Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement

by 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...