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Abolitionist Social Work: Possibilities, Paradox and Praxis

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Abolitionist Social Work: Possibilities, Paradox and Praxis

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Join us for a conversation about challenging carceral social work through the development and practice of an abolitionist social work.

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Abolitionist Social Work: Possibilities, Paradox and Praxis

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reading of radical gratitude spell by adrienne maree brown

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reading of radical gratitude spell by adrienne maree brown

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for reimagining our relationship to nature as mutually beneficial. lessons on reciprocity, being in right relation with each other and the earth

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A selection of pivotal works by Indigenous authors.

In this luminous and wise book, botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer (Potawatomi Nation) makes a lyrical and convincing case for reimagining our relationship to nature as mutually beneficial. Taking the reader from her classroom to her lab to her (enviably abundant) garden to a rainforest in Oregon, Kimmerer demonstrates time and again how working with the land, as opposed to shaping it to one's purpose, is a method rooted in Indigenous tradition and borne out by science. Brimming with knowledge and a deep love for the natural world, Braiding Sweetgrass is a hopeful guide to a better future for all life on our planet and an absolute joy to read. Recommended By Lucinda G., Powells.com

As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take us on "a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise" ( Elizabeth Gilbert).

Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, a mother, and a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings - asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass - offer us gifts and lessons, even if we've forgotten how to hear their voices. In a rich braid of reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.

" Braiding Sweetgrass is instructive poetry. Robin Wall Kimmerer has put the spiritual relationship that Chief Seattle called the 'web of life' into writing. Industrial societies lack the understanding of the interrelationships that bind all living things - this book fills that void." Oren Lyons, Faithkeeper, Onondaga Nation and Indigenous Environmental Leader

"Robin Wall Kimmerer opens a sense of wonder and humility for the intelligence in all kinds of life we are used to naming and imagining as inanimate." Krista Tippett, host of On Being

"Robin Wall Kimmerer has written an extraordinary book, showing how the factual, objective approach of science can be enriched by the ancient knowledge of the indigenous people. It is the way she captures beauty that I love the most - the images of giant cedars and wild strawberries, a forest in the rain and a meadow of fragrant sweetgrass will stay with you long after you read the last page." Jane Goodall

"Robin Wall Kimmerer is writer of rare grace. She writes about the natural world from a place of such abundant passion that one can never quite see the world the same way after having seen it through Kimmerer's eyes." Elizabeth Gilbert

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, a scientist, a decorated professor, and an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. A SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology and the founder and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, she lives in Fabius, NY.

Surprisingly, for people who spend a minimum of 40 hours a week up-close and personal with books, a lot of us aren't totally comfortable with the status of our relationships. Are we giving our books the care and attention they deserve?...

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braiding sweetgrass indigenous wisdom scientific knowledge & the teachings of plants

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Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer

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As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers.

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Bystander Intervention Options (Using 4 Ds)

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Bystander Intervention Options (Using 4 Ds)

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Note: If using the "don't I know you?" trick, use it on the person causing the harm rather than person being harmed. If you use it on the person being harmed that could increase their risk of being hurt by the abusive person later as punishment for talking to an old friend and thus challenging their isolation tactics.

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https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1smk2EKqNFRGej7PMlEi2JZNhh5aimhuDmUpSe80nc_E/edit?usp=sharing

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https://padlet.com/jmurra225/lw5z6ti21tte5zlb

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Information to consider in response to one of the intervention scenerios (Illegal for DV agencies recieveing VAWA funds to deny shelter to trans folks)

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National Center for Transgender Equality

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I'm a transgender woman. Can I be turned away from a women's shelter or program?

Under VAWA, you have the right for your gender identity to be respected-that means being treated as the gender you say you are. You should not be asked to prove your gender with medical or legal documents or and you should not be asked about your body parts.

You have the right to ask for an individual accommodation to provide greater privacy or safety if you desire to (such as by being housed in a separate area)-but a program cannot isolate or separate you just because you're transgender.

I'm a man (transgender or not). Can I be turned away because a program is only for women?

Under VAWA, programs can only segregate based on gender if it is necessary to effectively serve survivors. If you think a program is only open to women, or divided by gender, without good reason, you can file a complaint. Even in programs that are gender-segregated, equal services must be provided to people of all genders. Providing lesser services to men because of their gender is prohibited. This usually means that if there is a program designed just for women, similar services must also be given to any men who seek help.

What if another client complains about me being there?

A complaint from another client about being around a transgender person does not give a program an excuse to discriminate. If a client believes being around a certain type of person is interfering with their ability to receive services, an agency may offer alternate accommodations to the person who is uncomfortable, but that accommodation cannot limit services to the transgender person.

I was told I could only be served if I dressed as my birth gender.

If the program is covered by VAWA, this is unlawful discrimination. You have the right to express your gender identity and be served just like anyone else.

What if I am harassed, profiled, or abused as a transgender person by police or the courts?

No agency funded under VAWA can discriminate in anything it does-that includes police officers, prosecutors, judges, and courts staff if their agency accepts VAWA funds. While not all of these agencies accept VAWA funding, there may be other protections if you face discrimination or mistreatment by government officials. We strongly recommend seeking legal help.

How do I report discrimination?

You can file a complaint with the US Department of Justice (DOJ) online at: http://ojp.gov/about/ocr/complaint.htm. The DOJ investigates complaints and takes action to ensure agencies comply with the law in the future.

Provide as many details as you can in the complaint-who did what, where, on what dates. Write down details as soon as you can after the incident. Your privacy will be protected. You can also file a complaint on behalf of someone else.

While NCTE cannot provide legal help (see below), we encourage you to share your story and complaint with NCTE to help inform our advocacy.

How do I know if a program or agency is funded by VAWA?

Figuring out if a program or agency gets VAWA funds can be difficult, as there is no central list. Many organizations are listed on the US Department of Justice website at: http://www.ovw.usdoj.gov/grantactivities.htm. However, many agencies are not on this list because they receive VAWA funds indirectly through their state government. Some of these VAWA sub-grants can be looked up on USASpending.gov, and some states list them online too.

If you're not sure, you can still file a complaint against any victim service, law enforcement, or other agency, and the Department of Justice will determine if they are covered. If they are not covered under VAWA, you may still be protected under other federal, state, or local laws. You can also seek legal help to explore all your options.

What happens when I file a complaint?

The US DOJ investigates complaints and takes action to ensure agencies comply with the law in the future. VAWA does not provide a right to sue in court or be compensated financially, but other laws might. If you have been seriously harmed by discrimination or mistreatment, seek legal help.

What if I need legal help?

While you don't need a lawyer to file a complaint under VAWA, you may want help exploring all your options-especially if you were discriminated against by government officials, or were seriously harmed.

While NCTE does not provide legal services or referrals, there are many other groups that may give you referrals or maintain lists of local lawyers. You can try your local legal aid or legal services organization, or national or regional organizations such as Lambda Legal, the National Center for Lesbian Rights, the ACLU, and the Transgender Law Center.

I'm a domestic violence/sexual assault service provider and want to better serve transgender people. Where do I start?

Contact the National Training and Technical Assistance Center on LGBTQ Cultural Competency, which can be found at: https://avp.org/ncavp/tta-center/.

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Despite its name, the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) supports help for all survivors of intimate partner violence, domestic violence, sexual assault, or stalking-and since 2013, VAWA prohibits discrimination based on sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity in providing help.

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Here are the slides again but as PDFs

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Social Service Workers United - Chicago 

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Social Service Workers United - Chicago 

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There are other branches if you're not in Chicago

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Social Service Workers United - Chicago has 709 members. PLEASE NOTE: We do ask a few questions of folks wishing to join this group. Please answer those--if you don't, we can't approve your request...

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useful toolkit to helping build community skills

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Now Available: Free Download Print from booksellers In Spanish Interactive Web Version Download PDF Mix & Match Order In Print Interactive Web-Based Interactive (in English with Maori Banners).

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Moving Towards an Anti-Carceral Social Work 

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Moving Towards an Anti-Carceral Social Work 

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This paper addresses social work's place in the movement to "defund the police." We argue that social work's collaboration with police and use of policing constitutes carceral social work. In defining carceral social work, we specify the ways in which coercive and punitive practices are used to manage Black, Indigenous, other people of color and poor communities across four social work arenas - gender-based violence, child welfare, schools, and health and mental health. To inform anti-carceral social work, we provide examples of interventions in these arenas that dismantle police collaborations and point to life-affirming, community-centered, and mutual aid alternatives.

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This project explores how inequalities, welfare policies, and welfare spending correlate with crime, punishment, and incarceration rates. It also reviews current debates regarding the extent to whi ... [more]

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December 2020 · Journal of Progressive Human Services

This article addresses social work's place in the movement to "defund the police." We argue that social work's collaboration with police and use of policing constitutes carceral social work. In defining carceral social work, we specify the ways in which coercive and punitive practices are used to manage Black, Indigenous, other people of color, and poor communities across four social work arenas ... [Show full abstract]

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History reveals that the pathway toward carceral feminism was fraught with contradictions. Feminist reform strategies that appeared progressive devolved into mandates contributing to the policies of mass incarceration; frameworks meant to disavow racist myths of violence inherent to communities of color fueled color-blind narratives that cloaked white, middle-class-defined social movement ... [Show full abstract]

View full-text

The criminalization of violence against women over the past forty years represents both social movement success and the paradoxical alignment of feminism with increasingly punitive carceral policies. This historical analysis of the shifting social movement field during its formative years from 1973 to 1986 refutes dominant social movement paradigms for understanding social movement cooptation and ... [Show full abstract]

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(PDF) Defund the Police: Moving Towards an Anti-Carceral Social Work

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This paper addresses social work's place in the movement to "defund the police." We argue that social work's collaboration with police and use of policing constitutes carceral social work.

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by Monica Cosby in collaboration with an artist

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Change your channel | Mallence Bart-Williams | TEDxBerlinSalon

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Abolitionist Social Work has 2,454 members. We are working on updated posting guidelines (including a survey to the group). The description has been updated based on the natural flow this group seems...

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I was welcomed into the field of social work 8 years ago in Rochester, NY. Since then, I've rarely been asked to reflect on my implicit biases as a white woman, or to reckon with the ways the institution of social work has caused harm to the people we are employed to help.

I support the movement to abolish policing and the prison industrial complex. But I worry about the assumption that social workers are somehow inherently equipped to support people in crises, as I've seen that social work is a white supremacist institution too.

To me, this means that the institution of social work as a whole prioritizes the needs, benefits, perspectives, and perceived safety of white people. Historically, social work as an institution has a role identical to that of law enforcement-- to uphold the legitimacy of capitalism, perpetuate colonialism, and exploit the poor and working class.

Social workers were tools of the state to violently uproot indigenous children from their families, communities, and cultures. Some argue that to this day, this legacy still stands in the foster care system, uprooting Black and brown children from their homes and placing them in white or upper class households.

Currently, social workers can hold a license and be a police officer, a parole officer, or a corrections officer. This means that these social workers can literally perpetuate the prison industrial complex and still be considered ethical practitioners.

Even as practitioners outside the carceral system, we are often required to police and punish our clients in ways that could cause tremendous harm. During the recent panel discussion "Abolitionist Social Work: Possibilities, Paradox and Praxis," Tanisha "Wakumi" Douglas urged social workers to be "incredibly critical about how we are undoing punitive models at every level of our being." This means questioning the way social work upholds systems that require people of color, and Black women especially, to meet unrealistic requirements and submit to monitoring and surveillance in order to meet their basic needs.

Social workers must be knowledgable on a number of topics to adequately support people in crisis without reinforcing our carceral system. Understanding systemic racism, intersectional oppression, the criminal legal system, as well as mental health first aid and de-escalation techniques is imperative.

However, the Council on Social Work Education currently requires just one course on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion to become a licensed social worker. In my experience, this curriculum tends to be white-centered and focused on how white people can work with clients "across cultures." And, a 2013 study found that less than 5 percent of social work education offered courses with content related to the criminal legal system.

Currently, the field of social work doesn't require us to interrogate our own biases or inherited white supremacist values. That's very dangerous when we hold the ability to revoke housing opportunities, food stability, employment opportunities, and more. We know that these insecurities are so intertwined with incarceration. When we don't confront this power, we as social workers are all stewards of the prison industrial complex.

Of course, there is a long history of social workers fighting against the white supremacy within the institution. In the past year, the Social Service Workers United-Chicago urgently demanded that the National Association of Social Workers reckon with their relationship to the carceral system and make significant strides towards abolition. Abolitionists like Mimi Kim have been researching anti-violence alternatives to the carceral system for years. Organizations like , S.O.U.L Sisters Leadership Collective , and are also offering alternatives to carceral social services.

Like many abolitionists, I support the call to demolish the system that puts cops in front of vulnerable people in the first place. This requires investing money into housing, healthcare, schools, community programs, and more. But it also requires the people who provide social services to reflect more deeply on our biases, trauma, and conflict processes. And it also requires us as a society to recognize and respond to the punitive measures we take in our legal system, our communities, our relationships, and in our minds.

As Cameron Rasmussen & Kirk "Jae" James have written, this is a matter of imagining and building at the same time. "We can imagine a social work rooted in solidarity over charity, one that is decolonized, de-professionalized, anti-capitalist, and is committed to repair, accountability and continual transformation," they write. "Black feminist thought and organizing has taught us to create with intention, to build and imagine simultaneously, and to root our work in possibility."

That is the task before us as abolitionist social workers.

ANGELA TONA received her Bachelor's of Social Work from Nazareth College in Rochester NY. She currently lives in Minneapolis MN and works as a policy advocate for LGBTQ+ Rights and Mental Health Justice.

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Opinion | Social Work is a White Supremacist Organization Too

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I was welcomed into the field of social work 8 years ago in Rochester, NY. Since then, I've rarely been asked to reflect on my implicit biases as a white woman, or to reckon with the ways the institution of social work has caused harm to the people we are employed to help.

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Duke University Press - The Revolution Will Not Be Funded

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Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex

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"I'm very much afraid of this 'Foundation Complex.' We're getting praise from places that worry me."

"I want us all to be real creative about our tactics and strategies to dismantle the empire."
- Joo-Hyun Kang, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded Conference, 2004
In 2004, along with women of color at UC Santa Barbara, INCITE! organized the conference: "The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond The Non-Profit Industrial Complex." This conference drew in hundreds of organizers and activists searching for a space to address the ways in which the non-profit/NGO structure often obstructs radical movement building. At this conference, speakers and attendees addressed the following questions:

What is the history of the non-profit model? What drove its development? How did it impact the form and direction of social justice organizing?

How has reliance on foundation funding impacted the course of social justice movements?

How does 501(c)3 status impact social justice organizations' relationship to the state?

How does non-profit status allow the state to co-opt and control our movements?

Are there ways the non-profit model can be used subversively to support more radical visions for social change?

What are the alternatives for building viable social justice movements? How do we resource our movements outside the non-profit structure?

What models for organizing outside the NGO/non-profit model exist outside the U.S. that may help us?

What is the "non-profit industrial complex"?

The non-profit industrial complex (or the NPIC) is a system of relationships between:

the State (or local and federal governments)

the owning classes

foundations

and non-profit/NGO social service & social justice organizations that results in the surveillance, control, derailment, and everyday management of political movements.

The state uses non-profits to:

Monitor and control social justice movements;

Divert public monies into private hands through foundations;

Manage and control dissent in order to make the world safe for capitalism;

Redirect activist energies into career-based modes of organizing instead of mass-based organizing capable of actually transforming society;

Allow corporations to mask their exploitative and colonial work practices through "philanthropic" work;

Encourage social movements to model themselves after capitalist structures rather than to challenge them

How did INCITE! come to explore this issue?

In 2004, INCITE! learned the hard way that the revolution will not be funded. When we began in 2000, we took a stand against state funding since we perceived that antiviolence organizations who had state funding had been co-opted. It hadn't occurred to us to look at foundation funding in the same way.

However, in a trip to India (funded, ironically, by the Ford Foundation), we met with many non-funded organizations that criticized us for receiving foundation grants. When we saw that groups with much less access to resources were able to do amazing work without foundation funding, we began to question our reliance on foundation grants.

Our suspicions were confirmed when, in February 2004, INCITE! received an e-mail from the Ford Foundation with the subject line "Congratulations!" and an offer of "a one-year or two-year grant of $100,000" to cover our general operating expenses in response to a grant proposal the Ford Foundation had solicited from us. We committed to two major projects (SisterFire multimedia tour and Color of Violence III conference in New Orleans) based on this funding. Then, unexpectedly on July 30, 2004, the Ford Foundation sent another letter, explaining that it had reversed its decision because of our organization's statement of support for the Palestinian liberation struggle.

INCITE! learned firsthand the dangers of relying on foundations for our movement building. But we also learned that social justice organizations do not always need the foundation support they think they do. Strapped with this sudden loss of funding but committed to organizing two major projects, INCITE! members started raising money through grassroots fundraising - house parties, individual calls, T-shirt sales, and so on - and we were able to quickly raise the money we lost when the Ford Foundation rescinded their grant offer.

This story is not an isolated incident. The NPIC has a long and complicated legacy. The Revolution Will Not Be Funded anthology and conference recordings review this history and political context, but offer no simple answers. The contributors are a multigenerational assembly of organizers working inside and outside the NPIC from a variety of - even conflicting - perspectives. However, we hope the book and conference continue a conversation about how to think beyond state-proctored models like the non-profit system for organizing political projects for social change.

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Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex

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"I'm very much afraid of this 'Foundation Complex.' We're getting praise from places that worry me." "I want us all to be real creative about our tactics and strategies to dismantle the empire." - Joo-Hyun Kang, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded Conference, 2004 In 2004, along with women of color at UC Santa Barbara, INCITE!

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Mapping

We strive to map Indigenous territories, treaties, and languages across the world in a way that goes beyond colonial ways of thinking in order to better represent how Indigenous people want to see themselves.

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Native Land is a resource to learn more about Indigenous territories, languages, lands, and ways of life. We welcome you to our site.

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Resource shared in the conference breakout chat by an attendee!

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VOICE Award Winning documentary

Cracking Up follows a year in the life of Stand Up For Mental Health. You'll see a group of people who suffer the stigma of mental illness on a daily basis; strangers fear them, staring and whispering behind their backs. Many of them have survived suicide attempts, psychotic breaks and have been in and out of institutions for years. But ultimately, they are the underdogs who set out to achieve something that even they don't believe they will be able to do... confront their demons and find humor in some of their most horrible and emotionally painful experiences.

Cracking Up features naturally gifted people from all walks of life who happen to be afflicted with mental illnesses. The comedy class offers a "safe place" where everyone in the group is free of stigma and treated with respect.

You'll see the comics from their first time at the mic to their graduation showcase in front of a packed house! It's funny, inspiring, and educational. You'll come away from it with hope that recovery is possible!

Cost: $25 plus $10 shipping and handling in North America. Click here to email us to buy a copy
Click here to go to our video page to see a clip from from Cracking Up

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Cracking Up - Stand Up For Mental Health

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Cracking Up VOICE Award Winning documentary Cracking Up follows a year in the life of Stand Up For Mental Health. You'll see a group of people who suffer the stigma of mental illness on a daily basis; strangers fear them, staring and whispering behind their backs.

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also check out their instagram @accountabilitymapping

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I help people end cycles of violence by building accountability skills with body-centered somatic coaching and Transformative Justice

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Decolonizing Non Violent Communication Workbook 

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Decolonizing Non Violent Communication Workbook 

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Meenadchi: decolonizing NVC and family constellation therapy

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Healing intergenerational trauma by changing the way we talk to ourselves, each other, and the universe.

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Tool to help us identify our feelings.

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Borrowed (temporarily and without permission) from Geoffrey Roberts.

Hi there! This page is provided as a free resource for anybody who might find it useful. I make exactly $0.00 off of it, though I do incur small hosting and domain renewal costs. If you feel so inclined to contribute to those costs, you can Venmo me by scanning the QR code below.

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Borrowed (temporarily and without permission) from Geoffrey Roberts. Hi there! This page is provided as a free resource for anybody who might find it useful. I make exactly $0.00 off of it, though I do incur small hosting and domain renewal costs.

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The Wabash Center's Dialogue On Teaching

Episode 111 - Taking Play Seriously: Lakisha R. Lockhart

The Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion

Play, with and for adult learners, recognizes embodied aesthetics, assists in meaning making, redefines productivity, and welcomes wisdom. Diversities of epistemologies through play pedagogies enhance adult learning. Learning to have fun together rejuvenates and transforms classrooms. What does it mean to maintain health and wellbeing through play? Dr. Nancy Lynne Westfield hosts (Chicago Theological Seminary).

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Episode 111 - Taking Play Seriously: Lakisha R. Lockhart - The Wabash Center's Dialogue On Teaching

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Play, with and for adult learners, recognizes embodied aesthetics, assists in meaning making, redefines productivity, and welcomes wisdom. Diversities of epistemologies through play pedagogies enhance adult learning. Learning to have fun together rejuvenates and transforms classrooms. What does it mean to maintain health and wellbeing through play?

