Transformative Justice and Community Accountability

WHAT IS TRANSFORMATIVE JUSTICE?

Transformative justice recognizes that oppression is at the root of all forms of harm, abuse, and assault. As a practice, it therefore aims to address and confront those oppressions on all levels and treats this concept as an integral part to accountability and healing.

According to Mia Mingus, transformative justice is a political 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. It can be thought of as a way of “making things right,” getting in “right relation,” or creating justice together. Transformative justice responses and interventions 1) do not rely on the state (e.g. police, prisons, the criminal legal system, I.C.E., foster care system (though some TJ responses do rely on or incorporate social services like counseling); 2) do not reinforce or perpetuate violence such as oppressive norms or vigilantism; and most importantly, 3) actively cultivate the things we know prevent violence such as healing, accountability, resilience, and safety for all involved.

WHAT IS COMMUNITY ACCOUNTABILITY?

According to INCITE!, community accountability is a process in which a community—a group of friends, a family, a church, a workplace, an apartment complex, a neighborhood, etc.—works together to do the following things:

Commit to ongoing development of all members of the community, and the community itself, to transform the political conditions that reinforce oppression and violence
Provide safety & support to community members who are violently targeted that respects their self-determination
Create and affirm values & practices that resist abuse and oppression and encourage safety, support, and accountability
Develop sustainable strategies to address community members’ abusive behavior, creating a process for them to account for their actions and transform their behavior

Click here to learn more about INCITE!

TRANSFORMATIVE APPROACHES TO SEXUAL VIOLENCE

In 2020, NYSCASA hosted a webinar with Stas Schmiedt and A. Lea Roth (Spring Up) on transformative justice as part of our Ending Violence Without Violence virtual training series. This webinar introduces participants to the core principles of transformative justice and community accountability and how these frameworks can be used to address sexual violence.

Additional resources:

Click here to learn more about Ending Violence Without Violence, a collaborative effort of NYSCASA, Seven Dancers Coalition, and Interrupting Criminalization.

Intimate Partner Violence and Abolitionist Safety Planning Toolkit

This toolkit was created by Community Justice Exchange for those grappling with how to support survivors through intimate partner violence, with the intent of strengthening community-level responses to abuse by sharing practical skills and information for safety planning. Though it was written with prison abolitionist and activist communities in mind, it is also intended to be a useful resource for a broader range of people across varying experiences. Click here to access the toolkit.

BUILDING ACCOUNTABLE COMMUNITIES: A VIDEO SERIES

Accountability is a familiar buzz-word in contemporary social movements, but what does it mean? How do we work toward it? In this series of four short videos, anti-violence activists Kiyomi Fujikawa and Shannon Perez-Darby ask and explore: What does it look like to be accountable to survivors without exiling or disposing those who do harm? Learn more and watch the series here.

COMMUNITY ACCOUNTABILITY: EMERGING MOVEMENTS TO TRANSFORM VIOLENCE

Community Accountability: Emerging Movements to Transform Violence, a special issue of Social Justice: A Journal of Crime, Conflict & World Order (Vol 37, No. 4, 2011-2012), critically examines grassroots efforts, cultural interventions, and theoretical questions regarding community-based strategies to address gendered violence. This collection encapsulates a decade of local and national initiatives led by or inspired by allied social movements that reflect the complexities of integrating the theory and practice of community accountability. Click here to access the collection.

CREATIVE INTERVENTIONS TOOLKIT: A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO STOP INTERPERSONAL VIOLENCE

How do we turn back to our communities and strengthen community-based systems to resist violence in all of its forms? Creative Interventions created a toolkit to guide us. The toolkit promotes an approach called “community-based interventions” to violence that some call community accountability or transformative justice as a way to break isolation and to create solutions to violence from those who are most affected by violence—survivors and victims of violence, friends, family, and community. Click here to access the toolkit.

In 2021, NYSCASA hosted a webinar with Mimi Kim at Creative Interventions about community-based, transformative justice-informed responses to gender-based violence. Participants of this virtual workshop learned about the basic principles of transformative justice, reflected upon the mission, values, and practices of their anti-violence organizations, and engaged next steps in considering expanding their organization’s values and practices to include transformative justice-informed responses to gender-based violence. Click here to access the recording from this event. Click here to access presentation slides, transcript, and handouts

RESOURCES FROM THE ANTI-OPPRESSION RESOURCE AND TRAINING ALLIANCE (AORTA)

AORTA is a worker-owned cooperative devoted to strengthening movements for social justice and a solidarity economy. AORTA works as consultants and facilitators to expand the capacity of cooperative, collective, and community based projects through education, training, and planning. Their work is based on an intersectional approach to liberation, recognizing that true change requires uprooting all systems of oppression. Visit AORTA’s website to learn more about how you can bring them to your organization for trainings and consultation.

