by Generation FIVE

For the Left to accomplish its vision of a just world, we must develop a liberatory response to intimate, interpersonal and community violence. The daily reality of such violence prevents people and communities from imagining and participating in the creation of a more just world. Without a just world, people cannot find healing and safety. Developing a radical response by Left social movements to all forms of violence opens the opportunity to heal the trauma of past violence, reduce the level of violence we experience and mobilize masses of people for fundamental social change.

Transformative Justice responds to the lack of – and the critical need for – a liberatory approach to violence. A liberatory approach seeks safety and accountability without relying on alienation, punishment, or State or systemic violence, including incarceration and policing. We premise the Transformative Justice approach elaborated on three core beliefs, namely:

• Individual justice and collective liberation are equally important, mutually supportive and fundamentally intertwined – the achievement of one is impossible without the achievement of the other.
• The conditions that allow violence to occur must be transformed in order to achieve justice in individual instances of violence. Therefore, Transformative Justice is both a liberating politic and an approach for securing justice.
• State and systemic responses to violence, including the criminal legal system and child welfare agencies, not only fail to advance individual and collective justice but also condone and perpetuate cycles of violence.

Transformative Justice seeks to provide people who experience violence with immediate safety and long-term healing and reparations while holding people who commit violence accountable within and by their communities. This accountability includes stopping immediate abuse, making a commitment to not engage in future abuse and offering reparations for past abuse. Such accountability requires community responsibility and access to on-going support and transformative healing for people who sexually abuse.

In addition, Transformative Justice also seeks to transform inequity and power abuses within communities. Through building the capacity of communities to increase justice internally, Transformative Justice seeks to support collective action toward addressing larger issues of injustice and oppression. The goals of Transformative Justice as a response to all forms of violence are:

• Survivor safety, healing and agency
• Accountability and transformation of those who abuse
• Community response and accountability
• Transformation of the community and societal conditions that create and perpetuate violence.

The term “Transformative Justice” emerged directly out of Generation FIVE’s work on child sexual abuse as the term that best describes the dual process of securing individual justice while transforming structures of social injustice that perpetuate such abuse. While we developed the model as a response to child sexual abuse, we imagine Transformative Justice as an adaptable model that can and will be used to confront many other forms of violence and the systems of oppression they enable and require.

Without addressing violence in its most intimate manifestations, we will be unable to build a movement that can change the world. While Leftist and social justice movements in the U.S. continue to pose significant ongoing challenges to the power and primacy of the State, we have failed to offer real alternatives to replace, dismantle, or transform it. Ultimately, we will not be successful in mobilizing masses of people to transform current political, economic and social apparatuses if we do not have a concrete vision for the future. The goal of dismantling oppressive structures is shortsighted, and perhaps impossible, if we are not also prepared to build alternatives. This is not merely a rhetorical failure or a failure of analysis; it is a failure of practice. In fact, the lack of liberatory approaches to violence actually undermines the entire project of social justice on both ideological and practical levels.

Why do we need a liberatory approach to violence?
Our current responses to violence cannot lead us to liberation. They are usually limited to a focus on State incarceration and often result in family disintegration. They are focused on retribution and punishment rather than accountability and transformation. They are reactive rather than preventative. The lack of alternatives to State intervention, combined with our inaction and willingness to resort to State intervention, allows the violence to continue.

The most common response to violence is collusion – knowing violence is happening and allowing it to happen. There are many reasons that this response is so prevalent. Denial is a significant factor, but the fear of stigma, destruction of relationships and physical violence are also important. The people involved in situations of intimate violence – survivors, people who abuse and bystanders – may have complex relationships, including economic and emotional dependence. There is also the understandable fear of State intervention and the inability or unwillingness to challenge unequal power relations. Individual bystanders, those that collude with violence, also may have their own histories of violence and trauma, making it difficult to be willing or able to act.