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Adult Play. The Dirty Secret of Grownups

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Changes in the American religious landscape enabled the rise of mass incarceration. Religious ideas and practices also offer a key for ending mass incarceration. These are the bold claims advanced by Break Every Yoke, the joint work of two activist-scholars of American religion. Once, in an era not too long past, Americans, both incarcerated and free, spoke a language of social liberation animated by religion. In the era of mass incarceration, we have largely forgotten how to dream-and organize-this way. To end mass incarceration we must reclaim this lost tradition. Properly conceived, the movement we need must demand not prison reform but prison abolition.
weaves religion into the stories about race, politics, and economics that conventionally account for America's grotesque prison expansion of the last half century, and in so doing it sheds new light on one of our era's biggest human catastrophes. By foregrounding the role of religion in the way political elites, religious institutions, and incarcerated activists talk about incarceration, Break Every Yoke is an effort to stretch the American moral imagination and contribute resources toward envisioning alternative ways of doing justice. By looking back to nineteenth century abolitionism, and by turning to today's grassroots activists, it argues for reclaiming the abolition "spirit."

Product Details

ISBN-13:

9780190949150

Publisher:

Oxford University Press

Publication date:

12/11/2019

Edition description:

New Edition

Pages:

264

Product dimensions:

6.40(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Joshua Dubler is Assistant Professor of Religion at the University of Rochester. He is the author of Down in the Chapel: Religious Life in an American Prison and co-editor of Religion, Law, U.S.A.
Vincent Lloyd is Associate Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Villanova University. He is the author of Black Natural Law, Religion of the Field Negro, and In Defense of Charisma.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Chapter 1: Why Not Prison Abolition?
Chapter 2: The Political Theology of Mass Incarceration
Chapter 3: The Limits of Reformist Religion
Chapter 4: Prison Religion and Prison Justice
Chapter 5: The Spirit of Abolition
Concluding Meditations
Debts and Resources

Editorial Reviews

"Break Every Yoke unsparingly illustrates how religion has contributed to mass criminalization while also making a convincing case that religious people can be mobilized in the fight to transform the carceral state. The authors remind us that making a moral case against incarceration is essential to the struggle to abolish prisons. If you are new to the idea of prison abolition, the book offers a valuable primer. It pushed me beyond my comfort zone, agitated me in the best sense, and left me asking more questions. How much more effective could prison industrial complex abolition be if organizers more explicitly and intentionally incorporated religion and spirituality into our work? How should we do it? I m grateful for these provocations. I can t wait to talk to others about this book. Let s get the conversations going." — Mariame Kaba, founder of Project NIA

"Spirituality without structure is not easily sustained in hostile, authoritarian environments. Although religions have historically been practitioners of organized predatory violence, Break Every Yoke illustrates how we can counter violence with religion that supports resilience and a healthy spirituality to resist: school to prison pipelines, foster care, residential homes for special needs children, detention centers, mental asylums, solitary confinement, death row, political imprisonment and mass incarceration." — Joy James, Ebenezer Fitch Professor of Humanities, Williams College
"One of the critical moral and political issues facing Americans today is our system of mass incarceration. With this thoughtful and inspiring book, Joshua Dubler and Vincent Lloyd present a powerful indictment of this moral abomination and an inspiring mandate to create a new and radical abolitionist movement rooted in the Bible." — Susannah Heschel, Eli Black Professor of Jewish Studies, Dartmouth College
From the Publisher

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Break Every Yoke: Religion, Justice, and the Abolition of Prisons|Hardcover

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Changes in the American religious landscape enabled the rise of mass incarceration. Religious ideas and practices also offer a key for ending mass incarceration. These are the bold claims advanced by Break Every Yoke, the joint work of two activist-scholars of American religion. Once,...

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"Poetry as scream, balm, and tool."

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I am not a poet. Nikky Finney, Audre Lorde, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Pat Parker are. I started writing poetry when I was eleven years old. My poems were melodramatic diatribes about poverty, homelessness, and war. I was a strange kid who grew into a weird adult who is not a poet but reads, loves, and still occasionally writes poems in her journal.

I am an organizer: a prison abolitionist who wants to see black people, my people, free. To achieve this goal, we need imagination. Poetry helps me to imagine freedom.

Over the past year and a half, more people across the US have been circulating images of black death in part because of the current focus on police violence and impunity. These images, however, are traumatic and to some degree mind- and soul-numbing. How do we mourn? How can we grieve? I think poetry opens a door. Poetry helps us to resist.

Last summer, I stood on a soapbox, a real one, and used poetry to call out the cops while grieving in public.

The previous Friday, Dominique "Damo" Franklin, Jr. had been laid to rest after having been tased to death by police. I hoped to attend his funeral but in the end I was unable due to a previous commitment. It was just as well. I hate funerals, especially when the person being buried is in his early twenties.

On an overcast Saturday afternoon, on a concrete island at the intersection of Ashland, Milwaukee, and Division, I joined a couple dozen people (mostly young) who were reading and performing poetry in opposition to state violence. The organizers of the gathering were from the Revolutionary Poets Brigade of Chicago and they invited me to say a few words. I said yes, hoping to find an outlet to express my grief.

I was preceded by Damo's good friend, artist and activist Ethan Viets-VanLear, who shared an original poem:

And the police of the block that got a vendetta on every Black boy child;

The perpetrators of this fabricated peace we've apparently disturbed!

smothered so I couldn't speak.

I was transfixed by Ethan's words and gutted by his pain. His poem was part eulogy, part primal scream. I hoped that his spoken words were a catharsis on the long journey toward healing. Maybe poetry can be a balm. When one reads Dennis Brutus, for example, it is impossible not to believe in the healing power of art:

It was my turn. In memory of Damo and other victims of state violence, I read two poems by Langston Hughes and Ai, holding on to their words like a raft in choppy waters.

As I read, I pictured Damo being tased (twice) by Chicago police and hitting his head so hard that he was brain dead when he arrived at the hospital. Unable to adequately convey my horror, I borrowed the poet's tongue and took comfort in losing myself in another's words.

The gathering was titled "'No Knock' an Artistic Speak-Out Against 'the American Police State.'" The title was of course inspired by Gil Scott-Heron's poem "No Knock."

It is as it ever was. No knocked on Damo who is now six feet underground.

Passersby stopped to listen as various people read poems about Guantanamo, police violence, prisons, surveillance, and more. Lorde is right:

Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest external horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.

There is magic in hearing voices speaking out for justice over the din of a bustling city. Gathering as a collective to recite poetry can't end state violence but it can lift our spirits so that we might live another day to fight for more justice. Now more than ever we need words to help us think through that which cannot be thought. Poetry can help lift the ceiling from our brains so that we can imagine liberation.

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Imagining Freedom by Mariame Kaba | Poetry Magazine

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I am not a poet. Nikky Finney, Audre Lorde, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Pat Parker are. I started writing poetry when I was eleven years old. My poems were melodramatic diatribes about poverty, homelessness, and war. I was a strange kid who grew into a weird adult who is not a poet but reads, loves, and still occasionally writes poems in her journal.

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"Land acknowledgements are a good first step, but there’s a lot more work to be done"

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"Land acknowledgements are a good first step, but there’s a lot more work to be done"

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In hundreds of schools across Canada, the morning announcements start the same way, with a land acknowledgement stating that the building is located in the traditional territory of First Nations, Métis and Inuit peoples (FNMI). You may have heard something similar at a civic event or fundraiser-for many non-Indigenous Canadians, it's one of the first introductions to the idea of reconciliation.

I know my own kids hear one each morning. They are spoken by students not much older than they are, who may or may not understand what they're saying, let alone how to correctly pronounce the names of the Indigenous people who first inhabited the land their school is on or who the Indigenous and/or FNMI peoples are that share their home with them today.

When approached humbly, in authentic consultation with Indigenous people as equals, land acknowledgements can help pave the way to honouring those with whom we share this land. That means that land acknowledgements can't just be a token gesture. To bring equality to all Canadians, we need to find ways to match those words with action.

What exactly is a land acknowledgement?
Essentially, land acknowledgements are an act of conciliation by an educator, host, keynote speaker or programmer who introduces the territorial or traditional lands. While these announcements aren't politically mandated, they started about two years ago in response to the 94 "calls to action" by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC). However, Indigenous peoples have been introducing themselves through their connection to the land with one another for centuries because, depending on the occasion, multiple nations are often present. It's how we continue to recognize our own rich diverse nations within our own communities, singularly or in gatherings of large groups, in governance, in ceremony and in celebration.

It's important to note, though, that not all Indigenous peoples can place themselves in this way-they may not know their direct lineage as a result of colonization and genocide. Be cognizant that one Indigenous person is just that: one person with one experience. Someone may identify with being Ojibwa, Inuit or Métis, while another may prefer Aboriginal, Native, Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee or a specific nation within or outside of these alignments.

Why our kids need to learn about residential schools What are some of the concerns?
I've had many debates over land acknowledgements with Indigenous and non-Indigenous friends, family members, mentors, peers and community members. Will hearing the statement every day at school help kids absorb that information or will it simply become background noise? Do younger students even understand them? Is the curriculum in public schools demonstrating inclusion and a genuine representation of Indigenous culture?

Sometimes it can feel as though land acknowledgements are more about performance and less about accuracy, existing simply as a box to check off in the spirit of reconciliation. And consistency can be an issue. "I've seen them done in different academic settings, few and far between in terms of equal application," says Marjolaine LaPointe, Algonquin, Deer Clan, Ardoch First Nations, an Anishinaabemowin language teacher for the Kawartha Pine Ridge District School Board in Ontario. "I often worry that land acknowledgements are kind of like when you're having a family dinner and you want Grandma to say grace and then you stick her in the corner," she says. "No one is listening to her stories as an integral part of what's happening."

LaPointe is also concerned about the expectations that are sometimes placed on Indigenous people. "I worry that land acknowledgement openings by traditional people and elders are becoming expected volunteer roles from some of our most esteemed members without respectful consultation, honorarium or contract," she says. "I worry that teachers are asking Indigenous students to teach their entire class because they've been singled out. It's up to us to create safe spaces for our most marginalized kids. Asking them to speak on behalf of all Indigenous peoples-and not recognizing that they represent many different nations-is a growing problem."

What happens next, and how can we do better?
No matter where they are, Canadians live on Indigenous territory. It should be a priority to learn more about the places we call home and the neighbourhoods we live in. We can create real change by pushing ourselves to engage in uncomfortable conversations, which includes individuals doing their own work when it comes to confronting their own biases.

So how can public schools be used to help build a deeper understanding of land acknowledgements? "They're a good place to start, but there is a lot more work that needs to be done," says Rachel Mishenene, executive staff for First Nations, Métis and Inuit Education at the Elementary Teachers' Federation of Ontario. "As an Indigenous person, I feel good when I hear land acknowledgements, but I am also cognizant that it comes with a responsibility to demonstrate the inclusion of Indigenous perspectives through action. A land acknowledgement without action is just a statement."

Mishenene, who is Ojibwa from Eabametoong First Nation, uses a mind, body and spirit approach-her own interpretation of Indigenous world views-when talking to Canadian settlers about land acknowledgements. She explains how they might understand them from an Indigenous perspective and way of thinking.

Mind: "Think about your learning experience, specifically in learning about Canada and its relationship with Indigenous peoples. How are Indigenous people represented in books, media and films? Are they positive or negative, and from whose perspective? What do I need to do if I want to partake in reconciliation?"

Body: "Where are you physically situated? Where is your home and your child's school? Do you know the Indigenous group whose traditional lands you are situated on? A good place to start would be to research your community the same way you might research the culture, customs and languages of the places you travel."

Spirit: "Our identities are revealed through our connection to our culture and communities. Our interaction with our customs, traditions, languages and beliefs feeds our spirit. Ask yourself 'How is your cultural identity celebrated, represented and honoured in your community?' How can Indigenous cultural identities and traditions be positively reflected?"

Mishenene encourages others to get to know the Indigenous people in their communities who are making substantial contributions. Parents can have Indigenous film nights at their child's school or contact local representatives from Indigenous organizations and faculties to inquire about learning opportunities. Parents can talk to school trustees about the FNMI curriculum in their child's school and Indigenous learning spaces and workshops. She encourages Canadians to access culturally relevant and authentic resources.

I worry a lot about how we can repair the fractured relationship between Indigenous peoples and Canadians. But what remains most important to me is that we learn from one another and lead by example for our kids, even when it's messy. Showing them how to repair relationships is a foundational teaching in emotional intelligence. We should apply the same respect and thought process to teaching our kids how to manage their future responsibilities as a collective because those responsibilities are immense. They will join us and eventually pick up where we leave off in our efforts for social justice and equality. We have a responsibility to push conversations forward so that our children can see us work together and guide one another as equals.

For Canadians who wish to be allies, it's important to be present in the spaces of discord and stand in solidarity with Indigenous peoples. Learn more about and attend events for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG). Attend a youth-led march in your area. Take a stand against current injustices and oppression when it comes to our children being unjustifiably taken into foster care and our kids being killed.

There are ways to break down systemic and institutional barriers, and it begins with those with privilege, using their access as a stepping stone to do their own learning and share those resources with others. Schools can better support Indigenous peoples by inviting qualified members into spaces at a leadership level. For teachers, there is no reason to not be doing right by Indigenous and non-Indigenous students. It's either a lack of knowing where to go or an act of discrimination and bias in not wanting to make changes. Non-Indigenous parents should ask themselves if their Indigenous colleagues are being discriminated against in the workplace.

The TRC gave Canadians-Indigenous, non-Indigenous, settler and settler descendants-an important mission. It's not supposed to be easy to work together as people of many different nations, races and beliefs to change the colonial foundations of this country. Land acknowledgements are just one small step we can take to honour that healing-they're not meant to erase oppression. It's going to take many steps, walking together, but it's important to remember that every step counts.
Read more:
39 great Indigenous stories to read and share with your kids
How I'm raising my daughter to be 100 percent, unapologetically Indigenous

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Land acknowledgements are a good first step, but there's a lot more work to be done

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In hundreds of schools across Canada, the morning announcements start the same way, with a land acknowledgement stating that the building is located in the traditional territory of First Nations, Métis and Inuit peoples (FNMI). You may have heard something similar at a civic event or fundraiser-for many non-Indigenous Canadians, it's one of the first introductions to the idea of reconciliation .

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Create a pod-map of your support network 

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Create a pod-map of your support network 

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These would be the people in our lives that we would call on to support us with things such as our immediate and on-going safety, accountability and transformation of behaviors, or individual and collective healing and resiliency.

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Feminista Jones on Inner Hoe Uprising Podcast 

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Feminista Jones on Inner Hoe Uprising Podcast 

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Feminista Jones joins Akua & Sam to talk about kink, race, patriarchy, sexuality, and the historic and cultural complexities of being an African American woman into BDSM. Interview starts minute 8.

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Feminista Jones joins Akua & Sam to talk about kink, race, patriarchy, sexuality, and the historic and cultural complexities of being an African American woman into BDSM. She also tells us about her upcoming book "Reclaiming Our Space: How Black Feminists Are Changing the World from the Tweets to the Streets".

Fuck It (Topic of the Day): Points of Discussion include: discovering the difference between bottoming and being a sub, patriarchal norms influencing views on d/s relationships, personal BDSM journeys, reconciling shame as it pertains to being a black person into BDSM, empowerment thru kink, dealing with abuse while being in a d/s relationship, Race Play, the intersection of BDSM and Chattel Slavery, BDSM as an aid in healing from sexual trauma, African Americans disjointed sexual histories, sex and black academia, the glory and pitfalls of Twitter and Facebook, Kevin Hart, Cancel Culture, problematic favs and allowing for growth, black masculinity and black femininity in perceptions of d/s relationships, pegging, how patriarchy can foster abuse in BDSM communities, being the right kind of person for Kink, & much more!

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Episode 137: Complexities of Blackness, Womanhood, & Kink | Inner Hoe Uprising

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Feminista Jones joins Akua & Sam to talk about kink, race, patriarchy, sexuality, and the historic and cultural complexities of being an African American woman into BDSM. She also tells us about her upcoming book "Reclaiming Our Space: How Black Feminists Are Changing the World from the Tweets to the Streets".

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Network Insta Post on Accountability Steps

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Network Insta Post on Accountability Steps

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From 11/04/2019

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Evaluative Words Confused with Feelings Chart

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Evaluative Words Confused with Feelings Chart

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From Dr. Marshall B. Rosenberg's book!

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Evaluative words list nonviolent communication

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EVALUATIVE WORDS CONFUSED WITH FEELINGS Evaluative Word Giraffe Feeling(s) Giraffe Need(s) Abandoned Terrified, hurt,...

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It's the last solstice of the decade. Here in the northern hemisphere it's a winter solstice full of dark days and urgent hungers. There are shallow ways to mark the passing of time, like lists on social media of best and worst ________ of the decade. And then there is the depth work we can't avoid no matter how much we scroll, asking us what we want to take with us into a new decade and what we need to finally leave behind.

For me this has been a saltwater solstice, not because I am at the beach (I wish) but because it has been an immersion in familiar and new layers of grief, serious cravings for french fries and my mama's macaroni and cheese and major decisions about my creative and community practices. So, of course, I turn to marine mammals, kindred experts in navigating salt, immersion and breath. Tomorrow night I will be facilitating an online writing solstice prep workshop called "Deep Dive" which will engage a seven step process inspired by mile deep diving whales for how we can go deep this solstice without getting lost, how we can get in and out of our own heads, how we can let our breathing reshape our lives and more. You can sign up for the workshop here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/deep-dive-solstice-prep-session-black-feminist-lessons-from-marine-mammals-tickets-86291166201

And some of the words that will be guiding us are below.

Deep love,

Alexis
Seven. A Guide for Diving Deeper.
(from Cachalot aka Phyester Macrocephalus aka the Sperm Whale who can dive more than a mile deep translated by APG)

one. breathe.

(we sperm whales can replace 90% of the air in our lungs with one breath. we can blow our breath 17 feet high. however deep you are breathing, breathe more, breathe deeper.)

two. take responsibility for your forehead.

(we, for example, have a head full of wax we can solidify like a weight to go deeper, we can melt it to become lighter than water and float. what is going on in your head? be intentional with it.)

(we stretch out our bodies 60 feet long at the surface and then arch our backs facing down, our tails come with us "barely creating a ripple." we are saving our energy for depth. this is not the time to splash.)

four. be flexible.

(deep in the ocean there is pressure. a lot of pressure. it will press on your chest and your lungs will collapse. you call it heartbreak. it is not. it is how what made you embraces you. reshapes you. welcomes you back. let it happen.)

five. be specific in your actions.

(when your lungs collapse you will need the oxygen in your blood. it is deep in your muscles. it was put there by practice. let your practice facilitate depth. it will be there when you need it.)

(we listen underneath our throats, not with our ears. we listen across the planet. we can hear each other click from opposite sides of the globe. though we may seem alone, we never are.)
seven. come back.
(you will know when it has been enough time in the deep. it can vary. attune to your need. account for your nourishment. direct your thoughts, melt them down make them light. and return.)[1

Image Credit: Whale and Dolphin Conservation
Direct quote from Smithsonian Handbook on Whales Dolphins and Porpoises

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Solstice Depth: Guidance from Mile Deep Diving Whales - Alexis Pauline Gumbs

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It's the last solstice of the decade. Here in the northern hemisphere it's a winter solstice full of dark days and urgent hungers. There are shallow ways to mark the passing of time, like lists on social media of best and worst ________ of the decade.

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Reclaiming our Space: How Black Feminists are Changing the World from the Tweets to the Streets

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Reclaiming our Space: How Black Feminists are Changing the World from the Tweets to the Streets

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by Feminista Jones

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Editorial Reviews

12/10/2018

Feminist activist and writer Jones thoroughly explores how black women are carving out digital niches, building community among like-minded people, and fighting back against racism and misogyny. She looks at some of the most successful hashtags of "Black Twitter," including her own #YouOKSis, which spread awareness about street harassment. Jones also interviews other influential people and activists, including CaShawn Thompson, founder of the Black Girl Magic movement, which draws attention to black women's achievements, and Glynda Carr, founder of Higher Heights for America, which supports black women in politics. She astutely analyzes the nuances of black female identity and argues it is embattled and erased on two fronts, as feminism writ large is viewed as a white woman's space, and racial politics are monopolized by men: "Where all the women are white and all the blacks are men, we are not white enough to be women and too womanly to be black." Another section uses the lens of slavery and colonization to examine the lack of positive representations of black sexuality. Jones encourages other marginalized people to speak out, using "personal branding, activism, and innovative marketing strategies" such as hashtags and evidence-presenting tweet threads to amplify their messages. Part memoir, part tactical guide to internet activism, Jones's entertaining book advises black women on how to make their voices heard and everyone else on best practices for being an ally. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

There's a beautiful optimism about the power of social media throughout various chapters . . . Recommended for university-level courses on gender studies and new media studies as well as for general readers interested in the intersection of pop culture, feminist theory, racial justice, and activism."
- Library Journal, Starred Review

"Smart, savvy, and unapologetically fierce."
- Kirkus Reviews

"Jones's entertaining book . . . astutely analyzes the nuances of black female identity."
- Publishers Weekly

"If you want to understand the rising preeminence of black women in our modern day sociopolitical landscape, you would be smart to start with Feminista Jones, a black woman writing and working at the forefront of our movements."
-Ijeoma Oluo, author of the New York Times bestseller So You Want To Talk About Race

" Reclaiming Our Space is an invaluable contribution to long-overdue conversations about race, gender, and intersectionality in America. Feminista Jones combines empathy and wisdom with intellectual rigor and historical analysis to explain clearly and compellingly the central role that Black feminists play in the fight for democracy and social justice."
-Soraya Chemaly, director of the Women's Media Center Speech Project and author of Rage Becomes Her

" Reclaiming Our Space is a refreshing affirmation of Black women, centering our societal roles in a way I have never read before. For those of us whose race and gender exist at a precarious intersection, Reclaiming Our Space is a godsend that will inform not only how we are approached and regarded by others through social media platforms but how we interact with each other and value ourselves."
-CaShawn Thompson, creator of #BlackGirlMagic

"It's impossible to overstate the cultural impact of Feminista Jones . . . . A bold and candid voice."
-Eve L. Ewing, author of Electric Arches and Ghosts in the Schoolyard

"As often as I find myself disillusioned by today's political climate, Feminista Jones reminds us that Black women have always been and continue to be at the forefront of social change both online and IRL. Reclaiming Our Space is a thorough and accessible history of Black feminism that reflects on our past as a means of encouraging us to move toward a better future."
-Franchesca Ramsey, host of MTV Decoded and author of Well, That Escalated Quickly: Memoirs and Mistakes of an Accidental Activist

"In a world where many call themselves 'feminist,' educator, healer, and community leader Feminista Jones provides tangible steps for those seeking to do a better job of showing up and holding space for Black women. Reclaiming Our Space is required reading for brothers who fashion themselves supporters of our sisters, as well as those who don't yet know they need to be. It's also soul food for the rest of y'all desiring to move toward a better future."
-David Johns, executive director of the National Black Justice Coalition

From the Publisher

2018-12-03

A feminist writer/community activist offers insights into what she sees as the defining practices of 21st-century black feminism.