Here are some resources created by AORTA that can support your work:

Click here to browse additional resources created by AORTA.

LEARN MORE ABOUT TRANSFORMATIVE JUSTICE PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICES:

Transformative Justice: A Brief Description — Blog post by Mia Mingus
Transformative Justice and Community Accountability — Document created by the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective
Toward Transformative Justice: A Liberatory Approach to Child Sexual Abuse and other forms of Intimate and Community Violence — Paper created by Generation FIVE
A Stand-Up Start-Up: Confronting Sexual Assault with Transformative Justice — Zine created by Philly Stands Up!
Philly Stands Up: Inside the politics and poetics of transformative justice and community accountability in sexual assault situations — Article by Esteban Kelly, one of the founding members of Philly Stands Up!
Re-envisioning How We End Sexual and Intimate Partner Violence — webinar recording and resource list compiled by PowHer New York, NYSCASA, and NYSCADV
What Does Transformative Justice Look Like? Survivor-Focused, Trauma-Informed, and Community Accountability to Ending Sexual Violence — Blog post by ValorUS
Transformative Justice and Gender-based Violence Intervention and Prevention — Blog post by the Virginia Sexual and Domestic Violence Action Alliance
A Different Way Forward for Responding to Mental Health Crises — Blog post by the Virginia Sexual and Domestic Violence Action Alliance
Sexual and Domestic Violence Agencies and Law Enforcement, Part 1 of 2 – A Movement History from a Systems Advocate — Blog post by the Virginia Sexual and Domestic Violence Action Alliance
Sexual and Domestic Violence Agencies and Law Enforcement, Part 2 of 2 – Where We Are and Where We’re Going — Blog post by the Virginia Sexual and Domestic Violence Action Alliance
Rape Culture Intervention Toolkit — Toolkit created by Hope Praxis Collective to provide people with an understanding of how rape culture maintains the status quo in the US (and abroad), identify what power we have to check and transform rape culture, and to provide people with skills on how to make amends for harm from an abolitionist perspective
Introduction to Loving Justice: Embodied Conflict Resolution and Transformative Justice Webinar recording and presentation slide deck from Kai Cheng Thom
Transformative Justice on TransformHarm.org — A collection of articles, multimedia resources, and curricula about transformative justice
Mariame Kaba, We Do This ‘Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice, Haymarket Books (2021) and accompanying reading/discussion guide
Melanie Brazzel, “We Keep Us Safe: The Transformative Justice Movement,” ROAR Magazine (May 28, 2021)

LEARN MORE ABOUT COMMUNITY ACCOUNTABILITY PRACTICES:

Transformative Justice and Community Accountability — Document created by the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective
Community Accountability Working Document — Document created by INCITE! exploring various community accountability principles, concerns, and/or strategies
Taking Risks: Implementing Grassroots Community Accountability Strategies — Article written by CARA (Communities Against Rape and Abuse)
#MeToo and Transformative Justice Part 1 and Part 2 — Two episodes on transformative justice and sexual violence on the podcast How to Survive the End of the World
Ejeris Dixon on Transformative Justice and Community Accountability — Webinar with Ejeris Dixon, Founding Director of Vision Change Win, hosted by The Digital Abolitionist
What Does Transformative Justice Look Like? Survivor-Focused, Trauma-Informed, and Community Accountability to Ending Sexual Violence — Blog post by ValorUS
Punishment Is Not Accountability — Blog post by the Virginia Sexual and Domestic Violence Action Alliance
Get in Formation: A Community Safety Toolkit — Toolkit created by Vision Change Win featuring handouts, tips, and worksheets to support you in growing or building your community safety practices and/or teams
Mariame Kaba and Shira Hassan, Fumbling Towards Repair: A Workbook for Community Accountability Facilitators, AK Press 2019)
Community Accountability on TransformHarm.org — A collection of articles, multimedia resources, and curricula about community accountability