Transcript:

00:00

MIMI KIM: So a really important part of my journey has been the founding of INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence which is now Women, Transgender, and Gender Non-Conforming People Against Violence. And I think our coming together in 2000, which now is a couple decades ago, was a really important moment for me personally, an important moment for the anti-violence movement, and a really important, I think, starting point for much of the work that we see right now that's called transformative justice or community accountability.

00:41

SHIRA HASSAN: How I started out doing community accountability and transformative justice was just, I didn't know what it was called, we were just figuring out what to do because the police couldn't help us, they weren't safe to go to, they were causing more harm. And also social services didn't know what to do with us. And so, because I was part of a community that were doing illegal things all the time, or existed illegally, either without documentation, or because they were involved in the sex trade, or because they were using drugs, we just had to figure these things out. So it started out really organically and then somewhere around 15 years ago, someone labeled what we were doing as community accountability or transformative justice and we were like, oh, there's a thing for this? And then once we knew we were doing a thing we started tracking what we were doing because we got excited that it was a thing. I mean we had always kind of paid attention to what worked of course, and replicated it. But once we realized we fit into something we started figuring it out.

01:43

MIMI: At that moment of course we were really excited and we were really ambitious about what we could do in terms of change. And many of us have just stayed in there during the longterm, a time when many people rejected our work, a time when many people in the anti-violence movement rejected this work. And yet we truly believed that it was not only necessary, but possible.

02:15

SHIRA: One thing to remember about transformative justice that's really important is that communities have been solving problems without the state for generations. And what we were doing was specific to us. So there were things like, for example, bad date sheets. And bad date sheets were things that people in the sex trade and sex workers would use to track harmful johns, write down who they were make sure that everyone who was working that week literally got a flyer that described dangerous people. We were supporting people who were living in squats, who couldn't get into shelters, who couldn't get housing, but were living really successfully outside the system. The young people at Young Women's Empowerment Project started their own food bank, which just meant whenever they went, they would get a little bit extra and then bring it to the office and then people could take, and that was because food banks required id in so many neighborhoods. And those were all ways that we were responding to institutional and systemic violence without deepening our dependence on the state, that were not specifically about a community accountability process. And then later we tried to do community accountability work with people who had experienced sexual harm and were also having lots of success. So it was about showing up and saying, I see you, I'm watching you, I know that this is happening, you can't do this. Building deeper relationships was actually the most TJ thing we could do. Building relationships with people who caused harm to so many young women and trans people that we knew was actually the most transformative thing we could do because then we could hold them accountable inside those relationships. Another example I think about is when we started making relationships with drug dealers so that they would distribute Narcan so that they were a part of reducing overdose in their community. That's transformative justice. So when that got named for us we were like, whoa, all these strategies have a place, like we finally have a place somewhere. We didn't know that.

04:28

MIMI: In the past few years we've seen a shift. We've seen a shift in the anti-violence movement that is finally, in many many different forms, looking at itself and saying we made an error, we made a mistake, we have to turn around from the kind of pro-criminalization stance that we've taken. The term carceral feminism, although I think that's still unfamiliar with many, has started to strike a chord. We have seen changes in the last couple years where many, many anti-violence coalitions for example, domestic violence and sexual assault, who really turned away from our work for so many years, are starting to turn towards it. And not only turn towards it, but ask us to come and speak at their coalition meetings. They're starting to actually change policies in different states where they would have supported almost any pro-criminalization policy, and now are fighting against them. That is something that we hoped would happen, but something that's shocking all the same. I would say in the last couple years, though, there has been such a demand that it is also, comes from a space where I think we couldn't call it anything but cooptation. And that is people calling work transformative justice when they actually want to partner with law enforcement to do work that is really diversion. Where there's, I believe that there's going to be a lot more money coming in to restorative justice, and this is not meant to be disrespect for people who are using the term restorative justice, but there are forms of restorative justice that are much more compliant with or in partnership with law enforcement, for example. I think we're looking at this kind of wave coming that, it's so close in some ways and it's also something I've never experienced before in my lifetime, that I'm really struggling to understand both what it means, but also what we need to do. I don't know if it's resist it, or to keep what we've built intact so that it doesn't get washed away by what I see as this, this tide coming in. This is a conversation many of us are having right now. Different people have different thoughts about this. I think it's something that is a very serious concern, and one that I am hoping that we can look back and learn from other people in history that have faced the same, these same dynamics of cooptation. But we're in a different era.

07:16

SHIRA: And I started being contacted so often when harm happened, particularly sexual violence, that and when, when things were going wrong, like when people were trying to use community accountability and it wasn't working. So now my project is Just Practice and the idea is to build our collective capacity, so that we know how to do this together. The idea is that the more we can practice, the more we'll have justice. And so if we can just simplify what we're doing and just practice this, then we can get somewhere together.

07:52

MIMI: We need to learn from the past, but we also need to think about the present moment and be, I think, very wise and strategic about what we do next. And we also need to be collective in our efforts.