For Philadelphia-based social worker and activist Jones, black feminism is "the key to Black liberation." One tool that the author believes that black feminists have used successfully in their ongoing struggle for social justice is Twitter. She argues that hashtags, which help Twitter users find "specific topics and associated social media posts," have become vital mechanisms to grow communities that extend far beyond the narrow confines of academia. Some, like #FridayNightHorror (which focuses on black women in the horror film genre) and #BlackGirlsAreMagic (which focuses on the accomplishments of black women), are social, educational, and/or inspirational in nature. Others, like #BlackLivesMatter, have become the foundation for worldwide political movements. Jones believes that Twitter has become such a successful tool for black feminists/activists because the "forum [is] rooted in the African call-and-response tradition," wherein participants aid in the development of a message while also influencing its direction. She also suggests that Twitter has become a way that black feminists like herself have been able to build followings that have allowed them to continue much-needed conversations elsewhere. Tweets on sex-positive feminism, for example, led Jones to create a widely read blog and, later, articles for Ebony.com. While the author concedes that what exists online "can be negative and harmful to [black] progress," she also suggests that continued sharing of ideas among black feminists "will strengthen and improve the way the next generation interacts with each other." Sharp and provocative, the narrative is most powerful in its implication that, unless born to privilege, all Americans, regardless of race or gender, now "feel something akin to what Black people...have always experienced." Understanding black (female) struggles is therefore critical for everyone.

Smart, savvy, and unapologetically fierce.

Kirkus Reviews

★ Winter 2018

Part memoir, part manifesto, this work by social worker and activist Jones begins with the premise that social change needs to start with black people because, as the author explains, "without focused work to eradicate the insidious permeation of these oppressions, we will only get as far as our internalized hatred permits." By providing insights into how she has used social media to ignite change, Jones details how she has engaged in movements that have radically transformed culture. There's a beautiful optimism about the power of social media throughout various chapters. Her focus is on Twitter, and rightly so, as she's actively used hashtags such as #BlackLivesMatter, #SayHerName, #YouOKSis, and #BlackGirlMagic. Jones carefully designed this book so that readers would see first the small sites and signs of privilege before moving into an understanding of the larger implications of what it means to have privilege in America. The work aims to engender discomfort, which is what many of us need right now if we are going to play a role in creating systemic change. VERDICT Recommended for university-level courses on gender studies and new media studies as well as for general readers interested in the intersections of pop culture, feminist theory, racial justice, and activism. -Emily Bowles, Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison

Library Journal

Read More

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Reclaiming Our Space: How Black Feminists Are Changing the World from the Tweets to the Streets|Paperback

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12/10/2018 Feminist activist and writer Jones thoroughly explores how black women are carving out digital niches, building community among like-minded people, and fighting back against racism and misogyny. She looks at some of the most successful hashtags of "Black Twitter," including her own #YouOKSis, which spread awareness about street harassment.

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The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power

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The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power

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by Audre Lorde

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I love watching them dance together <3

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Bruno + Brenda - Dutch International Zouk Congress 2016 - "We Won't"

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I have a friend who leads like I imagine the angels do.

I can just picture it: Gabriel, Peter, and this sweet guy from Jersey, all chilling in the back of the club with a queue of ladies and gents waiting to dance.

This leader, my friend, is angelic in the most real and important way. He once told me that he consciously tries to make every dance as amazing as possible for the followers he is with. I know this sounds simple, but a whole hell of a lot goes into it. For any given dance he takes note of the qualities of your initial connection, gauges your emotional state, and crafts each move of the dance in a way as to help you feel safe and happy. He is committed to not just your pleasure but your comfort and joy. This, he says, is the essence of a good leader.

I agree.

What about a good follower? A good follower does much the same. A good follower listens. A good follower responds. A good follower tunes into your emotional energy, feels your interpretation of the music, gauges your type of connection, and provides the kind of response that is satisfying for you - the leader - on those levels. A good follower, like a good leader, meets her partner where she is at.

Dancing with these kinds of people can be heaven.

Being one of these people can also be heaven...

But you know what else it can be by the end of the night?

Exhausting.

Being a caring dancer can be really fucking exhausting.
Partner dance is care
Partner dancing is an intimate act. It's two people, moving together. It's communicating. It's being present. It's relationship. It's teamwork. It's union. It's sex, but better.

What distinguishes partner dancing from solo dancing is the relationship you have with your partner. Dancing is as rife with opportunities for mutual positivity or mutual negativity as any other time two people interact with one another.

Any time you interact with someone, from passing completely random strangers on public transit to making love to your own spouse, you have the opportunity to show them love and make them feel better, or not. You have the opportunity to smile at them, or not. You have the opportunity to be empathetic, and to listen, and to respond lovingly, or not. You have the opportunity to embrace a human being, and to make them feel at home in the world, or not.

Partner dancing - like any act between two people - is an opportunity to take care.
Taking care is giving energy
Yet the thing about taking care of people is that it's hard work.

We all only have so much emotional energy.

Say you wake up in the morning feeling springy. The sun is bright, and the sky is blue. You bounce out the front door. "Life is beautiful," you think. You buy a few dozen roses, and you pass them out to all the strangers you pass on the way to the office. All of these people smile brilliantly at you... they'll probably remember this moment all day. You put positive energy out into the world. You showed them love. You took care of them.

But what if you passed out roses all week, and no one expressed any care or even gratitude for you back? You might be able to get by feeling good about it for a while, bolstered by your sense of virtue and good ethics, but after some time of constantly putting all this energy out into the world, you will probably really start to yearn for some back. We are, unfortunately, limited human beings, who require as much nourishment from the world as we put into it.

At the end of a long, caring week without feeling cared for back, you might feel a little bit tired and a little bit sad. You might not feel like you could do much at all. You might not even feel much like you could buy one or two roses.

All you want to do is lay down and sleep.

Or better yet have someone come give you a rose of their own.
Emotional exhaustion on the dance floor
When I dance, I want to give 100%.

I want to be fully present with my partner, and I want them to be fully present with me.

I want to take care of my partner, and I want them to take care of me.

I want to love my partner, and I want them to love me.

I have noticed over the years however that if I cannot find a happy meeting ground - if I cannot find reciprocal energy of attention and care in a dance - I leave it feeling emotionally drained. If this goes on many times over the course of the night I go home feeling exhausted and sad.

This can happen for any number of reasons. My leader is indifferent. My leader doesn't pay attention to me. My leader never makes eye contact with me. My leader is physically rough with me. My leader doesn't seem to know or care how the quality of the lead affects me. My leader puts me through turn patterns without giving much thought to musicality or my experience. Perhaps most commonly - my leader is caught up in their own world.

It also happens when my leader doesn't notice - or cannot appreciate - the kind of care that I can give or am giving.

I don't care if it's someone at their first lesson or a pro whose been at it for decades. Even though the ways in which people can be caring vary based on technique, anybody on the dance floor is capable of care. Anybody is capable of demonstrating appreciation for you as a dancer and as a human being, as well as connecting with you and trying to give you the best experience possible. They might not be particularly good at it, technically, but that doesn't matter. It's the love that counts.
Takers and givers
A friend of mine once told me that she thinks about people in the world in terms of givers and takers.

On the dance floor, the angels, the ones who care, are givers.

People who are oblivious to care are takers.

If you don't go into each social and try to nourish and connect with your partners where they are at, you are a taker.

But if you go into each social with a big open heart and a desire to connect, support, and show appreciation to your partners, you are a giver.
Should you consent to dancing with a taker?
I don't typically consent to dances that I think will be emotionally draining.

If I have boundless emotional energy to give, I'll say yes to everybody (who appears to be respectful). If I think the leader who asks me to dance is well-intentioned but clueless about this sort of dynamic, I'll still say yes. I don't feel drained by people who are loving in whatever capacity they can be.

If I am not feeling particularly boundless, or simply having a rough day, I will say no to anyone who doesn't make me feel cared for. Sometimes I literally cannot bear my emotional energy being drained any more. Sometimes I need to feel cared for more than I can summon the will to care for others.
But if I dance with a giver...
If I end up with a partner who connects with me, finds my strengths and weaknesses, supports me, smiles at me, enjoys the music with me, or attentively makes art with me, then I feel cared for. I feel loved. I feel safe. I feel happy. I feel energized. My energy increases.

This is just like if someone makes me dinner, or opens the door for me, or simply smiles at me when I pass them on the street. It is a gesture that sends a message of openness, intimacy, and love.

This is super cool - the energy we get from gestures of love - it's one of the best things in the world. We all experience it every time we go dancing, or simply walk down the street, whether we are consciously aware of it or not.

Here's what's even cooler, though:
Dancing when both people are givers.
If I get into a situation in which not only does my partnercare for me, but also in which I care for them back, my energy does not just grow, but grows exponentially.

I feel actively energized in being able to care for an angel - for someone who is a giver.

I give; they give. Then I give more; then they give more.

And this isn't just me, this is everybody. It's human nature. When we care for people, we feel needed. We feel important. We feel reciprocal and connected and alive. We actively want to do good.

Caring reciprocally magnifies itself.
This is exactly the stuff that magical dances are made of.
It's each person doing everything they can, putting in 110%, to make the dance good not just for themselves but for each other.

You tune in to your leader; your leader tunes in to you. You settle into their frame, and they embrace yours. You figure out how to support their balance, and they support yours. You touch them lovingly just so, and they smile or touch you lovingly back. You wink, they smirk. You don't just get comfortable with one another, but you transcend that. You become joyfully at home with one another.

There is nothing in the world more energizing than this: when you can dance for someone else, and it means that you are nourishing yourself at the same time.

There is no longer a push or pull, a him versus her, a fight for safety or peace.

There is, instead, only mutual love, and something I think of as genuinely healing.
So I recommend...
That when you go out dancing, you think about dancers not just in terms of their technique, or even their connection, but rather their attention to and appreciation of their partner.

Perhaps pay attention to your own heart and dances. Take note of when you feel the most drained, and when you feel the most enlivened.

Nourish yourself on the dance floor. If you're feeling exhausted, let yourself be exhausted. Perhaps seek out a dance with one of your favorite angels, who could help restore you.

Nourish others on the dance floor. This means taking care of them while dancing with them, but then it also means providing space for them to care for themselves. This may mean letting them seek dances elsewhere.

And maybe most of all take note of the people who have really cared for you (and others) over time. Express your gratitude. Give back. Recognize that a good dance is never really just a good dance. It's a relationship full of focus, attention, support, care, and love.

Be an angel. It's what you, your partners, the community, the planet, need.

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Managing emotional energy on the dance floor: are you a giver or a taker? - The Perfect Follow

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I have a friend who leads like I imagine the angels do. I can just picture it: Gabriel, Peter, and this sweet guy from Jersey, all chilling in the back of the club with a queue of ladies and gents waiting to dance. This leader, my friend, is angelic in the most real and important way.

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Perspectives on Healing and Personal Transformation Through BDSM

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Perspectives on Healing and Personal Transformation Through BDSM

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"This beautiful photo series aims to contextualize the practice of bondage within larger conversations on personal liberation."

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Over the course of my life, I've met with a myriad of "mental health professionals" and have heard the words "ADHD," "anxiety," "obsessive compulsive disorder," "multiple personality disorder," "post-traumatic stress disorder," and "schizophrenia" discussed as potential diagnoses of all of the things I feel in my mind. But I have self-diagnosed it as "crazy brain" - when my mind is quick-moving but molasses-sticky, impenetrable and heavy, void of reason, painful, and dark; when it feels like I want to claw my eyes out or stab myself in the face. After careful consideration of each option, I've refused to be hospitalized or put on medication, and instead, for the past six or so years, I have focused on using natural remedies to ease the symptoms I feel- incorporating the use of gym time, essential oils, sex, and medicinal teas and tinctures into my personal self-care routine.

While these remedies work for my mental health maintenance, nothing has worked quite as well in alleviating said "crazy brain" as having my body tightly bound in scratchy rope with a hood over my face blocking out most of my senses as my top either firmly gives me directions or runs sharp knives down my legs and arms. As the philosopher Kant said, it's clear that my solution is to "deny knowledge, to allow room for faith."

It has only been through BDSM as a practice that I've realized that the ultimate healing first comes from destruction of everything you think you are. Poet Cynthia Occelli wrote, "For a seed to achieve its greatest expression, it must come completely undone. The shell cracks, its insides come out, and everything changes. To someone who doesn't understand growth, it would look like complete destruction." I finally feel like I'm removing all the masks and all the pretenses that we're taught to hold onto in our bodies and in our minds. This art of consensual submission has taught me to learn how to surrender my ego, insecurities, fear, and vanity to a deepening of pleasure, service, intimacy, and vulnerability in the present moment.

BDSM play breaks me in a way that allows me to be fully present, open, and flowing - the best version of myself. So much of what our culture teaches us about growth and expansion is based on socially-constructed norms, but wouldn't it make more sense if each of us took control of dictating what growth looks like for our own selves? Instead of feeding into the power dynamics and blatant misogyny that our society deems acceptable, wouldn't it instead make sense to question, disfigure, and dismantle those, and decide which power dynamics we want to consensually play with instead?

After a session where I've been painfully suspended in the air by rope, I feel capable and proud of my ability to flow and fly. After being paddled and made to count out loud each impact on my upper thighs, I feel stronger and more present in my body. After having needles pierce my skin to draw blood, I feel more desired and beautiful than I did before. When my muscles are sore and I have scars or bruises the next day, I feel whole and like my outsides finally match my insides; like I've taken off the unnecessary social masks and am instead wearing my "crazy brain" in the daylight for people to see.

It's only when our masks are challenged and tousled that they can finally be torn down, allowing what was once covered in darkness to finally be exposed to light. And only when the darkness reaches the light can we finally begin to heal.
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Perspectives on Healing and Personal Transformation Through BDSM

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Over the course of my life, I've met with a myriad of "mental health professionals" and have heard the words "ADHD," "anxiety," "obsessive compulsive disorder," "multiple personality disorder," "post-traumatic stress disorder," and "schizophrenia" discussed as potential diagnoses of all of the things I feel in my mind.

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movement methodology used in the workshop

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InterPlay is an active, creative way to unlock the wisdom of the body.

InterPlay is easy, fun, and life changing. It is based in a series of incremental "forms" that lead participants to movement and stories, silence and song, ease and amusement. In the process, we discover the wisdom in ourselves and our communities.

InterPlay integrates body, mind, heart and spirit. Life has become so fragmented. InterPlay helps to pull everything back together so we get more of what we want.

InterPlay is devoted to fun. It teaches the language and ethic of play in a deep and powerful way. If you are convinced that seriousness is the path to inner wisdom, then you might want to look elsewhere. If you would like to become a "recovering serious person," then TYPICAL InterPlay might be for you.

InterPlay is firmly based in affirmation and looking for the good. You don't have to think of yourself as creative in order to do InterPlay. We can teach you that part easily. We get far too much criticism in our lives already. We need to spend more time in the warm bath of acceptance.

InterPlay is the perfect antidote to stress and cynicism.

InterPlay is a community of people around the world who speak the shared language of a wide and deep variety of play. It is a body of bodies who enjoy contact and connection. You don"t have to dive in the deep end of InterPlay to learn and benefit from it, but it does exist and some wonderful folks are "swimming" there.

InterPlay has been developed by Cynthia Winton-Henry and Phil Porter over the last twenty years and it has spread around the world.

Resources for the Press

Some background materials about InterPlay.

InterPlay Co-founders Biographies of InterPlay Co-founders Cynthia Winton-Henry & Phil Porter

InterPlay in the News Online and print articles that have appeared about InterPlay.

Q & A: InterPlay Facts Basic information about InterPlay for those not familiar with the practice.

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InterPlay is an active, creative way to unlock the wisdom of the body. InterPlay is easy, fun, and life changing. It is based in a series of incremental "forms" that lead participants to movement and stories, silence and song, ease and amusement. In the process, we discover the wisdom in ourselves and our communities.

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TransformHarm.org | A Resource Hub For Ending Violence

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TransformHarm.org is a resource hub for ending violence. It offers an introduction to transformative justice. You can use what is here, and submit recommendations.

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

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by Mia Mingus for the BATJC, June 2016.

During the spring of 2014 the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective (BATJC) began using the term "pod" to refer to a specific type of relationship within transformative justice (TJ) work. We needed a term to describe the kind of relationship between people who would turn to each other for support around violent, harmful and abusive experiences, whether as survivors, bystanders or people who have harmed. These would be the people in our lives that we would call on to support us with things such as our immediate and on-going safety, accountability and transformation of behaviors, or individual and collective healing and resiliency.

Prior to this, we had been using the term "community" when we talked about transformative justice, but we found that, not surprisingly, many people do not feel connected to a "community" and, even more so, most people did not know what "community" meant or had wildly different definitions and understandings of "community." For some, "community" was an overarching term that encompassed huge numbers of people based on identity (e.g. "the feminist community"); while for others "community," referred to a specific set of arbitrary values, practices and/or relationships (e.g. "I don't know them well, but we're in community with each other"); or some defined "community" simply by geographic location, regardless of relationship or identity (e.g. "the Bay Area community"). We found that people romanticized community; or though they felt connected to a community at large, they only had significant and trustworthy relationships with very few actual people who may or may not be part of that community. For example, someone might feel connected to "the queer community," but when asked who from that "queer community" they felt they could trust to show up for them in times of crisis, vulnerability or violence, they could only name 2 or 3 people.

Although "community" is a word that we use all the time, many people don't know what it is or feel they have never experienced it. This became increasingly confusing as we used terms such as "community accountability" or "community responses to violence" and encouraged people to "turn to their communities;" and this became even more complicated in dealing with intimate and sexual violence because the violence, harm and abuse was often coming from their "community" because so many people are abused by someone they know.

We needed a different term to describe what we meant, and so, "pods" was suggested and it stuck. This is not to say that we don't use the term "community" still-we do; but we needed to create new language for our work.

We knew that across the board, people who experience violence, harm and abuse turn to their intimate networks before they turn to external state or social services. Most people don't call the police or seek counseling or even call anonymous hotlines. If they tell anyone at all, they turn to a trusted friend, family member, neighbor or coworker. We wanted a way to name those currently in your life that you would rely on (or are relying on) to respond to violence, harm and abuse.

POD
Your pod is made up of the people that you would call on if violence, harm or abuse happened to you; or the people that you would call on if you wanted support in taking accountability for violence, harm or abuse that you've done; or if you witnessed violence or if someone you care about was being violent or being abused.
People can have multiple pods. The people you call to support you when you are being harmed may not be the same people you call on to support you when you have done harm, and vice versa. In general, pod people are often those you have relationship and trust with, though everyone has different criteria for their pods.

Once we started using the term "pods," we realized a bunch of things:

- Most people have few solid, dependable relationships in their lives. Much of this is from the breaking of relationships, isolation, fear and criminalization that capitalism requires. We found that for many people, mapping their pod was a sobering process, as many thought their pod would be larger than it actually was. It is not uncommon for most people to have 1 or 2 people in their pod. We reassure people this is not a popularity contest, but rather a chance to reflect on why we have so few relationships with the kind of deep trust, reliability and groundedness we need to be able to respond well to violence.

- Many people have less people they could call on to take accountability for harm they've done than harm that happened to them. Though competent support for surviving violence is few and far between, we have found that accountable support for someone taking accountability for harm they have done is even harder to find. 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.