Those who are willing and able to act are often unsure what to do. When people do intervene, they are often confronted with alienation, aggression, blame, and, at times, may become targets of violence themselves. Even when people are able to mobilize an effective response, it is often hard to sustain the support and accountability needed to transform the situation over time. Long-term transformation of abusive relationships involves healing for multiple parties. It must also include processes of accountability and reparation, ongoing assessment and evaluation of all the people involved in the situation, as well as the ability to hold intense and volatile conflicts and emotional reactions. At the same time, in order to transform the conditions that allow violence to occur, a mobilization of broad sectors of the community is needed. Those willing to address violence at all are rarely able to do so in a transformative way – one that is rooted in and aligned with social justice politics and values.

Applying lessons to our movements
Our movements similarly struggle to address violence. The Left tends to dismiss violence as a “personal” issue. When violence surfaces in the course of their other work, social justice movements and organizations can be reluctant to address it directly for fear of losing focus and derailing their work. In seeking to oppose state interventions on individual and community violence, some on the Left may end up minimizing the scale and impact of that violence in the communities we represent. At other times, many of us on the Left engage public systems when faced with a lack of other options for addressing violence and other forms of injustice in our lives or work. The Left’s lack of a conscious approach to violence is dangerous for two reasons. It denies the lived reality and material conditions faced by those communities whose liberation they seek and it leaves unchallenged, and therefore legitimates, the State’s monopoly on potential responses to violence.

Even when we want to intervene in violence and harm in the lives of those with whom we organize or work, we do not have the capacity, skills or resources to do so in a liberatory way. Sometimes our shame about the ways we may collude with either violence or the State makes it difficult to discuss how and why we do so and therefore prevents us from identifying what we would need in order to effectively respond. Moreover, our emotional reactions to violence often and understandably contradict our political understanding of the conditions in which individual behavior occurs and our political commitment to transformation and justice – this is particularly true when the violence is a gross abuse of power such as with child sexual abuse.

In contrast, many organizations that have emerged to respond to violence in people’s lives accept the violence of the criminal legal and child welfare systems as a necessary harm for stopping violence. The vast majority of sexual and domestic violence organizations leverage State intervention as the primary strategy for prevention and response. Many of these non-profit organizations are funded by the State, which forces their work in the direction of harsher sentencing, incarceration and surveillance. Often, the conditions of State or systemic violence that are reflected in acts of violence get ignored or are considered secondary to intimate or interpersonal violence – thus allowing systems to express and leverage racism, sexism, homophobia and class oppression while responding to intimate and community violence.

Organizing for liberation
Differences in philosophies, goals and priorities often create barriers to cross-movement relationships. There is not enough cohesion in our movements and organizing for personal or political liberation. Such cohesion would better enable movement organizers to overcome the conditions that prevent the full potential of communities and members to participate in campaign work. It would also facilitate the participation of community-based services in organizing toward transforming the conditions that create the harm and violence for which they (the service providers) often end up providing band-aids.

Yet, even with relationships and willingness, we all face a real lack of options. This lack of options reflects the current economic environment, the erosion of protective factors within communities, the devastation, targeting and dismantling of communities by the prison-industrial complex and the child welfare system. Without liberatory options, people are forced to rely on State mechanisms in which they have little faith.

The response of social movements must be two-fold. On the one hand, it is essential that we continue to hold the State accountable for its failure to provide adequate services and funding to support families and communities in dealing with violence. The State must also be held accountable for the ways in which its policies create the conditions that allow violence to continue. At the same time, it is critical that our social movements recognize that liberation from violence is one of people’s most basic needs. As the Left, it is our responsibility to provide people with alternative options, resources and processes for securing liberation from violence, in the face of the failure of the State.

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This article is the product of collective thinking, writing and editing by Sara Kershnar, Staci Hines, Gillian Harkins, Alan Greig, Cindy Wiesner, Mich Levy, Palak Shah, Mimi Kim and Jesse Carr. For more information about Transformative Justice, contact Generation FIVE at www.generationFIVE.org or at 1015 Martin Luther King, Jr. Way, Oakland, CA 94607. .

IMAGE by Clifford Harper.