10 Nov Transformative Justice in the Lives of Survivors with Disabilities & Deaf Survivors
From 2:00 PM until 3:30 PM ET
Presented by the National Center on Ending Abuse of People with Disabilities / cvs@vera.org
With high rates of victimization and incarceration, people with disabilities have an elevated likelihood of having contact with the criminal legal system in their lifetime. However, due to lack of accessibility, unexamined biases - conscious and unconscious - that exist in the criminal legal system, and an overall fear of system involvement, people with disabilities, specifically Black, Indigenous, people with disabilities, are seeking alternatives to healing and accountability.
One of those alternatives is Transformative Justice. Transformative Justice (TJ) is a framework and approach for responding to violence, harm, and abuse. At its most basic, it seeks to respond to violence without creating more violence and/or engaging in harm reduction to lessen the violence. TJ was created by and for people from marginalized communities for whom calling the police may not be a viable or safe option. This session will further explore the concept of transformative justice and its application to power-based violence in disability and Deaf communities.
Facilitator, Olga Trujillo, Vera Institute of Justice, will be joined in conversation by Najma Johnson and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha.
Najma identifies as BlackDeafBlind Trans non-binary, and is the Executive Director at DAWN, a anti-violence agency providing services for the DeafDisabled, DeafBlind, Deaf, Hard of Hearing and Late-deafened who experienced power-based violence.
Leah is a nonbinary femme disabled writer and disability and transformative justice movement worker of Burgher and Tamil Sri Lankan, Irish and Galician Romani ascent. They are the author or co-editor of nine books, including (with Ejeris Dixon) Beyond Survival, Tonguebreaker, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, and Bodymap.