- Asking people to organize their pod was much more concrete than asking people to organize their "community." Once we had the shared language and concept of "pod," it allowed transformative justice to be more accessible. Gone were the fantasies of a giant, magical "community response," filled with people we only had surface relationships with; and instead we challenged ourselves and others to build solid pods of people through relationship and trust. In doing so, we are pushed to get specific about what those relationships look like and how they are built. It places relationship-building at the very center of transformative justice and community accountability work.

- "Pod people" don't fall neatly along traditional lines, especially in situations of intimate and sexual violence. People don't necessarily turn to their closest relationships (e.g. partner, family, best friends), especially because this is often where the violence is coming from, but also because the criteria we would use for our pod people is not necessarily the same as what we use (or get taught to use) for our general intimate relationships. We have different and specific kinds of relationships with our pod people, often in addition to relationship and trust, they involve a combination of characteristics such as, but not limited to: a track record of generative conflict; boundaries; being able to give and receive feedback; reliability. These are characteristics and skills that we are not readily taught to value in U.S. society and don't usually have the skillset to support in even our closest relationships.

- Building analysis was much easier than building the relationship and trust required for one's pod. Once people started to identify their pod, it became clear that most of the people they would call on were not necessarily political organizers or activists and usually didn't have political analysis. This was true, even for political organizers and activists who were mapping their pods. Using the language of "pods" was a way to meet people where they were and reveal what was already working in their intimate networks. People already had individuals in their lives they would turn to when violence happened (even if it was just one person). So this is where we needed to focus our work, instead of trying to build new relationships with strangers who might share a political analysis, but had no relationship to each other, let alone trust. We set out to build through our relationships and trust. We then worked to support our folks in cultivating a shared analysis and framework for understanding intimate and sexual violence through many things, most notably our transformative justice studies.

- The BATJC focuses on transformative justice responses to child sexual abuse. Growing and deepening our pods helps us build where children already are. Utilizing the concept of pods is a way to reach children where they are because a 5 year old is not going to reach out to us for support, nor should they be expected to spearhead a community accountability process. The more we can grow our own pods and have conversations about protecting and supporting the children and youth in our lives, the better prepared we will be to respond to child sexual abuse in our intimate networks.

- Relationship and trust, not always political analysis, continue to be two of the most important factors in successful TJ interventions, whether in supporting survivor self determination and healing, or in accountability processes. Though shared language, values, and political understandings can be very useful in responding to violence, we find that these are easier to build where relationship and trust already exist. By building where there is already authentic relationships and trust, rather than trying to piece together shallow versions, we help to set the conditions for, not only, successful TJ responses, but the likelihood that people will respond to violence at all.

- There are many people who do not have any pod people. This a very real reality for many oppressed and isolated communities/individuals because of how capitalism, oppression and violence shape our lives. For example, many disabled people are extremely isolated because of lack of access and resources; many immigrant women of color are isolated because of language or documentation; adults, youth and children who are surviving current abuse such as domestic violence may be isolated by their abusers. We hope that by beginning to build and grow pods where they already exist (or could exist), we can help build the conditions to be able to support people who do not have pods. By growing the number of people in the Bay Area who can recognize, talk about, prevent and respond to violence, we hope to make it that much more likely that people in need of support will find it in their daily lives. We also believe that orienting from a place of growing pods can help us gradually move away from the structures that keep people isolated. In this way, building our pods is not only useful for ourselves and the people in our immediate circles, but has the potential to help build a network of pods that could support anyone experiencing violence.

Above is our Pod Mapping Worksheet, which you can download here. We use this as a template to help people start to identify who could be in their pod(s). We invite people to fill out multiple worksheets for their different pods. This is only a basic template, people are welcome to create their own pod maps.

1) Write your name in the middle grey circle.

2) The surrounding bold-outlined circles are your pod. Write the names of the people who are in your pod. We encourage people to write the names of actual individuals, instead of things such as "my church group" or "my neighbors."

3) The dotted lines surrounding your pod are people who are "movable." They are people that could be moved in to your pod, but need a little more work. For example, you might need to build more relationship or trust with them. Or maybe you've never had a conversation with them about prisons or sexual violence.

4) The larger circles at the edge of the page are for networks, communities or groups that could be resources for you. It could be your local domestic violence direct service organization, or your cohort in nursing school, or your youth group, or a transformative justice group.

Your pod(s) may shift over time, as your needs or relationships shift or as people's geographic location shift. We encourage people to have conversations with their pod people about pods and transformative justice, as well as to actively grow the number of people in their pod and support each other in doing so. Growing one's pod is not easy and may take time. In pod work, we measure our successes by the quality of our relationships with one another and we invest in the time it takes to build things like trust, respect, vulnerability, accountability, care and love. We see building our pods as a concrete way to prepare and build resources for transformative justice in our communities.

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Pods and Pod Mapping Worksheet | Transform Harm

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by Mia Mingus for the BATJC, June 2016. Original article found here During the spring of 2014 the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective (BATJC) began using the term "pod" to refer to a specific type of relationship within transformative justice (TJ) work. We needed a term to describe the kind of relationship between people who [...]

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Credit goes to Jayda Shuavarnnasri, @jayda_kissed on Instagram

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I wrote an essay almost a decade ago based in reflections of my own experiences with overwork and burnout and the experience of people I was supporting in various organizations. I never published it, always thinking there is more work to do on it. I keep going back to it and realized now is as good a time as any to share the excerpt below that I hope is helpful to people who are being impacted by their own burnout and overwork or that of someone else.
Symptoms and Feelings of Overwork
Below I describe some of the symptoms and feelings that emerge with overwork. Some I experienced, and some I have heard others share. Many are very closely related and intertwined, but I have bulleted them for the ease of those who are more likely to skim than read.

A desire to take on tasks and responsibilities in order to "be important" to the group or control outcomes.

High stress when thinking about tasks being performed by someone else who might do it a different way, or the group coming to a different decision that I would make.

Feelings of resentment: "I've done the most for this organization" or "I work harder than anyone else." Can include creating a damaging organizational culture of competition and hierarchy about who overworks the most.

Not respecting group agreements or group process because I feel above the process as the founder or director or hardest worker.

Feelings of competition with other organizations that are actually politically aligned or with other issues that I perceive are better supported or other activists I perceive as better supported.

Feelings of martyrdom.

Desire/need to endlessly be given credit for my work.

Taking on more and more work to feed the cycle of martyrdom, shut-down, and resentment.

Depression and/or anxiety.

Overwhelm and fear.

Close to anger and/or close to tears regularly-staying in a constant heightened state, never feeling relaxed.

Feeling like I "have to" do all these things, cannot see any way to do less work or have less responsibility.

Inability to let others take on leadership roles.

Hoarding information or important contacts so that others cannot rise to the same level of leadership, usually rationalized in some way.

A life or death feeling that it must be done the way I do it. An extreme version of this can result in leaders sabotaging the organization or project rather than recognizing that it might be time to step back and share leadership or take a break from leadership.

Paranoia and distrust about others in the organization or other people working in this kind of work. Feelings of being alone. Feelings of "me against [members of the organization/staff/everyone]."

Believing that if I don't do it, it won't get done (by coworkers/the organization/other organizations) so I have to accept more and more work.

Tension or anger that results in giving the silent treatment to others in the organization or former collaborators.

Exhaustion.

Overpromising and under-delivering, which can lead to feeling fraudulent and afraid of being caught so far behind.

Feelings of scarcity driving decisionmaking: "There's not enough money/time/attention."

Feelings of emptiness, anxiety, depression or aimlessness only alleviated by working. Not knowing how to do anything besides work. Not having fun or feeling relaxed on vacation or days off.

Having no boundaries with work-working all the time, during meals, first thing upon waking and last before sleeping, during time that was supposed to be for connecting with loved ones.

Dismissal of the significance of group process and overvaluation of how the group is perceived by outsiders such as funders, elites, and other institutions.

Low quality work product including under-serving vulnerable people seeking help from the organization.

Defensiveness about all of the above and unwillingness to hear critique. "I'm doing so much, I'm killing myself with work. How can you critique me? I can't possibly do any better/more!"

Shame about experiencing all of the above.
These feelings and behaviors, of course, are reasonable results of the conditions under which we do our work. We are steeped in norms of capitalism and white supremacy that encourage us to compete, distrust, hoard, hide, disconnect, and only understand our value as based in how others see us. Our work is often under-resourced in important ways. Many of us come to the work because of our own experiences of violence or harm, and doing this work can be emotionally triggering and exhausting. We come to the work to heal ourselves and the world, but we often do the work in ways that further harm ourselves and impede our contribution to the resistance. In the context of professionalized non-profit social justice "careers" there is rarely room to process our triggering experiences or admit what we do not know how to navigate our roles in organizations. We also carry around fallback attitudes and behaviors that can undermine our principles, especially when we are stressed out and over capacity. These are the times when we might act out gender privilege, race privilege, class privilege, and forms of authority based in status distinctions like educational attainment. Many of the symptoms and behaviors listed in the bullets above can correlate to systems of privilege.
Addressing the Impacts of Overwork and Burnout in Organizations
When we are experiencing toxic feelings and acting out, or when someone in an organization we are involved with is struggling in this way, there are things we can do to address what is going on. One thing that helps is having a language for what is going on and realizing it is not about one person being "bad" or about whether the organization will be run by this person or others, but instead recognizing a set of dynamics that are impacting the group and impeding the mission of the organization and the principles of the person or people who are struggling. When we realize how common these dynamics are, sometimes we can move away from shaming and blaming ourselves and others and toward acknowledging what is going on and supporting change. It is often hard to confront another person about behavior that is harmful, and it is often hard to be confronted about harmful behavior and listen to what is being said. The ideas below do not change that, but they may help individuals or groups create concrete steps to address the problems. My own experiences with these issues are based in horizontal organizations that operate using consensus decisionmaking, so they may be most appropriate to those situations. In my view, horizontal and consensus decisionmaking models are the most conducive to creating accountable, sustainable organizations that build lots of people's leadership and have the capacity to address the causes of burnout.
Steps Toward Balance for Organizations

Bring more attention to addressing the organization's internal problems. The organization cannot do its important work if it is falling apart inside, and it cannot do its work well if it is promising to do work it does not have the capacity to do. The internal concerns cannot wait until later because the giant need the organization exists to fill is probably not going to be reduced in the immediate future. This does not mean the organization's work needs to stop, but it might mean calling a moratorium on new projects and commitments so that the problem does not worsen, and so that people can carve out time for working on the internal problems. Organizations working on internal problems might seek any of the following resources:

Training on decisionmaking and consensus

Facilitation training

Facilitated discussions and training about how racism, ableism, sexism, homophobia, trans phobia, classism and other systems of meaning and control impact organizational development and culture

Active listening training

Strategic planning provided by trainers using grassroots social justice-centered, not corporate, approaches

Reviewing workplans and job descriptions to figure out how to assign work fairly, assess workload and plan for reasonable workloads

Conflict mediation between particular people or groups with an outside facilitator who understands the organizations values and who the people in conflict trust and/or see as relatively neutral

Work on building transparency in the organization so that people know what each other are doing and members, clients, peer organizations and other partners know what the organization is doing

Training on giving and receiving direct feedback to reduce or avoid gossip and trash-talking and increase responsiveness and accountability to each other

Creation of regular evaluations systems where people can hear from each other about what is going well and what needs work early and often, rather than only when someone blows up or a controversy emerges

Make sure that new people who are entering the organization are being welcomed, given full background about what is going on, and clearly understand that they are being asked to fully participate in all decisions and ask any questions they need to in order to do so. Ensuring that everyone is getting access to what it takes to co-lead is essential to building leadership in more people. The organization and the people in it will be healthier if lots of people are leading, not just one or two.

Establish mechanisms to assess the workload and scale back. How many hours is each member working? Is it beyond what they are supposed to or can do healthfully? Did they actually track their hours for a week to make sure they are really aware of how much they are working? Assess the workload and scale back projects until it is under control. Create a moratorium on new projects until capacity expands. Enforce the moratorium-no one can unilaterally take on new work for the group or for themselves as a member of the group.

Focus on facilitation. How can the group's meeting culture foster well-being, good will, connection between members? Eating together, having check-ins with interesting questions about people's favorite foods, plants, movies, or politicizing moments may feel silly at first but makes a big difference. Bringing an attention to wellness into the organization means helping members be there as multi-dimensional people, rather than just as work machines. People need to build strong enough relationships to actually be able to talk about strong feelings and dynamics that come up in the work, or those dynamics will fester. The organization needs to build a culture that can cultivate supportive relationships.

Is everyone trained on how to facilitate meetings in ways that maximize the participation of all members of the group? Whenever there is a danger that just a few people will dominate an important conversation, use a go-around rather than having people volunteer to speak. Quieter members speaking can really change the dynamics.

As a group, recognize the conditions creating a culture of overwork. It is not one person's fault, and everyone may be feeling the pressures. Have one or many facilitated discussions about the pressures and dynamics that lead to overwork or to individual's dominating or disappearing. Create a shared language for the pressures the members may be under so they are easier to identify and address moving forward.

Include time and space for evaluation of how the group is operating regularly. This can include filling out questionnaires that allow people to provide feedback that may be hard to say in an open meeting, as well as having group discussions. Ask questions like: Do you feel clear about your role in the group? Is your workload manageable? Do you feel welcomed by and connected to the other members? What would improve your relationship to the other members and to the group as a whole? What kinds of support do you need to help you participate in this group? Are you noticing any dynamics that we could improve? What is going well in the group from your perspective? What are our greatest strengths?

Make sure that facilitation of meetings rotates, including agenda-making and other key leadership tasks.

Addressing Burnout and Overwork in Our Own Lives
In addition to creating organizational approaches to burnout, we can take action in our own lives when we recognize symptoms of overwork and burnout in ourselves. This requires us to work on changing behaviors that may be causing problems for us and for people around us. It also means we have to be willing to examine the root causes of our impulses to over-commit, to control, to overwork, and/or to disconnect. This is healing work aimed at helping us be well enough to enjoy our work, make sustained life-long contributions to the movements we care about, and receive the love and healing that is possible in communities of resistance. Above all, we must take a gentle approach to ourselves, avoiding judgment, recognizing the role of systemic violence in producing these responses in us, and patiently and humbly experimenting with new ways of being.

What the compulsive worker, over worker, control freak might need:

I need trusted friends who I can talk to about what is going on, who I can ask for honest feedback about my behavior, and who can help support me and soothe me when I feel afraid of doing something in a new way. For example, these people might remind me that even though someone else in the project will do this task differently, it is better to let them do it so they can build their skills and I can do something else with that time that has been missing from my life. These people might help remind me that it will be okay if I say no to a task or project. These friends can help me give love to the wounds underneath my compulsive, competitive, or controlling behavior, reminding me that I am worthwhile and my value does not hang on what the organization does, how much work I do, or what other people think of me.

I need supportive friends who can also point out compulsive, competitive or controlling behavior or ideas when they hear them from me or see me engaging in them. It can be difficult to receive such feedback, but it is truly a gift.

I need to attend to my defensiveness. When I get feedback from friends or collaborators about concerns they have, I need to resist the impulse to defend myself or critique the way they delivered their message. This feedback, including any anger they express while sharing it, is likely a sign that others are identifying my leadership. They are doing the hard and uncomfortable task of raising a concern because they see me as a person with influence. I can remember that, no matter how it is delivered, this feedback is an investment in me and in our work, an act of love. I can seek out a friend separately to process the difficult feelings that receiving this feedback brings up. The need to avoid acting out my defensiveness, or taking on a victim narrative, is especially important when I am in a position of privilege of any kind and/or have more developed leadership in the group or project.

If I hate everyone I'm working with or feel like I am going to die or like I have to stay up all night working, this is probably about something older or deeper in my life, not about the current work/workplace/organization/coworker. If my heart is racing, if I feel threatened, if I feel like I can't get out of bed, if I feel like I can't speak to my coworker or I'll explode, I am probably experiencing pain rooted in deeply in my life history. To get out of this reactive space, I need to devote resources to uncovering the roots of my painful reactions and building ways of being in them that don't involve acting out harm to myself or others (including the harm of overwork). The first step is recognizing that my strongest reactions may not be entirely or primarily about the work-related situation directly in front of me, and being willing to slow down and explore what is underneath.

I need a healing path for myself if I want to be part of healing the world. What that looks like is different for everyone, and could include individual or group therapy, 12-step programs (including Workaholics Anonymous), exercise, bodywork, spiritual exploration, art practice, ritual, and building meaningful relationships with family or friends. Whatever it is, I have to be in it in a loving and gentle way and be careful that it doesn't become another thing to try to be perfect at or to try to be the leader of. A healing path can, in addition to other things, help me increase kindness to myself, trust others, trust processes, and avoid scarcity mentality. It can be a place to practice doing things because they feel good rather than to accomplish something.

I need to stick around. It may be tempting to disappear altogether from a project or organization if relationships have gotten difficult and I am experiencing negative feelings about myself and others. If I want move toward a more balanced role in the organization, or even transition out altogether, I need to do so gradually and intentionally. I need to transfer relationships and knowledge and skills that I hold and make sure that my transition is done in a way that ensures the organization is healthy and my coworkers are supported.

Healing can happen, even inside relationships that have become difficult, if I am willing to admit to the dynamics that exist. This can be very hard if things already feel adversarial with coworkers, but it is really worth it to push past the fear. People often want to forgive, and having the truth of the dynamics acknowledged will create space for healing and forgiveness. It is okay to admit mistakes.

If I am in leadership and someone is yelling at me, it is likely that part of what they are saying is true. I don't have to believe all of it, and I can reach out to my support network to help process how it feels to be yelled at, but the most important thing for people in positions of privilege (like being staff rather than volunteer, or being a long-time leader or founder, or having privilege in a social identity) in an organization to do when someone is yelling at them is listen for the truth of the person's experience and feelings and acknowledge it. Just listening, rather than denying, defending or minimizing, is the first step to resolution.

If I have particularly strong feelings about one of my collaborators in the project or organization, if the dynamic with them is particularly tense, there is probably great love and respect in the relationship. This relationship may be the most charged because of how I admire this person for particular traits, because their articulation of what is going wrong in the organization or relationship are hitting home for me and I am feeling afraid. These relationships can heal, and it can help to try to remember what I love about this person, why I was drawn to collaborate with them, what I admire about their work in the world, why we both ended up in this kind of work, and what I might like our relationship to be like in the future.

Working with Joy
It is not surprising that most of us have distorted relationships to the world of work, including activist work. The conditions and systems we live under make work coercive, create severe imbalances in who does what kinds of work for what kinds of compensation and recognition, and make work a matter of survival. Working to change the world is extremely hard because the conditions we are up against are severe, we lose people from our communities regularly, and we are battling monstrous apparatuses of violence. We cannot blame ourselves for having distorted relationships to our work, even though we understand that healing from distorted relationships to work is vital for our movements and for our own well-being and survival. We must be compassionate to ourselves and each other as we practice transforming our ways of working together.

One of the most significant sources of suffering people face the communities I live and work in, which often exacerbates other forms of scarcity and vulnerability, is isolation. When we do work together to build resistance movements, we often break this isolation and experience the healing of being heard by others about our experiences, of helping each other out with basic survival needs, and of sharing inspiring imagination and little experiments with building the world we want to live in. Our connection to each other is vital for us as we experience the grief, heartbreak and rage of living under brutal conditions, witnessing and experience harm and violence, and enduring setbacks in our work for change. We need each other badly to share what is hard about the overwhelming suffering in the world and the challenge of doing work for change in dangerous conditions. Even in the face of the pain that being awake to contemporary conditions causes, I believe that all of our work for change can be rooted in the comfort and joy of being connected to one another, accompanying one another, and sometimes being inspired together or by each other. Rather than our resistance being rooted in connection, often our organizations struggle with cultures of overwork based in capitalist, sexist and racist norms of scarcity, fear, competition, insecurity, and disconnection. Putting more attention toward how we work together, and what it means to be together in new ways that defy harmful norms, is essential to building the huge, strong, inspiring, joyful movements we need. Reflecting deeply about our own orientations toward work, what it feels like to participate in groups, what ideas we are carrying around about leadership and productivity, is crucial to building a practice of working from a place of connection, inspiration and joy. This means intentionally creating ways to practice a new relationship to work with each other, and diving into the psychic structures underlying our own distorted experiences of working and finding methods of healing that create new possibilities for how we can be in our work lives.

Some useful resources for further learning about horizontal organizations and consensus decision making can be found here.

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Burnout: What It Is and Some Ways to Address It In Ourselves and In Organizations

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I wrote an essay almost a decade ago based in reflections of my own experiences with overwork and burnout and the experience of people I was supporting in various organizations. I never published it, always thinking there is more work to do on it.

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On the Road With Abolition: Assessing Our Steps Along the Way

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On the Road With Abolition: Assessing Our Steps Along the Way

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On the Road With Abolition: Assessing Our Steps Along the Way

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The Struggle to Abolish the Police Is Not New

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The Struggle to Abolish the Police Is Not New

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Garrett Felber

Prison and police abolition were key to the thinking of many midcentury civil rights activists. Understanding why can help us ask for change in our own time.

As protesters demand justice for George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and Ahmaud Arbery, calls for police and prison abolition have gained unprecedented traction. A majority of the Minneapolis city council pledged to disband a police department it said "cannot be reformed," the public school system in Portland canceled its $1.6 million contract for "school resource officers," and Los Angeles has reallocated $150 million from the police budget to communities of color.

