Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement

by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

And just because the healing process is hard doesn’t mean that all the violence is the same, and that we need to address that violence differently. There is not a hierarchy in violence, it’s just very important that everyone knows that each thing is not the same. I hear a lot of lumping all sexual violence, or all gender-based violence, and that all of it needs a transformative justice process, and I don’t know. There are different things that work for different things. A community accountability process is not the same as a transformative justice practice. A transformative justice practice is how we have our own movement security at demos, marches, and rallies. And how we have a bad dates sheet in the sex trade to track fucked-up johns. And how we have what you brilliantly talked about, that was world-changing for me, around community restraining orders. Those are so different than a community accountability process, which is a long-term transformative piece that involves lots of people working specifically on one thing that happened between two people. And then we have circles, which, now we’re like, circling for everything, and circles are really ineffective for certain things.