded this one. As we follow the thread back through time, it splits and splits again, tangling and weaving into other stories and histories, until we find ourselves asking still deeper questions about love, fear, scarcity, and the origins of harm. In doing TJ work, most of us are forced, at some point, to confront our own contradictions about who deserves connection, compassion, and forgiveness—and what those things include. 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. Confronting our shame can also unstick us from the immobilization of privilege, allowing us to join in the solidarity and interdependence our spirits long for. What mistakes might you need to face in order to trust yourself? What hurts are you carrying that remain unmourned?

Cripping TJ Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

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 more disabled people to write our real stories of just how fucking hard it is to find love, sex, and friendships that are not violent, where you’re not closeting all of your weird body/mind secrets—and the deep triumphs and complexities of crip love when we make it happen.41 I also want there to be space to talk about the specific challenges even the sweetest disabled love faces. I want us to talk about the ways we blow open/crip what sex and love can look like, talk about the ways we negotiate consent and bodily autonomy nonverbally and through every cripped-out means of communication. Finally, I want to start to dream about what transformative justice looks like when someon...

What Is/Isn’t Transformative Justice? adrienne maree brown

In my mediations, “why?” is often the game-changing, possibility-opening question. That’s because the answers rehumanize those we feel are perpetuating against us. “Why?” often leads us to grief, abuse, trauma, mental illness, difference, socialization, childhood, scarcity, loneliness. Also, “Why?” makes it impossible to ignore that we might be capable of a similar transgression in similar circumstances. We don’t want to see that. Demonizing is more efficient than relinquishing our worldviews, which is why we have slavery, holocausts, lynchings, and witch trials in our short human history. “Why?” can be an evolutionary question.

Every Mistake I’ve Ever Made An Interview with Shira Hassan Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

But each time we sit down to do the work, we’re going to pull different things from our toolbox. It’s not always going to be a circle. It’s not always gonna be a freaking three-year-long community accountability process. Leah: Thank God. Shira: Thank God. But, you know, it can be something else that uses similar ingredients. And then what we have is purity politics coming in and saying, no, it’s supposed to be this plus this plus this plus that, or it’s not transformative justice. It’s not the right way to do things. You hear people calling out processes that are going well to the people who are involved with them. I saw something play out maybe a year and a half ago, where someone who I happened to know had no experience practicing community accountability heard about a process that a friend of mine was doing, where everyone had agreed to do a circle with someone who had caused sexual violence. It was a completely transparent and agreed-upon process that everyone wanted. This person with zero experience, who had a really amazing analysis around TJ, and talked about TJ all the time on the Internet, had tons and tons of followers, went hard to be like, “you can’t have an accountability circle with a sexual predator in the space with the survivor! That is 101, TJ 101! The survivor and the predator should not be in the same space.” And like, seriously ranted at the process, which was working, to the point where the survivor then started to question, am I being harmed? Like, a...

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...

How We Learned (Are Learning) Transformative Justice adrienne maree brown

We went through the untrustworthy age. It was hundreds and hundreds of years. Not trusting creates good soil for fear, terror. We were terrified of everyone, everything different than us. Our distrust was contagious, palpable. It seemed like everyone died. It seemed like we wept every day. Then we remembered ourselves, remembered that trust is not earned—it is how we begin. It is the first thing we do. Learning to trust is returning to beginner’s mind, returning to our nature. We are meant to need each other

We surrendered to how deeply we need each other. All of us matter, to ourselves, to each other.