Struggles for black freedom have always had to contend with prisons and police as the enforcement arm of the racial capitalist state.

Both critics of abolition and recent converts often frame it as a radical new concept. This can have the effect, intended or not, of making it seem idealistic, naïve, or undertheorized. But while the mainstream prominence of abolition may be new, the premise is not. Indeed, the struggle against mass criminalization-sometimes characterized as the "civil rights movement of our time" to combat a system described by some as the "new Jim Crow"-was a crucial feature of the movement to end the original Jim Crow. Struggles for black freedom have always had to contend with prisons and police as the enforcement arm of the racial capitalist state.

However, many people remain unclear about how the movements to abolish prisons and abolish police connect to each other, exacerbating the feeling that the movement to abolish police lacks a history. But the movement to abolish prisons has always understood that doing so would necessarily entail an end to policing. Without police, there would be no one to fill prisons and jails. Without prison and jails, the police could not serve their current purpose. Put most simply, the two are locked in a mutually dependent relationship: to serve capital, and protect themselves.

Historic movements to abolish prisons called for an entirely different social and economic order in which prisons and police would not exist. Considering how prison abolition was woven into the last century's civil rights movement can help us better understand how to build on those successes in framing our own demands.
* * *
In April 1947, nine men with suitcases in one hand and overcoats in the other posed briefly for a photograph in Richmond, Virginia, before embarking on a two-week racial desegregation campaign in the South known as the Journey of Reconciliation.

"Our present way of life-with its reliance on violence in economics, in politics, in social change, and in international warfare-is a corrupt society. And prisons today are a reflection of this society."

The men comprised an interracial group, eight black and eight white. (Women were originally set to participate but ultimately prohibited to avoid evoking fears of interracial sex.) Their aim was to test the effectiveness of a recent Supreme Court ruling, Morgan v. Virginia (1946), which overturned state laws forbidding interstate travel by integrated groups. The Journey of Reconciliation is sometimes remembered as the "first Freedom Ride," inspiration to the better-known busloads of student activists who in 1961 set out from Washington, D.C., with the goal of driving to New Orleans and were repeatedly attacked and imprisoned along the way. By the Journey of Reconciliation's end, the men had attempted to board twenty-six buses and trains. A total of twelve were arrested on six different occasions, and three ultimately served twenty-two-day sentences on a North Carolina chain gang. James Peck-the sole participant in both the 1947 and 1961 rides-was brutally beaten during both.

Rarely noted is the fact that, of the Journey of Reconciliation's participants, eight were formerly-incarcerated conscientious objectors and part of a growing network of prison abolitionists. For example, Bayard Rustin, a young gay socialist who would go on to help organize Martin Luther King, Jr.'s 1963 March on Washington, was sentenced to serve three years in 1944 for violating the selective service act. He began his prison term by singing the anti-lynching ballad "Strange Fruit" through the vents from solitary confinement at Ashland prison. He would soon lead hunger strikes against racial segregation and protesters chanting "Jim Crow Must Go." Another participant, Wally Nelson, a black pacifist, walked out of a Civilian Public Service camp in 1943 and served three and a half years in federal prisons. There, he went on a 107-day hunger strike against racial segregation and was force-fed for 87 days until his release in 1946.

George Houser, who along with Rustin was the Journey of Reconciliation's mastermind, had served a year at Danbury federal prison for draft resistance in 1940. In September 1945, the year before he and Rustin began planning the Journey, Houser hosted nearly fifty formerly incarcerated men at his Philadelphia home for the inaugural Conference on Prison Problems. The attendees were mostly white (federal prisons were three quarters white and many black objectors, such as Nelson and Rustin, were still incarcerated on longer sentences than their white peers); they had been imprisoned in protest of conscription, war, imperialism, and racism, and now met to theorize the intersection of these moral evils with prisons themselves. Houser, for example, noted this intersectionality when writing shortly before the conference about a hunger strike against racial segregation at Lewisburg prison (where Rustin was incarcerated). "Some of the fellows decided to make the purpose of the strike more inclusive," he wrote. "Not only would they protest race discrimination, but also the general philosophy behind the prison system."

At the conference, the chief debate was whether to work toward prison reform or outright abolition. While there was general consensus in the goal of abolition, the question became how to get from here to there. The group's concrete first steps were to divorce the chaplaincy from the prison, create independent legal aid, end all censorship, and demand paid work at union wages and all time in jail to count toward sentence. A meeting later that year even proposed settling the debate by calling the organization Prison Abolition Through Reform.

While the conference did not outline a holistic plan for what would replace prisons, the participants felt that an important next step would be to "propose an alternative way of dealing with anti-social behavior." Among the conference's concrete suggestions, in the meantime, was to omit names from news reports of crimes (to prevent people from being stigmatized) and the creation within the criminal justice system of a "prosecutor of society" who would "present evidence as to the guilt of society" in all cases. It was also recommended to create a prisoners' bill of rights, which would include an end to racial segregation, the right to workman's compensation, no mandatory work without pay, conjugal visits, the right to communication with an attorney, an end to censorship, and "no solitary, no strip cell, no dark cells."

Abolition is inherently intersectional. To unravel the punishment system is to lay bare the interconnection of people's struggles against extraction, dispossession, and enclosure organized through racial and gendered hierarchies.

Although the conference attendees fiercely debated the relationship between reform and abolition, the pages of Grapevine, the community's newsletter, were less ambivalent. One reader responded to the question, "What are you doing about the prison system?" by writing, "of the two groups-reformists or abolitionists-I am of the latter." Anticipating the adage of abolitionist scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore that " prisons are catchall solutions to social problems," he went on to argue: "for as long as we have prisons and prison reforms more and bigger and better prisons will appear, as history is proving, and society will keep on using them as an escape from its own responsibilities of correcting the economic and social failures that make crime possible. Yes, reforming the prison system is like repairing a shack that should be torn down." Newt Garver, who went to prison after burning his draft card in 1946, warned there, "Don't get any false optimism about prison reform. Any hope there is lies outside the system, not in it."

For his part, Rustin, the Journey of Reconciliation's other main organizer, was never an outspoken abolitionist. But early in the course of his long activist career, he did organize against both prisons and policing, beginning immediately upon his release. Just months before departing on the Journey of Reconciliation, he wrote a treatise "Imprisonment from the Inside" decrying punitive solutions to social problems:

Our aim today is to see that our present way of life-with its reliance on violence in economics, in politics, in social change, and in international warfare-is a corrupt society. And that the prisons today are a reflection of this society. . . . We must see the connection between our use of the atomic bomb in international war and our mistreatment of the offender against society internally.

Even the Journey of Reconciliation itself provided ample opportunity to challenge the carceral state. As a result of his arrest during the rides, he and two other riders who attended the Philadelphia conference-Igal Roodenko and Joseph Felmet-served three weeks on a North Carolina chain gang. Rustin wrote a scathing report which was serialized in the New York Post and the Baltimore Afro-American and contributed to the abolishment of chain gangs in the state.
* * *
Although abolition was not a central demand of the midcentury civil rights movement-despite informing the activism of many of its key figures-it took hold in the 1970s. This revolutionary ethos-what Chicano poet Raul Salinas called the "prison rebellion years"-was linked to mass uprisings in the streets; the state repression, jailing, and murder of black and brown radicals; and opposition to the Vietnam War and imprisonment of conscientious objectors. Quaker Fay Honey Knopp's pivotal 1976 Instead of Prisons: A Handbook for Prison Abolitionists, for example, had its genesis in her visits to conscientious objectors in prison during the Vietnam War and her participation in feminist, civil rights, gay rights, and prisoners' rights struggles.

As historians Dan Berger and Toussaint Losier document, prisoners became "symbols of, and spokespeople for, broader radical movements." The 1980s and '90s saw an emergence of international gatherings on abolition. In 1983 Ruth Morris would organize the International Conference on Penal Abolition, and the abolition formation Critical Resistance in the Bay Area was formed in the late 1990s. Other groups since then-including Incite!, Survived and Punished, Movement 4 Black Lives, BYP100, Dream Defenders, the California Coalition for Women Prisoners, the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls-have made abolitionist praxis a core part of their visions of liberation.

The kneejerk question is often, What would we do without prisons or police? rather than, What could we do with $200 billion for our communities?

Abolition has developed and expanded dramatically since the Philadelphia Prison Group conference, thanks to the contributions of incarcerated people, black radical feminists, survivors of sexual violence, Muslims, immigrants, and queer, trans, and disabled folks, among others. Consistent though has been a commitment to fighting the racism, militarism, and capitalism that define U.S. empire.Abolition is inherently intersectional. To unravel the punishment system is to lay bare the interconnection of people's struggles against extraction, dispossession, and enclosure organized through racial and gendered hierarchies.

The relationship between abolition (as the goal) and reform (as a means to an end) remains a live debate. Many continue to endorse what Wilson Gilmore calls "non-reformist reforms"-in other words, reforms that shrink the carceral system and thus continue to move us incrementally, in the words of abolitionist organizer Mariame Kaba, " toward the horizon of abolition." Examples of non-reformist reforms include, but are not limited to: abolishing solitary confinement and capital punishment; moratoriums on prison construction or expansion; freeing survivors of physical and sexual violence, the elderly, infirm, juveniles, and all political prisoners; sentencing reform; ending cash bail; abolishing electronic monitoring, broken windows policing, and the criminalization of poverty; and a federal jobs and homes guarantee for the formerly incarcerated.

Both the short-lived Philadelphia conference and the Journey of Reconciliation have been overshadowed and even forgotten. Houser later described the Journey of Reconciliation as "a bit ahead of its time . . . a planned and often audacious attack on Jim Crow before the civil rights movement was full blown." Rustin argued that "things we did in the '40s were the same things that ushered in the civil rights revolution." Ideas do not arrive fully formed, and movements are not linear, but these histories of struggle provide raw material for us to build a world without gendered racial terror and state-sanctioned violence.

A sprawling carceral landscape has bloated budgets and desiccated our imaginings of what is possible. The kneejerk question is often, What would we do without prisons or police? rather than, What could we do with $200 billion for our communities? But, as Wilson Gilmore points out: " abolition is about presence, not absence." Incarcerated abolitionist Stevie Wilson added that it "is not just about eliminating something (e.g., police and prisons); it is about creating what we need to live, love and thrive." At this moment, when abolition feels more possible than ever, we should not look elsewhere for "better" models of policing and prisons, but look deeper within our own history for better models of liberation.

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the struggle to abolish the police is not new

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The Struggle to Abolish the Police Is Not New

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Garrett Felber Prison and police abolition were key to the thinking of many midcentury civil rights activists. Understanding why can help us ask for change in our own time. As protesters demand justice for George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and Ahmaud Arbery, calls for police and prison abolition have gained unprecedented traction.

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adrienne maree brown on somatics, the body, and pleasure

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adrienne maree brown on somatics, the body, and pleasure

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Pleasure Activism: what's somatics got to do with it?

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On June 30, as part of a virtual discussion on the topic of "Prison as Abuse," feminist activist Monica Cosby recounted a memory from when she was incarcerated. It was the day after armed police in riot gear, part of a tactical team called Orange Crush, had done a shakedown in the women's prison where she was detained, she recalled. As these men destroyed the women's personal things, yelled abuses at them, and aggressively strip-searched them, something clicked for her: "If there was anyone out there who ... could understand what it was like to be in prison, it's someone that's been in an abusive and violent relationship." The surveillance, the constant physical and emotional degradation, the isolation, the intimidation, the way that women are taken out of their communities and away from their social safety nets as a way of exerting totalizing control-"It's the same," she said. "The exact same."

The timing of the panel wasn't an accident. Abolitionist frameworks have tentatively entered the mainstream in the wake of mass uprisings in response to the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others. But as they get translated from radical, decentralized spaces into mainstream liberal discourses, they have been treated to dilution, misinterpretation, and resistance. Media characters and politicians alike have committed themselves to the task of decoding what exactly Black Lives Matter and its allies mean by "defund the police," but the answers they've come up with have only sometimes included, you know, taking funding away from the police.

Even for those who are new to these ideas but can see abolition as a long-term goal, there remains the sticking point of what to do about the violence that occurs right now. It is the same double-step that leads someone to demand the abolition of policing at the same time as they demand the arrest of the officers who killed Breonna Taylor. It is the lingering question of what to do with real harm, and the wall of imagination that one hits when punitive justice is the only means by which one has been taught justice at all. The question often goes something like this: Since we can't expect to wake up tomorrow to a world without police and prisons, shouldn't we deploy the systems we do have to hold people to account? Wouldn't doing otherwise be an act of complacency and dangerous leniency? Basically, as long as jails do exist, shouldn't killer cops or domestic abusers be in them?

But as the abolitionists whose work has brought us to this moment of possible transformation have long pointed out, the answer is no. There is no justice in these systems, only more violence. And as Mariame Kaba points out in The New York Times, even if we accept them at face value-that police exist to "serve and protect"-they are failing on their own terms when it comes to gender violence.

Most rape and assault is never reported to law enforcement in the first place. Of the cases that are, less than 1 percent are referred to prosecutors, and even fewer result in convictions. There are currently hundreds of ongoing lawsuits against police departments across the country, alleging a culture of institutionalized negligence, antipathy, and outright hostility toward survivors. Beyond the structural violence endemic to policing, police themselves are four times more likely than the average person to be domestic abusers.

These things are often framed as proof that policing is "broken," but that again accepts the premise of the police on their own terms. Gender-based violence enabled by and within the criminal legal system is by design, and it is inseparable from the way that "crime" itself is construed: racialized, atomized, and alienated from broader social problems.

Far from being protected, it's under the guise of "fighting crime" that Black women, trans women, indigenous, undocumented, and poor women have been subjected to a system of violent policing that continually exposes them to gender-based harm at the same time as it hems them into the margins of society. This system is self-protecting-it conspires to conceal the means through which it reproduces and justifies itself, making it difficult to imagine an alternative. This is the bind that leaves many people, when first encountering abolition and ideas about the end of policing, asking: What about the rapists? But there is a way out, long paved by radical feminists of color, and a future where this cycle of violence is interrupted for good.

This difficulty in imagining a response to sexual violence beyond the criminal legal system is strange given that it is only somewhat recently that gender-based violence came to be regarded as a kind of crime. In her research, Mimi Kim, professor in the school of social work at California State University in Long Beach, anti-domestic violence advocate, and member of INCITE!, an organization of radical feminists of color, traces this shift. "In the 1970s, the police were wholly disinterested in the issues of sexual violence and even more so domestic violence," she told The New Republic. The latter was explicitly addressed as a 'family matter' outside of the boundaries of policing." The American Bar Association's official recommendations at the time regarding "the resolution of conflict such as that which occurs between husband and wife," for example, were that the police should operate "without reliance upon criminal assault or disorderly conduct statutes."

As part of the broader agenda of the women's movement, second-wave feminists fought to bring these "family matters" into the public sphere and incorporate them into a critique of patriarchy writ large. But they found that the political landscape around them was mutating. The tide of neoliberalism-the conservative backlash to the social movements of the 1960s and '70s-was on the rise, and with it came a rapacious appetite to do away with social safety nets and pour resources into prisons and policing. "With growing attacks against the U.S. welfare state and the stigmatizing of welfare recipients came the increasing belief that crime should be the focus of public and, hence, governmental efforts," Kim writes in a 2018 paper. This was the era of the "war on drugs," the "welfare queen," and the starting point for the country's soaring rates of incarceration-cornerstones of an outright and sustained campaign of state violence against Black people in America.

White, mainstream feminists looking to gain popular support for their cause took the temperature of their political moment and surrendered to it. They "forged partnerships with the police, framed sexual assault and domestic violence as crimes, and demanded the criminalization of these forms of violence as the only legitimate response to gender-based violence." These women helped push through now-ubiquitous policies like "mandatory arrest" statutes, whereby the police are required to make an arrest if they have reason to believe domestic violence has occurred. As INCITE! noted in 2001, these laws have had precisely the wrong impact-"a decrease in the number of battered women who kill their partners in self-defense, but [no] decrease in the number of batterers who kill their partners." The passage of new legislation like the Violence Against Women Act in 1994-part of Bill Clinton's infamous Crime Bill, which infused police departments with funding, called for thousands of added cops on the streets, and introduced more punitive sentencing measures-was heralded as a victory. Contrarily, an understanding of gender-based violence as bound to state violence and broad social injustices-housing insecurity, poverty, crises in mental health, homophobia and transphobia, etc.-was abandoned wholesale on the level of policymaking. It was a trade-off buttressed by the Clinton administration's reign of austerity and catastrophic welfare reform, which stripped communities of government resources while painting their (poor, Black) inhabitants as latent criminals. And models of justice that did not rely on the state, the only kinds that might actually serve communities under attack from that same institution, were consigned to the margins.

"In the reformist frame of mind, these gains looked like wins," said Kim. "However, over time, they proved to be profound losses for the movement-and tied feminists more tightly to the most masculinist arm of the state." The mainstream anti-violence movement has been mired in the language of crime and punishment ever since.

The result has been interlocking fields of violence for Black, undocumented, Indigenous, and trans people: interpersonal harm on one side and state brutality on the other. But despite the complicity of mainstream feminists for the last half-century, radical feminist communities have continued to develop more holistic frameworks for resisting these layers of violence. Sex workers in particular have been at the forefront of the project. In their book Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Worker's Rights, Molly Smith and Juno Mac write, "when we think of police violence not only as state violence but as male violence against women, the criminalisation of prostitution comes into focus in a new way." By bringing "criminalization" into the schema of patriarchal oppression, the policing of sex work can be seen for what it is: yet another arena in which Black women, gender-nonconforming people, and others are exposed to violence that, due to their work, is inherently "gender-based." What else can we call their arrests, deportation, incarceration, the parole terms that threaten their housing and families, the threat of rape and abuse while in police custody or during state-sanctioned police "stings," and the lack of protection from a system that will always treat them as deserving of such surveillance and punishment? As my colleague Melissa Gira Grant, author of Playing the Whore, writes, "I've stopped asking 'Why have we made prostitution illegal?' Instead I want an explanation for, 'How much violence against "prostitutes" have we made acceptable?'"

Locked in the paradigm of policing, how much violence have we similarly made acceptable? How much violence against "survivors" have we made acceptable? It's through the work of groups like Survived and Punished, which organizes on behalf of criminalized and incarcerated survivors, as well as the stories of survivors themselves, that we can uncover some answers. In recent years, several cases have risen to prominence as some of the most egregious examples where victims found themselves persecuted by the state; cases like those of Marissa Alexander-who faced 20 years in prison after firing a warning shot at her abusive husband when he threatened to kill her; Nan Hui-Jo-who tried to flee to her home country of Korea after repeated abuse by her husband and was instead found guilty of abducting her own child; Eisha Love-a trans woman who went to the police to report an attack on her life and who was then arrested herself for injuring her attacker before being incarcerated in a men's prison; and Cyntoia Brown-who was sentenced to over 50 years in prison at the age of 16 for shooting her 43-year-old rapist in self-defense. The stories of these women and so many others whose names we will never know are best synthesized by feminist activist Beth Richie in her 1996 book Compelled to Crime: The Gender Entrapment of Battered Black Women: "The cases presented here are extreme not because the women themselves are extreme, but because the degree to which their lives are stigmatized and marginalized is extreme."

Survived and Punished calls it the "Good Victim" problem. The multiform ways in which society already pathologized and criminalized the conditions of these women's lives-their Blackness, their sexuality, their immigration status, their class positions, their "criminal records"-prevented them from being seen as victims in the eyes of the state. And as nonvictims involved in a crime, they became criminal themselves. Author, activist, and victim advocate Andrea Ritchie puts it this way in Invisible No More: "White supremacy demands such complete control of Black women and women of color that it takes very little to perceive us as out of control." The result is that the United States is filling prisons with survivors of rape and domestic abuse. According to the ACLU, up to 94 percent of incarcerated women in some women's prisons are victims of past sexual abuse.

But as feminist Beth Ritchie writes, "You do not need a prison to build up a prison nation." Instead, the export of carceral practices beyond the prison, through surveillance, the hoarding of resources, and the constant threat of coercive violence, is enough to exercise control over women in their homes and their communities. The same framework is behind the systems that force victims into houselessness and poverty and threaten them with deportation. "Survivors who are already criminalized are not recognized as people in need of support and advocacy," Survived and Punished writes on its website. "Their experience of violence is diminished, distorted, or disappeared, and they are instead simply seen as criminals who should be punished."

So how do we account for sexual violence-undisappear it without reproducing the same violent logics of the carceral state? What do we do with the rapists?

In April 2000, a group of radical, queer feminists of color convened a conference in Santa Cruz, California, to contend with this question and others in the struggle against gender-based violence. Much of what we in the U.S. know today about alternative models of justice is owed to the Color of Violence Conference. It was there that INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence formed and collectively developed tool kits to recast state and interpersonal violence as mutually constitutive forces, building on the work of abolitionists in the 1960s and '70s. In recentering their own communities, which were at once brutalized by the criminal legal system while being denied recourse to it, these women developed strategies to circumvent it, and they named it "transformative justice."

As opposed to punitive justice, which excises people from their communities, the principles of transformative justice are rooted in a practice of community accountability. Here, perpetrators are treated as people (rather than eternal criminals) who have the capacity to permanently change their behavior. Survivors are treated as agents (rather than eternal victims) who can ask for and be provided with whatever resources and courses of action they might need. Forgiveness may be part of that equation; it may not be. And harm is located within a broader nexus of violence within the community. In her seminal work Are Prisons Obsolete?, abolitionist Angela Davis writes that the prison "functions ideologically as an abstract site into which undesirables are deposited, relieving us of the responsibility of thinking about the real issues afflicting those communities from which prisoners are drawn in such disproportionate numbers." Transformative justice, on the other hand, does not let us off so easily. It asks us to understand acts of violence as arising from conditions of scarcity, trauma, and oppressive hierarchies like racism and sexism. In doing so, it reveals the pressure points where real interventions can have real impact.

This is not a simple process. It also does not mean an instant, clean eradication of violence. In these accountability processes, friends, family, neighbors, co-workers, community organizations, apartment complexes, labor unions, and other sites of social and community meaning work together to repair harm done and generate safety in their communities, often with some degree of involvement by either the survivor or the perpetrator, or both. Within the context of these processes, survivors are afforded more flexibility to decide for themselves what justice looks like. This is critical, because the open secret of sexual assault is that even if the criminal justice system worked perfectly (putting rapists behind bars), it would still have little to nothing to offer survivors in the way of healing. "One of the things that I've learned over the years is that people mostly want ... answers. 'Why are you doing this?' 'Why did you do this to me?'" Mariame Kaba has said of this work. "They want you to admit that you did what you did.... The current system ... makes it impossible for you to admit that you did harm." Here again is the weird double bind of "crime" on full display: In the context of the criminal legal system, to admit guilt is to submit to possible punishment and violence. There is no incentive to take responsibility for harm done, which is often the very thing that survivors need. Accountability processes create a structure in which a perpetrator can voluntarily "enter into accountability," as INCITE! puts it.

Of course, if justice is going to happen at the level of the community, it is important that those communities are materially fortified and equipped to deliver on the promise of transformative justice. But Mimi Kim warns that it is not enough to tinker at the edges of our fraying social safety net. "In looking towards investments in social welfare or public health as demanded today, it is also important to be clear about the punitive histories of these systems in the United States," she says. Writing in The Chronicle of Social Change, Dorothy Roberts makes a similar point: "Abolitionists must also ask ... whether the recommended reallocation of money and authority will reduce and not increase other parts of the state's punishment regime." In her piece, Roberts goes on to lay out how the "family regulation system," embodied by agencies such as Child Protective Services, is a central perpetrator of this "punishment regime." CPS, she writes, is no less than "a multi-billion-dollar government apparatus that regulates millions of marginalized people through intrusive investigations, monitoring and forcible removal of children from their homes." For Kim, as well, these bodies require a kind of transformation rooted in abolition: "They are not in and of themselves helpful, much less liberatory. We need to make demands for the humanization of these systems."

None of this-the massive redistribution of resources, the dismantling of the prison industrial complex, the institution of transformative justice models-can be accomplished without the complex work of reimagining what justice means for victims of gendered interpersonal violence and gendered state violence.

In the weeks since mass uprisings first erupted around the country to protest the police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, a new coalition has organized around the call to defund the police. The speed with which this demand moved from abolitionist circles that have long been made marginal into something resembling a mainstream position has been both dizzying and thrilling, but as this vision travels through wider circles, Black feminist abolitionists like Kaba remind us to be wary of liberal sleight of hand:

Congressional Democrats want to make it easier to identify and prosecute police misconduct; Joe Biden wants to give police departments $300 million. But efforts to solve police violence through liberal reforms like these have failed for nearly a century. Enough. We can't reform the police. The only way to diminish police violence is to reduce contact between the public and the police.

Mealy-mouthed politicians will scramble for ways to keep full abolition at arm's length, and we have already seen the specter of sexual violence be used as a convenient pretext. (The president, an accused rapist many times over, has also embraced this line of critique.) And so, survivors have a role to play in this movement, both by acting as guardians of their own experiences-with a refusal to let their stories be appropriated by the police state-and by helping lead the effort to reimagine how harm and violence can be accounted for outside of a crime and punishment model that has singularly used and failed them.

This is the crux of what Angela Davis calls "abolition feminism," as opposed to what sociologist Elizabeth Bernstein has identified as "carceral feminism." While carceral feminism obscures and props up the violent power of the state, abolition feminism unearths the rot at the core. Simply: The institution of policing requires there to be "crime" in order to justify its own existence and certainly to justify its bloated department budgets. So the state has every incentive to stretch the definition and the province of "crime" as far as it can go and ensure that it is continually reproduced. This is the scheme that both allows and demands that resources be sucked away from Black and working-class communities, divesting from their education, their lives, and their well-being.

But if carceral feminism developed hand in hand with the rise of neoliberalism, the retrenchment of the welfare state, and an influx of money into the prison-industrial complex, it stands to reason that an anti-carceral or abolitionist feminism can take hold by the reverse process: the revitalization of social safety nets, a commitment to economic justice, sustained movements against white supremacy, and the defunding of the racist carceral state. As a rallying cry, then, "defund the police" is even more powerful than it appears on its face. Not only does it meet this particular political moment with forceful clarity, it identifies the historical roots of the problem it seeks to address. It is both means and end, all at once.

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On June 30, as part of a virtual discussion on the topic of "Prison as Abuse," feminist activist Monica Cosby recounted a memory from when she was incarcerated. It was the day after armed police in riot gear, part of a tactical team called Orange Crush, had done a shakedown in the women's prison where she was detained, she recalled.

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How Police Became the Go-to Response to Domestic Violence

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How Police Became the Go-to Response to Domestic Violence

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In response to widespread demands to "defund the police," a specific question repeatedly crops up: "What about domestic and sexual violence?" These "what about" questions imply that defunding, reducing, and reforming the aggressive street policing currently under public scrutiny will leave people without vital protection and trigger a tidal wave of crime.

As prominent prison abolitionist Mariame Kaba has explained, the police have never been the solution to violence against women. Few women actually report rapes to police, and when they do, officers disbelieve and mistreat them. Kaba and others point out that police officers frequently commit domestic and sexual violence themselves, often using their authority to get away with it.

Still, some argue that this reality calls for more policing. Laws and policies could require officers to believe women and make arrests in their cases. This may, in turn, increase reporting and victim satisfaction. Some policies like this already exist in the form of special victims units where officers are trained to be victim-centered and trauma-informed and to pursue cases to arrest. One letter to the editor responding to Kaba suggested that we could change the face of policing: "I disagree that we should abolish the police. Instead, we should simply replace male policemen with more women."

It is tempting to see aggressive rape and domestic violence policing as the solution to violence against women, especially as the coronavirus lockdown is increasing such violence. But we have been down that road before, and it just led to more harm for marginalized people, including women.

Beginning in the late 1970s, battered women's activists launched a remarkably successful campaign for states and police departments to adopt laws and policies that encouraged, even required, police officers to arrest in domestic violence cases. Before the policies, officers who responded to "domestic disputes" often did not arrest, instead choosing to mediate between the parties or temporarily remove the suspect from the scene. Department policies even encouraged police not to arrest.

In the early days of the movement, many feminists also rejected strict law enforcement. Black activists within the movement vociferously opposed increasing police presence in the lives of people of color. Social scientists warned that arrest "initiates a judicial process which, experience tells us, has little chance of a productive outcome," as researcher Morton Bard observed.

Consequently, much of the early battered women's movement was oriented not around policing but around services like helping women obtain housing, employment, and public benefits. Shelley Fernandez, an administrator at La Casa de las Madres, a shelter created for Latina women, testified to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in 1978 about the kind of government intervention her clients needed: "We need money for teaching sheltered children, bilingual and biculturally. We need money for the day-to-day operation of shelters, ongoing rent, food, furniture, clothing, remodeling, upkeep, and paid staff. We need money for supplemental housing because we are already full."

Still, feminist advocates and lawyers heard horror stories from abused women who said they had begged for the abuser's arrest, only to be dismissed by ambivalent or sexist officers. Feminists like advocate Yolanda Bako reasoned, "Since the problem is already at the doorstep of the police, I think it is essential to make reform there." Activists pushed a pro-arrest agenda during an era of escalating tough-on-crime sentiments, and by the mid-1980s, law enforcement was the centerpiece of battered women's activism. The domestic violence arrest program received a boost in 1984 from a pioneering and highly publicized Minneapolis study, led by sociologist Lawrence Sherman, that tracked 205 domestic violence cases for six months and found that arresting suspects had a greater deterrent effect than giving suspects verbal advice or temporarily removing them from the home for eight hours. By 1991, around 90 percent of police departments and half of the states had adopted pro-arrest policies and laws. (A 2011 ABA survey showed that 19 states and the District of Columbia had mandatory arrest laws, and six states had preferred-arrest laws).

The pro-arrest program did not generally increase victim reporting to or satisfaction with police, but it made women more reluctant to seek stateintervention.

As police and lawmakers raced to implement aggressive arrest policies, Sherman was conducting large-scale replication studies that cast serious doubt on the deterrent effects of arrest. Several showed that arrest violence, particularly among unemployed Black men. By 1992, Sherman possessed enough evidence to proclaim, "Mandatory arrest may make as much sense as fighting fire with gasoline." Some battered women advocates dismissed the replication studies in a disturbingly racist manner. One prominent activist argued that police simply needed to be tougher on unemployed Black men, whom she referred to as "society's failures," because in "subcultures of ghettoized people, where imprisonment is all too common, a few hours in jail may be seen as only minor irritation, or even a right of passage."

The pro-arrest program did not generally increase victim reporting to or satisfaction with police, but it made women more reluctant to seek state intervention. Women were right to worry that calling the cops would result in their partners' incarceration, job loss, or deportation, or even the woman's own arrest. Research in California revealed that the adoption of mandatory arrest policies increased arrests of men by 60 percent and arrests of women by 400 percent. The primary deterrent effect of arrest policies, it appears, was deterring women from calling for help. And this may have had deadly consequences. A 2007 study that compared domestic homicide rates among states with and without mandatory arrest laws and within states before and after such laws found that the laws corresponded to a "54 percent increase in intimate partner homicides." The author hypothesized that arrest had deterred at-risk women from seeking help.

The domestic violence law enforcement program was costly in other ways. Armed policing comes at a steep human cost. Take, for example, Derek Chauvin, the officer who killed George Floyd. In 2008, he responded to a domestic violence call, busted down the door of a bathroom where Ira Toles was hiding, and shot Tolles twice in the stomach. Chauvin claimed the unarmed Toles reached for his police gun. Toles told the Daily Beast that he remembered Chauvin breaking in and beating him but not being shot. But, he added, "I remember my baby mother screaming and crying." Policing this domestic violence incident traumatized the victim, left Toles with holes in his stomach and a misdemeanor conviction, and garnered Chauvin a medal of valor.

And significantly, the domestic violence policing program came at the expense of funding and expanding the many evidence-tested service programs available to states and localities, including shelters like La Casa de las Madres. The Violence Against Women Act, for instance, was the signature federal effort against domestic violence. A central part of the infamous 1994 crime bill, VAWA too had a tough-on-crime bent that became more pronounced over time. As professor Leigh Goodmark has noted, at VAWA's inception, 62 percent of its grant funds went to the criminal system and by 2013, 85 percent of the funds went to policing and punishment. For 40 years, lawmakers and the public accepted costly policing that failed to meaningfully reduce violence, when all the while, Shelley Fernandez's 1978 sentiments pointed the way.

Policymakers are starting to recognize this failure. In 2017, the CDC published a comprehensive report on programs, policies, and practices that are effective at addressing and reducing intimate partner violence. The report deemphasizes the role of policing, prosecution, and punishment and instead highlighs programs that provide early violence intervention with children, prenatal care, shelter, employment, free preschool, and even green urban spaces, which studies have shown as being effective at reducing violence.

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One example is the Minnesota Family Investment Program, which provides cash and food assistance to low-income families to help working parents meet basic needs. Families receiving MFIP assistance experience a significant reduction in domestic violence compared with families that receive traditional benefits. Then there's Washington state's Housing First program, which helps survivors obtain shelter, child care, and other necessary services. In pilot studies, 84 percent of survivors in the program reported an increase in safety. The U.S. Airforce Suicide Prevention Program was created to address the stigma of seeking mental health services and connect Air Force personnel with professionals. In addition to reducing the risk of suicide, the program reduced moderate family violence by 30 percent and severe family violence by 54 percent.

The evidence is clear: Dialing back aggressive policing, even without other changes, promises to benefit women, especially those living in low-income communities of color. Investing in programs proved to reduce violence and increase victims' well-being, instead of policing, is even better. The question "What about domestic violence?" is better understood not as a critique of defunding the police but as an argument for it.

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How Police Became the Go-to Response to Domestic Violence

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In response to widespread demands to "defund the police," a specific question repeatedly crops up: "What about domestic and sexual violence?" These "what about" questions imply that defunding, reducing, and reforming the aggressive street policing currently under public scrutiny will leave people without vital protection and trigger a tidal wave of crime.

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"From 'Me Too' to 'All of Us': Organizing to End Sexual Violence, Without Prisons"

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"From 'Me Too' to 'All of Us': Organizing to End Sexual Violence, Without Prisons"

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Welcome to Interviews for Resistance. We're now several months into the Trump administration, and activists have scored some important victories in those months. Yet there is always more to be done, and the question of where to focus and how to help remains. In this series, we talk with organizers, agitators and educators about how to resist and build a better world.

Mariame Kaba: This is Mariame Kaba. I am an organizer and an educator. I run an organization called Project NIA, an abolitionist organization focused on ending youth incarceration. I also have a long history of doing work around ending racialized gender violence, having worked in domestic violence organizations, as well as anti-sexual assault organizations. I currently organize with a formation called Survived and Punished, which I helped to cofound. Survived and Punished works to support and uplift the stories and lives of criminalized survivors of violence. I am also a part of a collaborative called Just Practice.

Shira Hassan: My name is Shira Hassan. I am the founder of Just Practice. What Just Practice does is work to give people the space to put into practice how community accountability works. Community accountability is the idea that we can solve problems without using the police or state systems. Specifically, Just Practice looks at sexual violence and intimate partner violence without the use of social services or state systems. It is the survivors who want that. Just Practice is a community project that works to give people the opportunity to work out what that looks like and to create safe space for people to grow and make mistakes while they are learning how to hold people accountable.

My history and what brought me to Just Practice is that I spent the last 25 years working with young people in the sex trade industry through a harm reduction lens. Our work required us to solve problems without the use of police and state systems, because we are very often pushed out of those systems or criminalized if we try to act within those systems. We had to come up with other solutions. We spent years refining those ideas. Now we are trying to put them into practice in the larger world.

Sarah Jaffe: Sexual harassment and sexual assault are in the news because of a powerful, famous man. I wanted to start off with a question for both of you, who have been doing this work for a while. Do you feel like the public conversation around these people - in the media, on social media or wherever you are hearing it - has progressed at all? Does it look different right now from when you began doing this work?

I also came of age before social media. The conversation was very much limited to having talks with your friends. It wasn't this kind of generalized conversation that is not even really a conversation. It's more often a one-way harangue or a one-way rant or just venting. It really wasn't like that. You had to talk to people you knew. Beyond that, you were talking with folks in a support-group setting, storytelling and divulging that you had been raped. It wasn't this environment of compulsory confession, where you were being forced into disclosing that you were a survivor of sexual violence. It didn't feel like you had to premise your conversation on disclosing your own experience before you could actually speak to this in a real way. I, yes indeed, am a survivor of sexual assault and violence, but it just felt different at that time. It felt somehow more intimate and less tied to media and social media.

I don't know when the movie The Accused came out. I often see that movie in my trajectory of coming into my own and understanding sexual violence. That movie felt like a moment that made sexual violence connect much more with the larger media conversation. But, maybe I am remembering that wrong.

Shira: I totally remember when that movie came out, and it really did change the conversation. Bless Jodie Foster.

I think the conversation has definitely changed. We have the conversation much more publicly. It is a lot different from writing people's names on the bathroom walls, which is what we were doing in the 1990s. Facebook has become the bathroom wall, in a way. I think the way we have the conversation changes. Then, I think because it is a more democratized platform, to some degree, different people are in the conversation than used to be. I do think that, by and large, the people who are having the conversation are still the same, though.

I don't see this conversation happening in the same way about young people in the sex trade, for example. A lot of the young people I know are more street-based: The idea of sexual harassment is something that people are thinking about and angry about. Gwyneth Paltrow is not commenting on their experiences. She is commenting on actresses in Hollywood. I don't want to diminish or demean how important those experiences of violence are. At the same time, it is a certain kind of survivor and a certain kind of violence that we are all talking about. I think that part is the same.

Sarah: One of the things about this big public conversation is that, for me, it actually feels more overwhelming. What Mariame called this culture of compulsory confession feels smothering. It just feels like there is nothing we can do. You have been doing work around this for a while and dealing directly with survivors. How do you fight that feeling that this is never going to end?

Shira: There are stories that overwhelm me and stop me in my tracks. But they are also the stories of people I love, and there is a face to the story most of the time for me. The feeling of being overwhelmed is something that I counter with action and I counter with healing. This idea of healing justice, where speaking out is part of that healing. I feel connected to that as an action, not so much connected to that as a burden. I feel like it is a blessing to be amongst survivor stories. I don't actually feel overwhelmed by survivor stories. I feel overwhelmed by inaction around survivor stories.

You can't also just take on everybody's joy either. When I think about it in that kind of individualistic way, it can feel overwhelming. But I have worked towards a collective idea of healing and a collective idea of action and organizing. I don't think that the issue we have right now is that we have too many organizers. I think we have too few organizers, and that can also feel super debilitating when there is a lot of handwringing or a lot of outrage, but without any direction. I think that can feel overwhelming. Since 1988, since I have been in this field, what has kept me going is that collectivity. And seeking to actually understand and to heal and to be part of that healing process with other people.

Sarah: We end up with this story of one survivor who has to come forward and file charges with the police, and then this one perpetrator will be held accountable. But that doesn't work.

Mariame: And it doesn't happen. I think that is another aspect of this, for people who are counting on a criminal punishment response to this. I understand feeling completely depressed and debilitated, because that system doesn't actually know how to hold firm for survivors. It doesn't know how to transform harm that occurs. It is a system that most people don't access, and most survivors still never access for lots of reasons: because they don't want to, because they have been traumatized in the past by the system, because they don't want the person who harmed them necessarily caught up in the system. There are a million reasons. Because they don't want to be raked over the coals themselves. Because they try to solve problems in community.

When people do access the system, they are screwed over by it, literally, in all different kinds of ways. They then feel a sense of disempowerment. I can understand that, if the way you think we are actually going to solve this problem is through that system, I can understand that sense of complete debilitating depression, because that system actually can't do that.

Sarah: In the wake of the Weinstein revelations, one of the things that some people have been talking about is the whisper network. This is the way that women warn each other about certain men in their political circles or in their work circles. And yet, these feel inadequate too - they are not particularly accountable for the people making accusations, which is less a problem than the fact that they just end up assuming that it is still our job to avoid perpetrators.

That means, for example, people continue to be rewarded when they do bad things to other people or take negative action against people. We are in a situation where people try to argue over semantics. We don't have a sense that people are prepared to say, ​"There is a spectrum of sexual harm. Not everything is rape. And yet, everything that feels like a violation is harm." We just don't have that within the larger culture that allows for people to feel like they can take responsibility and that they can be accountable.

The other thing is, we do have the threat that if you do admit that you do this, you might be caught up in the criminal punishment system. You might see the inside of a jail. So your inclination is to deny, deny, deny until the very end. There is just no incentive for you to ​"come clean" and be like, ​"I actually did this. Yes, I did rape this person. I did sexually assault them. I did harass them. I did molest them." We are in this adversarial model where you don't admit it, and the person who is actually being placed on trial is the survivor, to prove that you actually did this.

I understand, within that, why people feel like they have to whisper and why survivors then have to take on the weight of actually figuring out how to ​"bring somebody to accountability." The incentive structure is set up this way.

Sarah: And, of course, not all survivors are women.

Mariame: Exactly. This is what is, to me, the work that we have to do. We have to make community members understand what sexual harm looks like, what it feels like, why it is unacceptable. We have to make violence unthinkable in our culture. We have to make interpersonal violence unthinkable. It has to become that. This is not about punishment, but about organizing. Most people don't want to organize around these things. That, to me, is the nexus. That is the place that we have to work from if we are really going to transform this into something where it isn't the survivors or the victims who have to carry the load all the time.

Shira: I want to add one thing: where the history of those lists come from. Those kinds of lists got started with people in the sex trade, in particular transgender women of color, who started creating bad date sheets. These were informal sheets, literally, that were written down and passed around through the community. We used to photocopy them, copy them down and hand them out with people's physical descriptions. The rest of the world looks at people in the sex trade as completely disposable, but we borrow their tools all the time when we feel disposable.

I want to be sure that we recognize the history and legacy of the tools that are being used, how they are being used and why they are being used before we say that they are not working or important. Because the next thing just has to grow out of that. What is the next thing we are going to do with those lists? We went from the bathroom wall to Facebook. We went from photocopying the sheet with descriptions to passing it around online. We do have the power and capacity to think of ​"What next?" but we haven't quite yet. In part, it's because we don't have solidarity with each other, and we don't recognize that the spectrum of sexual violence is something that is happening to all of us. We live in rape culture, and all of this is going to keep happening to us until we can collectively figure out what we are doing here.

Mariame: In terms of Survived and Punished, we have come together nationally to put a spotlight on the fact that when you look at who is actually incarcerated and criminalized in the current criminal punishment system, in terms of women and gender nonconforming people, in particular, often these are people who are survivors of sexual violence and domestic violence prior to their criminalization and prior to their incarceration. They have been violated in the first place. They end up criminalized within the system, often for defending themselves against violence or for criminalized survival actions like having self-medicated and used drugs in order to get over some of the stress that they have been put under, being brought in under conspiracy charges for their abusive partner who coerced them into actions. Taking their kids and fleeing and then being charged with kidnapping. All sorts of survival actions.

We understand that the link between criminalization and domestic and sexual violence is inextricable and undeniable, and people find themselves caught up in the system and end up re-violated and re-traumatized within that very system. Then, you are in prison or in jail or an immigrant detention center and those institutions basically are rapists, themselves. People come in, they have to be patted down, they have strip searches, women are made to shower with male corrections officers watching them and leering. Sometimes people are raped in those particular institutions.

We have to be mindful of the fact that the very thing we say we want to end - violence - is being perpetrated by that very same system. We are trying to end violence with more violence. It just doesn't make any sense. Our work has been to uplift the particular cases of people who have been criminalized by the system and make those connections. It is not just that we are lifting up those cases as exceptional cases, as cases that prove that this ​"one good person" needs to be released or this one innocent person needs to be released. We are making a broader case that everybody should be free, because almost everybody within these systems has these histories that they bring with them and these institutions are re-traumatizing institutions. They make no one better. In fact, they make everybody worse.

Recently, we organized to help free Bresha Meadows, a 14-year-old girl who killed her father in self-defense. We came together, initially, through the work that so many of us had been involved in in terms of freeing Melissa Alexander. We are part of a long tradition of defense campaigns for Joan Little and Cassandra Keaton and any number of other survivors of violence who have been criminalized for defending their lives or for actions they took in the attempt of surviving. We are trying to bring together many, many different kinds of people, groups, ideas, to leverage this in order to be able to free more people. These are freedom campaigns.

As Shira mentioned early on, who are the survivors we are actually uplifting? Who are the people? What is sexual violence? When we put people in prisons and in jails, often we are sentencing them to judicial rape because we know they are going to be assaulted when they go inside. Yet we are still putting people in that environment to be assaulted. How are you going to be an anti-rape advocate or organizer and still be pressing for people to be put into rape factories?

We have to complicate this conversation around sexual violence and see all the different ways that it is used as a form of social control across-the-board, with many different people from all different genders and all different races and all different social locations. If we understand the problem in that way, we have a better shot at actually uprooting all of the conditions that lead to this, and addressing all of the ways in which sexual violence reinforces other forms of violence. Our work over a couple of decades now has been devoted to complicating these narratives that are too easy, these really simple narratives around a perfect victim who is assaulted by an evil monster and that is the end of the story. The ​"Kill all rapists" conversation, which just kind of flattens what sexual violence really is, that doesn't take into consideration the spectrum of sexual violence, therefore minimizing certain people's experiences and making others more valid.

The last thing I want to add here is my concern over not just the ​"perfect victim" narrative, but also this idea that we all have the same experience because we have been raped, and we all think the same way about how to address it, and that for all of us being a rape survivor becomes your identity. We were raped. Something bad happened to us. We are trying to address that, but we are not taking on the survivor as a totalizing identity for everything we do in our lives and how that matters. I want more of those kinds of conversations to be happening in public, but somehow, we can't have those. We can't have complicated conversations about sexual violence because then you are accused of rape apologia or you are accused of coddling rapists. That is very, very limiting. It means that we are not going to be able to uproot and really solve the problem ultimately.

Shira: I don't know what is going to happen with Mr. Weinstein, but I know that he has enough money to make what he wants to happen a possibility. The consequences that are going to happen to him, they may never measure up to the harm that he created. Yet we see wide-scale harm happening for people who may ultimately want to be accountable. Sexual violence is very nuanced, and the system that we have is not.

Prison is as not feminist. That is one of Mariame's famous points. Prison isn't feminist, because it recreates the same sexual violence and the same fear, the same kinds of oppression. It is the pin on the head of the racist and sexist system that we live in.

That does not mean, however, there should be no consequences. It means real consequences. Consequences that really matter. It means transforming the conditions that exist in the first place for this to even have happened. It is really critical for people to think the difference between punishment and consequences. Punishment often is actually not the same as transformation. Even though it feels good to wear the ​"Kill the rapists" t‑shirt, that isn't the thing that is actually going to get us the world we want to live in.

Mariame: I also want to talk a little bit about what is hopeful about what is happening in the world around these issues. Shira and I just spent three and a half days in Chicago with 50 people from around the country doing trainings and facilitating discussion and dialogue about how we do community accountability to address sexual harm and interpersonal violence. These folks came together from all around the country and took that much time out of their day, because we understand this as a moment of opportunity for something different. A lot of people are talking now, and there is much more awareness around the fact that the prison-industrial-complex has churned communities and people through a meat grinder, devastating people. Yet, people don't feel safer. People don't feel as though violence is ​"curbed" in any way.

We have to build up the skills of being able to ask questions like: What does it mean to actually center a survivor who is harmed? What does it mean to actually support people who have caused harm? What does it mean to take responsibility for saying, ​"We refuse in our community to condone when this happens"? One of the things that is so important is that harm causes wounds that necessitate healing. That is what so many people are looking for - a way to begin to heal. How are we going to create in our communities, spaces that allow people real opportunity to heal?

Again, this will not necessarily be accomplished through compulsory confession in a public way. But, how do we hold that people who have been harmed deserve an opportunity for that harm to be addressed in a real way? Often, that is all people want: a real acknowledgement that, ​"I was hurt. Somebody did it. I want them to know that they did it. I want to see that they have some remorse for having done it and I want them to start a process by which they will ensure to themselves, at least, and be accountable to their community for not doing it again. That is what I am trying to get as a survivor." I think there is hope in that.

People are doing this work all around the country. People want to be able to engage this. Maybe if more of us do this, maybe we will be talking in 20 years about something totally different, a landscape that is totally different, a way that people start taking accountability for actions that they do that are harmful to other people in a totally different way.

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From "Me Too" to "All of Us": Organizing to End Sexual Violence, Without Prisons

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Welcome to Interviews for Resistance. We're now several months into the Trump administration, and activists have scored some important victories in those months. Yet there is always more to be done, and the question of where to focus and how to help remains.

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Building Accountable Communities video series

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Building Accountable Communities video series

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Transcript (PDF) available here.

During the event, questions can be submitted via online form, or you can tweet @bcrwtweets or using the hashtag #transformharm.

Accountability is a familiar buzz-word in contemporary social movements, but what does it mean? How do we work toward it? Kiyomi Fujikawa and Shannon Perez-Darby will join us for an online discussion to explore models for building accountable communities for the purpose of healing and repair. What does it look like to be accountable to survivors without exiling or disposing those who do harm? A series of four short videos exploring these concepts are available below. This conversation will be framed by audience questions in response to these videos, and moderated by Mariame Kaba.

Watch the videos below, contribute questions here, and join us for an online conversation on October 26.
How to Join
This event will take place online only. You can tune in here on the event page, where the conversation will stream live starting at at 4 PM EST on 10/26.

Again, there is no in-person component for this event. We encourage you to organize a viewing party and discuss these important issues with your communities.
Transcript (PDF) available here. PARTICIPATE Videos
Part 1: What is Accountability?

Part 2: What is Self-Accountability?

Part 3: Self-Accountability and Survivors

Part 4: People Who do Harm are not Monsters

PARTICIPATE About the Speakers
Kiyomi Fujikawa works within movements to end gender-based violence, organizing with Queer and Trans communities of color around preventing and responding to intimate partner violence and towards racial, gender and economic justice.

Shannon Perez-Darby has spent 12 years as a community advocate working within LGBTQ communities and communities of color to support survivors of domestic and sexual violence. She is a queer, mixed Latina writer, survivor, community activist and author of the piece "The Secret Joy of Accountability: Self-accountability as a Building Block for Change" in the seminal book The Revolution Starts at Home. Shannon's passion lies in supporting communities to actualize our dreams in our day-to-day lives.

Mariame Kaba is an organizer and an abolitionist, the founder of Project NIA, co-founder several organizations including of Survived and Punished, and a current BCRW activist in residence.
Details and Accessibility
This event is free and open to the public. RSVP is preferred but not required. This is an online event. Please contact BCRW for additional accessibility needs.

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Building Accountable Communities | Barnard Center for Research on Women

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Transcript (PDF) available here. During the event, questions can be submitted via online form, or you can tweet @bcrwtweets or using the hashtag #transformharm. Accountability is a familiar buzz-word in contemporary social movements, but what does it mean? How do we work toward it?

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"What we can learn about police abolition from domestic violence activists"

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"What we can learn about police abolition from domestic violence activists"

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It was the late '90s when writer, activist, and educator Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, then living in Toronto, found themselves in an impossible situation. Their partner, who I'll call "T," had become physically abusive, but calling the police wasn't an option. To begin, T was their immigration sponsor in Canada, and they worried that calling the cops might put their status in jeopardy. Then, there was the fact that both of them were working-class people of color, and that T had already spent time in prison. "Even in a situation where I was in harm's way, I was like, 'I still love and care for my partner, and I don't actually think that calling the cops is going to help either of us find safety,'" Piepzna-Samarasinha says. Instead, they started researching other ways they might deal with what was happening. "I needed to figure out a way for creating safety for myself that didn't rely on the police."

In the weeks since George Floyd was killed, sustained protests against racism and state violence - the largest many of us have seen in our lifetimes - have brought to the fore a conversation previously relegated to left-wing activists: that the only way to truly make our communities safer is to defund and, one day, completely abolish the police. Activists have largely rejected proposed reforms such as creating additional oversight or altering the rules for officers' use of force, and, for the first time, many Americans are considering what their lives might look like if police departments were disbanded en masse. It's logical for them to wonder: What about violence perpetrated by other civilians? What if somebody tries to harm me?

It's important to remember that, for many of us, the most dangerous place isn't a dark alley or a street corner. The majority of women murdered in the United States (and across the globe) are killed in their own homes, at the hands of an intimate partner or family member. When it comes to this most endemic form of violence, we've largely already stopped calling the cops. From 2010 to 2018, 57% of those killed by a partner in NYC - all of whom had almost undoubtedly experienced previous instances of violence - had never reported domestic violence to the NYPD.

For many feminist abolitionists, the realization the police weren't the answer to the violence they witnessed and experienced was just the beginning of their political journey.

When police do respond, there's no promise they'll help: In 2012, Marissa Alexander, a Black Floridian woman, was sentenced to 20 years for firing a warning shot at her abusive, estranged husband, an incident in which no one was harmed. (After an appellate court ordered a new trial, she accepted a plea deal that capped her sentence at the three years she had already served.) In the last few years, countless other survivors have been arrested for defending themselves after enduring years of violence, including Aylaliya Birru, Tomiekia Johnson, and Chrystul Kizer. "[Gender-based violence] survivors who are Black, brown, immigrant, poor, trans, queer, disabled... [or otherwise marginalized] lack the luxury of believing" that cops or prisons will keep them safe, explained Colleen McCormack-Maitland, who campaigns on behalf of criminalized survivors with the group Survived and Punished.

Despite having 911 at our fingertips for generations, the very place in the world women should feel the safest - our own homes - is still the most dangerous. For Piepzna-Samarasinha and many other feminist abolitionists, the realization the police weren't the answer to the violence they witnessed and experienced was just the beginning of their political journey. The next step was allowing the possibility that they could build effective alternatives themselves. From implementing early-education programs to help prevent violence to devising ways to intervene when abuse is occurring to establishing processes so that a perpetrator can be held to account, feminist abolitionists have spent the last few decades creating the infrastructure for the world they dream of - one in which the end of misogynistic violence and the end of the police go hand in hand.

UpperCut Images, halbergman/Getty, Clique Images/Stocksy, Margaret Flatley/Bustle

To understand why activists say American police will never protect and serve Black people, it helps to look back to the institution's origins in slave patrols. But even if you expect to be treated well by the police, you might hesitate to call the cops on the people you know or love. We might depend on the person perpetrating the harm for our survival. We might be fearful that other people in our families or communities won't believe us. We might simply not want to see the person doing harm in handcuffs or behind bars. Drawing on data collected in a self-reported national crime victimization survey from 2006 to 2015, the Bureau of Justice Statistics estimated that nearly half of nonfatal domestic violence incidents (44%) are not reported to the police. The vast majority ( an estimated 70%) of victims of child sexual abuse opt not to report their experiences to the cops. Trans and nonbinary people experience intimate partner violence and sexual assault at rates that far exceed their cisgender peers, but when surveyed, nearly one in two trans people said they wouldn't feel comfortable seeking assistance from the police.

Violence doesn't happen in a vacuum; we are embedded in each other's lives in a way the police will never be. What would it mean to see these existing connections as the strongest possible protection against present or future violence?

That's the idea behind pod-mapping, a process for determining whom one might rely on if they've experienced abuse, witnessed someone they loved being harmed, or were called to account for violence they had committed. The practice comes from the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective (BATJC), an Oakland community working to build and support transformative justice responses to child sexual abuse (CSA). As co-founder Mia Mingus explains, pods create a tangible, concrete network through which people can prevent CSA or interrupt harm that may be ongoing: "If you see your friend treating their child in humiliating, unsupportive ways, have conversations with them. If you hear your friend using misogynistic language, intervene." If someone agrees to be in another person's pod, that constitutes a commitment to build trust, show up when asked for and hold the person accountable for their behavior.

Having conversations about the harm a friend could be committing through their parenting is awkward and difficult - it's something we've been encouraged not to do, says Mingus. Instead of taking an active role safeguarding our own children and the kids in our extended families and communities, we've ceded that responsibility to the police. Building a world without cops means reconceptualizing who we entrust to guarantee our collective safety. "That means it's us," Mingus says.

We are embedded in each other's lives in a way the police will never be. What would it mean to see these existing connections as the strongest possible protection against present or future violence?

In the many years since their abusive relationship ended, Piepzna-Samarasinha has written and organized extensively on these issues, becoming a leading voice on how queer people and leftists can foster safer relationships and communities, including by not relying on the cops. In the book Beyond Survival, published this year, Piepzna-Samarasinha and their co-editor sought to capture the diverse ways transformative justice has and can manifest in our everyday lives, a few examples of which have been explored in this article. A previous book they co-edited, The Revolution Starts at Home, examined how social justice activists have sought to confront intimate partner violence happening in their own communities.

Currently, Piepzna-Samarasinha consults with the Seattle-based group API Chaya, an organization that supports Asian and Pacific Islander survivors of gender-based violence and human trafficking. They also run "Natural Helpers," a program to train community members - everyone from hair stylists and faith leaders to business owners and day care providers - to recognize the warning signs and dynamics of abuse so they can assist those in need. The program serves as a reminder that you don't need a degree in social work to understand and intervene in violence that's happening in your community. "We know way more than we think we do about how to support survivors and perpetrators," they tell Bustle.

As Piepzna-Samarasinha and other activists readily admit, taking on the responsibility of addressing interpersonal violence isn't easy. "It's very unrealistic to think that people are voluntarily going to say, 'I sexually abused this person!' [or] 'I'm beating up my partner and now I'm going to change!'" says Sonya Shah, an associate professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Shah has been involved in restorative/transformative justice work over a decade, including as the founder of The Ahimsa Collective, a group that facilitates conversations between those who have committed child sexual abuse and those who have experienced it. She says there are plenty of ways communities have sought to push a person who's done harm to a place of contemplation without subjecting them to punitive measures or extended isolation. In the Ojibway community of Hollow Water, on the shores of Lake Winnipeg, parents and other family members who perpetrate sexual harm spend years in a community healing and sentencing circle, working to take responsibility for their conduct until they're able to be formally reunited with their children.

Funding from the police could be used to support programs in the United States that have been created elsewhere, for example an initiative in Germany designed to provide confidential support to people with professed attractions to children - enabling them to access therapy knowing nothing they disclose will be reported to the police, as long as they don't have an active prosecution against them. According to Shah, one of the greatest barriers in preventing violence and abuse, especially in the United States, is that people who commit harm have nowhere to go to understand or prevent their bad behavior. "In the bigger scheme, if we want to prevent [harm] from happening, we have to build our capacity to hear things that are really painful and hard," she says.

Halfdark, Jon Lovette/Getty, Yelizaveta Vlasenko/Stocksy, Margaret Flatley/Bustle

The Safe Bar Collective, a program launched in 2016 by the D.C.-based Collective Action for Safe Spaces (CASS), trains member businesses to identify, respond to, and intervene in sexual and racial harassment so that patrons and workers can be safe. "Too often in our conception, we're thinking about what survivors need after violence occurs," says CASS former Interim Director Alicia Sanchez Gill. "But we also have to be thinking about how to transform the entire culture so we're in a community where sexual violence is no longer tolerated."

Behind Gill's and many other transformative justice activists' work is a refusal to accept that sexual assault, familial abuse, and intimate partner violence are inevitable. We understand that comprehensive sex and health education is key to stemming the spread of HIV/AIDS, preventing unwanted teen pregnancies, and getting the coronavirus pandemic under control. What would it mean if young people, and especially young women, were given practical skills for protecting themselves and troubleshooting violence so they could be as safe as possible in the present or down the line?

Before Sikivu Hutchinson founded the Women's Leadership Project in South L.A., there was nothing local "that addressed intimate partner violence, sexual violence, sexual harassment in a manner that was culturally responsive or sensitive to the social capital of African American girls." In addition to gaining practical skills, participants explore the construction of Black and Latinx femininity and the ways in which misogynoir impacts their own lives. They meet and engage with Black feminist thinkers like Aishah Shahidah Simmons, talk about the erasure of gender-based violence in parts of the hip-hop world (including the 2015 N.W.A. biopic Straight Outta Compton), and launch campaigns in high schools where sexual harassment isn't being taken seriously.

"My parents had to work multiple jobs. How could they be present [to keep me safe from abuse]? We need resources to keep kids safe, housing and health care for all."

Hutchinson sees WLP as an integral outlet for the mental health of the young women participants, but she's been unable to expand the program to more than a handful of schools due to funding restrictions and a lack of buy-in from the public school district. "In my mind, if we're talking about defunding and dismantling the police, the vacuum that creates is a generative one," she says, that will allow for more culturally responsible programming for youth of color, the kind of interventions on issues of self-esteem and well-being that white youth rely on all the time.

The call to defund the police may indeed allow money to shift toward new initiatives, but as always, the devil is in the details. Scholars like Kristin Bumiller have tracked the ways in which contemporary movements against sexual and domestic violence have actually contributed to the criminalization of poor people and communities of color. Men of color's supposed threat to white women has been a foundational myth of white supremacy, as has the erasure of the violence done to women of color by white men. Initiatives that do not recognize these histories and patterns risk recreating them.

"Funneling and diverting resources from policing into community-based programs is exactly what we should be doing in this moment," says Gill. She cautions against using money previously earmarked for the police to fund government actors who have also caused lasting harm to people and families of color, for example social workers employed by child protective services. Moreover, says Gill, survivors don't just need community intervention - they need material resources. "My parents had to work multiple jobs. How could they be present [to keep me safe from abuse]? For many of us who have experienced CSA, all of these other circumstances played into what happened. We need resources to keep kids safe, housing and health care for all."

Piepzna-Samarasinha says funds ought to be redistributed in a manner that recognizes the many initiatives that operate outside of nonprofit organizations or other formal institutions. "A lot of the time, the most important transformative work is being done by people who can't even access the state or are criminalized by it," they say. Sex workers, for example, have sought to cultivate their collective safety by creating bad date lists or facilitating sex worker-led peer support groups There's a significant risk redistributed funds might just end up in the hands of the best networked, least marginalized groups, notes Piepzna-Samarasinha.

They hope people will learn from the abolitionist feminists who have been doing this for years, and that we won't diminish our demands to defund and abolish the new police.

"I hope that we don't stop believing that we don't actually need them," they said, before quoting the words of June Jordan. "'We are the ones we have been waiting for.'"

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What Does A World Without Cops Look Like? Just Ask Domestic Violence Activists

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It was the late '90s when writer, activist, and educator Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, then living in Toronto, found themselves in an impossible situation. Their partner, who I'll call "T," had become physically abusive, but calling the police wasn't an option.

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Andrea Ritchie joins the show to talk about her research with the group Interrupting Criminalization, specifically their looking back on the "Defund the Police" demand in 2020.

Interrupting Criminalization describes itself as an initiative that aims to interrupt and end the growing criminalization and incarceration of women and LGBTQ people of color for criminalized acts related to public order, poverty, child welfare, drug use, survival, and self-defense, including criminalization and incarceration of survivors of violence.

The discussion begins with a look at the work that Interrupting Criminalization does, and their findings on the various successes and failures activists have had with the "Defund" demand over the last year. Perhaps most importantly, we talk about how the state has tried to undermine abolitionist efforts. Toward the end, we speak about the need to fund experimental approaches to harm, including those that might fail.

Andrea Ritchie is a Black lesbian immigrant whose research, litigation, organizing, and policy advocacy has focused on policing and criminalization of women and LGBT people of color. She is the author of " Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color ," and co-author of " Challenging Criminalization: A Call for A Comprehensive Philanthropic Response; Centering Black Women, Girls, and Fem(me)s in Campaigns for Expanded Sanctuary "; " Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women "; " A Roadmap for Change: Federal Policy Recommendations for Addressing the Criminalization of LGBT People and People Living with HIV "; and " Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States. "

A nationally recognized expert on policing issues, Andrea supports and advises numerous groups across the country. She is also a frequent author of opinion pieces making critical interventions in current debates around police sexual violence, policing of young women, responses to mental health crises, and more.

Andrea is a current Researcher-in-Residence at Barnard's Center for Research on Women .

Episode Notes & Resources

Andrea Ritchie's website

Follow Andrea on Twitter @dreanyc123

Interrupting Criminalization's website

Follow Interrupting Criminalization on Twitter @interruptcrim

Read the report: "The Demand Is Still #DefundPolice: Lessons From 2020"

Buy " Invisible No More " (Beacon Press, 2017)

Because She's Powerful by Essie Justice Group

Credits

Created and hosted by Kim Wilson and Brian Sonenstein

Edited by Ellis Maxwell

Website & volunteers managed by Victoria Nam

Theme music by Jared Ware

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Interrupting Criminalization feat. Andrea Ritchie - Beyond Prisons Podcast

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Andrea Ritchie joins the show to talk about her research with the group Interrupting Criminalization, specifically their looking back on the "Defund the Police" demand in 2020.

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Ten Lessons for Creating Safety Without Police

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Ten Lessons for Creating Safety Without Police

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BY

Tasha Amezcua, Ejeris Dixon & Che J. Rene Long, Truthout

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How can we create safety collectively? How can we challenge hate and police violence by using community-based strategies rather than relying on the police?

For the past 10 years, the Safe OUTside the System (SOS) Collective - an anti-violence program led by and for lesbian, gay, bisexual, two spirit, trans and gender non-conforming (LGBTSTGNC) people of color (POC) in Central Brooklyn, New York, specifically Bed-Stuy, Crown Heights and Bushwick neighborhoods - has been working to answer these questions. After a decade of organizing, the three SOS Coordinators, founding coordinator Ejeris Dixon (2005-2010), the second coordinator Che J. Rene Long (2010-2014), and the current coordinator Tasha Amezcua (2014-present) co-wrote this piece to share the lessons we've learned over the years. We also asked SOS members from the past 10 years about their reflections on our successes, struggles and our hopes for the future. We write these lessons for all the people seeking to address violence and envision safer communities.
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1. Cultural work is a crucial organizing strategy. From its onset our members have included activists, organizers, artists and cultural workers (i.e. dancers, musicians, playwrights, actors, singers, poets, performers, artists, healers, etc.) and many people who see themselves at the intersections of these identities. However, it took us time to integrate people's passions, fully utilize each other's skills, and create a collective culture and value system that allowed us all to be seen and heard. We knew that cultural work was necessary to build community, create our vision of safety and make space for healing. Yet we struggled with the question of what our priorities were - and where cultural work fit into those priorities. SOS members who identified as artists and cultural workers refused to let organizers deprioritize art and healing, and consistently reminded us that cultural work is not a footnote or an addition to make an event more interesting. Instead, these members showed us all that art and cultural work can allow us to vision, strategize, educate, heal and organize with our full selves. Organizing that integrates cultural work transforms people's perspectives in a way that is often deeper and longer lasting than organizing alone. After many meetings and challenging conversations we began to build cultural work into our organizing strategies, events and community-based curriculum. We created a step team to engage and excite new members as an outreach strategy. Our annual Bed-Stuy Pride includes visual artists, performers, healers and vendors to bring our full communities together. This conversation still continues today and not without tension, but we keep growing and learning new ways to communicate across our perspectives and passions.

2. Organizing for community safety must include an analysis of gentrification. The Safe Neighborhood Campaign began at a time when Bed-Stuy was still a mostly low-income Black community. Our campaign relied on small businesses agreeing to become safe spaces that would open their doors to people fleeing from violence, and uphold our principles of using transformative justice strategies to address and reduce violence. As the campaign progressed and built relationships with more community-based businesses, the neighborhood also changed in less subtle, more abrupt ways. Soon the question of gentrification took center stage in our campaign development as well as in our outreach and base building. Gentrification and increased policing of LGBTSTGNC POC disrupted our existing community safety networks, pushing out our safe spaces. We met this strong socio-economic force with study and research, developing a timeline for the average lifespan of a small business and finding new ways to engage locally owned small businesses. We began to invest in longstanding institutions such as schools and churches and explored ways to engage them in the campaign. This work continues today. As a mixed collective of people born and raised in Bed-Stuy and transplants, we have honest conversations internally about how to support the local community together with our money, energy and time.

3. Our work exists within a legacy and we are just a small part. Over time we've noticed thatsafety exists in relationships. And wellness exists in culture. In this moment of rapid displacement, we continue to identify LGBTSTGNC/POC cultural workers, and support them in strengthening, deepening and intermingling roots with LGBTSTGNC/POC in our neighborhoods.

4. Are we a "real" collective? The struggle to create a practical and visionary structure. The SOS Collective is structured as a collective of intergenerational lesbian, gay, bisexual, two spirit, trans and gender non-conforming people of color. Members lead the Collective's organizing, political analysis, strategy and a staff person coordinates the collective - ensuring resources, coordinating logistics, maintaining structure, and supporting members leadership development and political education. There is a hierarchy inherent to this structure, as staff is paid and members are not. And while at times we had the resources to temporarily hire members, we still weren't able to fully compensate their labor or address the power dynamics between members and staff. Since its founding, SOS staff and members constantly assessed whether decisions were informed, collective, not coercive and held true to the values of member leadership, transformation, community accountability and collectivity. We also had conversations where members discussed and defined which roles the staff member should hold, and how those roles were in service of the collective's progress. The power of collective is that there's been no burden on any one person or a few people to have an answer. When we have all contributed, prioritizing survivors and most-impacted folks, we have learned about and from each other, we have learned to talk to each other, and we have had the remarkable opportunity to grow, heal and transform together. This way, we built safety and wellness in our communities that was more robust, dynamic and informed than any single one of us could create.

5. Internal accountability must be a foundation for community safety. We believed that we must internally model our own values of addressing violence and harm without relying on the police or disposing of community members (aka transformative justice) in order to achieve our vision in the community. However, this definitely was a challenge and a journey. When SOS started, we were all working with limited resources, the staff was part time and often volunteering 15 hours a week of unpaid time, and many of the members were volunteering 5 to 10 hours a week of their time. Our community is made up of survivors and they need us to be consistent to maintain trust. To ensure that we were as accountable as possible to our own communities we developed agreements around how we would share responsibilities, and had rotating members who would check in on our tasks. Through these ever-evolving structures we were able to collectively work towards internal accountability. At times internal accountability has been harder and more painful than just navigating our tasks and commitments. We've had experiences of members who've harmed other members, or the collective as a whole. We've had conflicts and disagreements so deep that we permanently lost crucial members. Yet, through having transparent and challenging conversations, we've built some structures for addressing harm internally, and keep revising and adjusting them to ensure they stay useful and relevant. We continue to build internal accountability processes that center and are led by those most impacted to support the boundary, safety and wellness needs of all folks involved, including those who have caused harm. We also encourage and support our members in holding community accountability processes outside of nonprofit structures due to the limitations of nonprofits and legal liability for mandated reporting.

6. Grappling with cultural capital, fame and ego. Ego and fame often get in the way of community accountability and transformation, privileging people with more status or capital in the community, allowing folks with more power to avoid accountability. Early on we knew that building community-wide transformation required humility, and that our work was ineffective and useless if it was only built by one of us. We actively worked to build safety, trust and love in our collective so folks felt safe enough to leave their egos at the door, which helped maintain access for everyone. One way we disrupted the impact of ego and cultural capital was to encourage and support our most-impacted and newer members - Black, Indigenous, youth, elder, disabled, homeless, femme, fat, trans, gender non-conforming and long-term resident members - to take leadership and visible roles. We also worked to use our collective fame and visibility as a resource. While we started out as a relatively unknown project, over time we began to receive a great deal of praise for our work. We were not in movement work to become QTPOC (queer and trans people of color) famous. And we always knew that on the ground in our neighborhoods, "QTPOC famous" wasn't neighborhood famous. Over time we learned to use fame as a resource to strategically to leverage our work, and to give momentum to our political vision. At times we did this well. At times our humility or desire to get visibility as a collective as opposed to individuals meant that we were left out of critical movement conversations, or that other organizations took credit from the work we created. Out of these experiences and our values, we have learned how to use cultural capital in a different way. Those of us who have a lot of cultural capital now work to use, redistribute, disrupt and ask questions about the use of these resources, for the service of the entire collective and community.

7. Base building and relationship building are the cornerstone of all our work. Base building, outreach, relationship building, whatever you call it - you gotta do it! In the beginning, we spent the majority of our time actively building relationships with LGBTSTGNC people of color in Central Brooklyn. We recognized early on that the only way we would ensure that we had the support we needed to build lasting community safety strategies was to have deeply connected networks of SOS members and allies. Base building was a unifying factor for our collective members, it was the skill that everyone learned and worked on together. It was the project that we never de-prioritized. It's still the glue that keeps us connected and accountable to our communities.

8. Beyond winning or losing, we have each other. The thing about doing this kind of anti-violence organizing is that it was sometimes difficult to identify moments of victory. There was often not a picture perfect moment of the contract being signed or the "person in power" conceding to the community's demands. What was more prevalent was prevention. On a good day, we prevented a community member from being harassed, and on a bad day we comforted a mother who lost her gay son to hate violence. We did a lot of celebrating when the good days came, sat in the joy of altering the story, wrote down what conditions and strategies contributed to our victory. Of course, loss was also prevalent. On the bad days, we did a lot of sitting with one another, sometimes in silence, sometimes with music in the background and let ourselves just feel sad without needing to immediately "fix it." And it was ok as long as we were feeling sad together.

9. Clear, simple language builds trust and community. The Collective began at a time when terms like "Community Accountability" and "Transformative Justice" were newer terms and most people were still figuring out what they meant. We didn't entirely know what they meant but we knew that violence was happening and that we couldn't rely on the cops to intervene. We spoke to people in the community with the language we knew would be most understandable and relatable, and saved the more complicated terms for the panels. It was important that anyone who was affected by hate violence in the community could explain what we did to others. Over time, as these terms grew in popularity, many people would name our work saying, "Oh what you're doing is Transformative Justice." And that was fine with us as long as we continued to use language that makes sense to the people in the community.

10. We must show up hard for each other, all of us, including ourselves. We need to build a revolution, a movement that fits all of us. For us this meant that if we were making ourselves unwell so that the community could be well, or if we were sacrificing our personal relationships so that we could nurture community, or if we were not ensuring that our movement spaces were accessible, then we were not building a sustainable movement. In SOS, we worked to celebrate when members needed to take space or assert boundaries. When we celebrated and supported each other practicing sustainability, we were building a liberation we can each survive. In her poem, "Who Said it Was Simple," Audre Lorde asked, "But I who am bound by my mirror, as well as my bed, see causes in colour, as well as sex, and sit here wondering, which me will survive all these liberations." Lorde, here, pointed directly to the intersection of disability, race and gender that prevented her from participation in movement spaces. The question of "which me will survive" reminds us to build movements that are inclusive of folks at the periphery of the margins we already occupy.

Over these last 10 years, we have learned the hard way that building community safety is complex. The experience of collectively creating safety has forever changed us. We still believe that our communities can address violence without the police, and that LGBTSTGNC POC communities have long histories of doing this work. But we still have so much to learn, skills that need to be transferred and supported. Our overall takeaway is that people who work to create community safety need to be willing to grow, change and sometimes be wrong. Our ability to be flexible enough to grow with the changing conditions of the neighborhood, and the needs of our community, keeps our work relevant, vibrant and useful. Our lessons are not unique, but we hope that you will find them useful to create safety within your own communities - that you feel empowered to challenge violence within your community, and that our movements will continue to reduce state control over our bodies.
To learn more about the SOS Collective and our neighborhood-based community safety strategies, please contact [email protected] . This piece includes contributions from Eugene Carrington, Taina Crespo, Danielle Ehsanipour, Yvonne Fly Onakame Etaghene, Lisa Feliciano, Susanna Hernandez, TK Lambert, India McKnight, Sal Munoz, Joseph Reaves, Noah Richard, MJ Santiago, Adaku Utah and YaliniDream.

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Ten Lessons for Creating Safety Without Police

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How can we create safety collectively? How can we challenge hate and police violence by using community-based strategies rather than relying on the police?

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Explore snapshots of community-based safety strategies that expand our ideas about what keeps us safe. Put together by Mariame Kaba.

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One million experiments is-
Exploring snapshots of community-based projects that expand our ideas about what keeps us safe.
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Exploring snapshots of community-based projects that expand our ideas about what keeps us safe.

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How are prisons gender violence? In what ways does incarceration replicate abusive power and control dynamics? Why is abolition a feminist framework? Learn from the wisdom and expertise of Dr. Beth Richie, Monica Cosby and Rachel Caidor. #FreeThemAll

(And learn more from Love & Protect and Moms United Against Violence and Incarceration)

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Prison Is Abuse: Understanding Prisons, Abuse of Power, and Control

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Planning for Disaster: A Writing Exercise by Movement Memos

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who's left- Mariame/Prison Abolition

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The Pocket Healing Zines are made free and accessible thanks to a strong community of supporters who supplement the cost of printing, production, and delivery. Note: The Pocket Healing Zines are protected by copyright © 2020, Bria M. Royal. The Pocket Healing Zines are a community resource and may be photocopied and distributed EXCLUSIVELY for educational purposes only.

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Sustainable art making using pigments, tea, coffee & ephemeral material (CAA 2021)

I like to bring my use of tea, coffee, dirt, and earth material to different environments, contact me, lets talk more and do a workshop!

I offer one on one, group and organization setting workshops at different price points.

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Sustainable art making using pigments, tea, coffee & ephemeral material (CAA 2021) I like to bring my use of tea, coffee, dirt, and earth material to different environments, contact me, lets talk more and do a workshop! I offer one on one, group and organization setting workshops at different price points.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2uypNSsfuo

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Check out a TikToker that talks about Nonviolent Communication! (@anastasiaaantonova)

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Check out a TikToker that talks about Nonviolent Communication! (@anastasiaaantonova)

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Check Out my Agency's Instagram Page (@familyshelterservice)

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Check Out my Agency's Instagram Page (@familyshelterservice)

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Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life: Life-Changing Tools for Healthy Relationships

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Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life: Life-Changing Tools for Healthy Relationships

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Consider purcnasing the book Dr. Marshall B. Rosenberg wrote on Nonviolent Communication from Chicago Feminist Bookstore Women & Children First

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Description

2,000,000 COPIES SOLD WORLDWIDE * TRANSLATED IN MORE THAN 35 LANGUAGES

What is Violent Communication?
If "violent" means acting in ways that result in hurt or harm, then much of how we communicate-judging others, bullying, having racial bias, blaming, finger pointing, discriminating, speaking without listening, criticizing others or ourselves, name-calling, reacting when angry, using political rhetoric, being defensive or judging who's "good/bad" or what's "right/wrong" with people- could indeed be called "violent communication."
What is Nonviolent Communication? Nonviolent Communication is the integration of four things:
* Consciousness: a set of principles that support living a life of compassion, collaboration, courage, and authenticity

* Language: understanding how words contribute to connection or distance

* Communication: knowing how to ask for what we want, how to hear others even in disagreement, and how to move toward solutions that work for all

* Means of influence: sharing "power with others" rather than using "power over others"
Nonviolent Communication serves our desire to do three things:
* Increase our ability to live with choice, meaning, and connection
* Connect empathically with self and others to have more satisfying relationships
* Sharing of resources so everyone is able to benefit

About the Author

Marshall B. Rosenberg, PhD (1934-2015) founded and was for many years the Director of Educational Services for the Center for Nonviolent Communication, an international peacemaking organization. During his life he authored fifteen books, including the bestselling Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life (PuddleDancer Press), which has sold more than one million copies worldwide and has been translated into more than 30 languages, with more translations in the works.

Dr. Rosenberg has received a number of awards for his Nonviolent Communication work including:
2014: Champion of Forgiveness Award from the Worldwide Forgiveness Alliance
2006: Bridge of Peace Nonviolence Award from the Global Village Foundation
2005: Light of God Expressing in Society Award from the Association of Unity Churches
2004: Religious Science International Golden Works Award
2004: International Peace Prayer Day Man of Peace Award by the Healthy, Happy Holy (3HO) Organization
2002: Princess Anne of England and Chief of Police Restorative Justice Appreciation Award
2000: International Listening Association Listener of the Year Award

Dr. Rosenberg first used the NVC process in federally funded school integration projects to provide mediation and communication skills training during the 1960s. The Center for Nonviolent Communication, which he founded in 1984, now has hundreds of certified NVC trainers and supporters teaching NVC in more than sixty countries around the globe. A sought-after presenter, peacemaker and visionary leader, Dr. Rosenberg led NVC workshops and international intensive trainings for tens of thousands of people in over 60 countries across the world and provided training and initiated peace programs in many war-torn areas including Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and the Middle East.

He worked tirelessly with educators, managers, health care providers, lawyers, military officers, prisoners, police and prison officials, government officials, and individual families. With guitar and puppets in hand and a spiritual energy that filled a room, Marshall showed us how to create a more peaceful and satisfying world.

Praise For...

" Nonviolent Communication connects soul to soul, creating a lot of healing. It is the missing element in what we do." -Deepak Chopra, author of How To Know God

"Dr. Rosenberghas brought the simplicity of successful communication into the foreground. No matter what issue you're facing, his strategies for communicating with others will set you up to win every time." -Anthony Robbins,author, Awaken the Giant Within and Unlimited Power

"Marshall Rosenberg'sdynamic communication techniques transform potential conflicts into peaceful dialogues and create compassionate connections. I highly recommend this book." - John Gray, Ph.D., author of Men are From Mars, Women are from Venus

"You have to be able to say, 'Where is this person coming from?' he says. 'What makes them tick? Why are they excited or frustrated by something that is happening, whether it's about computing or beyond computing?' There's far more to McCracken's outstanding piece. Nadella gave him a close and honest look at both himself and Microsoft, and the result is a fun must-read." - Ben Kerschberg, Forbes

"Upon becoming Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella asked his top executives to read Marshall Rosenberg's Nonviolent Communication. . . . If empathy as a measure of emotional IQ is a predictor of success, then Nadella hit the nail on the head by inculcating the corporate giant with the trait from top to bottom. Why else is empathy important? Microsoft is both a services and a product company, and its offerings have to resonate with users. Nadella states: 'You have to be able to say, "Where is this person coming from? What makes them tick? Why are they excited or frustrated by something that is happening, whether it's about computing or beyond computing?"' - Harry McCracken, Fast Company

"The 1 Book That Transformed Microsoft's Culture from Cutthroat to Creative." - Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO

"Nadella's time as CEO was initially shaped by Marshall Rosenberg's 'Nonviolent Communication,' which he asked his top executives to read. This was the first indicator to senior leadership that Nadella would not operate like his predecessors" - Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO, Business Insider

"The CEO of Microsoft, the most valuable company in the world, grounds himself and Microsoft's culture on ideas he's learned thanks to his reading habit. 'I read a few pages here or a few pages there,' Nadella told Fast Company. 'There are a few books, of course, that you read end-to-end. But without books I can't live.' Nadella's time as CEO was initially shaped by Marshall Rosenberg's 'Nonviolent Communication,' which he asked his top executives to read. This was the first indicator to senior leadership that Nadella would not operate like his predecessors. Nadella recommended it to his leadership team, symbolically differentiating his expectations from that of his predecessors. Nonviolent communication integrates qualities like compassion and effective communication to allow for better leadership. Rosenberg writes from a position of experience and research: He has started peace programs in places throughout the world that have experienced the effects of war, including Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Serbia, and Ireland. This book outlines the principles of peaceful conflict resolution. It's interesting to note that one of the concepts involves sharing power with others instead of using power over others. Nadella recommended it to his leadership team, symbolically differentiating his expectations from that of his predecessors. Reports have found that Microsoft used to have a conflict-heavy culture under Steve Ballmer - now there's nonviolent communication coming from the top." - Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO, Business Insider

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Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life: Life-Changing Tools for Healthy Relationships (Nonviolent Communication Guides) (Paperback)

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2,000,000 COPIES SOLD WORLDWIDE * TRANSLATED IN MORE THAN 35 LANGUAGESWhat is Violent Communication?

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Simple Tips for Starting a Youth Advisory Board

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Simple Tips for Starting a Youth Advisory Board

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Written by Maine Boys To Men's youth advisory board!