What is Transformative Justice?

It is an organizing tool to understand systems of power and abuse and a framework to approach community violence, particularly sexual violence. It is *one*, not *the* strategy to achieve abolition.

What are the core tenants/beliefs of Transformative Justice?

1) Individual justice and collective liberation are equally important, mutually supportive, and fundamentally intertwined—the achievement of one is impossible without the achievement of the other.

2) The conditions that allow violence to occur must be transformed in order to achieve justice in individual instances of violence. Therefore, Transformative Justice is both a liberating politic and an approach for securing justice.

3) State and systemic responses to violence, including the criminal legal system and child welfare agencies, not only fail to advance individual and collective justice but also condone and perpetuate cycles of violence.

- Generation 5

Transformative Justice seeks to provide people who experience violence with immediate safety and long-term healing and reparations while holding people who commit violence accountable within and by their communities.

This accountability includes stopping immediate abuse, making a commitment to not engage in future abuse, and offering reparations for past abuse.

Such accountability requires on-going support and transformative healing for people who sexually abuse.

What can Transformative Justice look like in practice?

1) Providing immediate safety, care, and community to the person being harmed. The community should come together with the survivor to map our needs and meet these immediate needs.

This can look like securing housing, fundraising to take time off of work, community check-ins and care, providing safe transportation, food, providing access to therapy, providing community security, etc. What are the needs that need to be met to secure the safety of the harmed?

Transformative Justice is an organizing framework that asks us what are the conditions that allow violence to occur. One of the main things survivors need is safe and secure housing. So this can look like organizing a campaign around housing or creating mutual aid housing

This can look like creating underground networks of safe housing. This can look like purchasing a house to house survivors. This can look like demanding the government invest in housing for people escaping abusive situations.

What are the conditions that allow violence to occur? Lack of community interventions. Transformative Justice can look like creating a bad date sheet or creating a database of abusers or informing impacted communities of the abuse.

This can look like limiting or eliminating the harm doers access to community spaces and/or spaces where they've caused harm. This can look like the person losing their job or having to move to a different community.

Transformative Justice can also take the form of community accountability

(community accountability processes =/= transformative justice nor does TJ require or necessitate community accountability)

Community accountability =/= mediation nor does it necessitate face to face

A Transformative Justice Community Accountability Process is usually done *after* harm has done and *after* the person who was harmed has safety secured and immediate needs met. A TJ community accountability process should not occur when there is ongoing crisis.

A Transformative Justice Community Accountability Process is consensual. Some TJ community accountability processes only involve the person who has been harmed. Some TJ community accountability processes only involve the person who has harmed. Some involve both of them.

A Transformative Justice Community Accountability Process does not require someone who has been harmed to sit across from someone who has harmed them; rarely does it especially since TJ recognizes the nature of abuse and the forms of manipulation that takes place.

Sometimes survivors want nothing to do with the person who has harmed but they want the person who has been harmed to go through a process that they, along with their community, along with the facilitator have outlined.

Questions to think about when someone is taking accountability (via fumbling towards repair)

1) What concrete interventions could make the violence stop?
2) What could prevent further violence?
3) What are the points of leverage? How can they be used?

4) What milestones do you hope to reach?
5) What reparations are needed to promote survivor and community safety & healing?

TJ Community Accountability processes require a number of people who play different roles. And every process is going to be different because it is based on the harm, the community, the survivors needs, and the structural/systematic analysis and power dynamics at play

TJ Community Accountability doesn't "treat everyone as equal". It is simply an acknowledgement that communities enable abuse and communities must work to intervene, stop, and provide reparations for abuse. There is a long history that TJ comes out of and I suggest people read

Transformative Justice is *one* strategy people have taken up to intervene in particularly sexual abuse. It is not the end all be all. TJ is not everything and anything nor is it fit for any and everything. It requires a certain level of skill, practice, and understanding.

Transformative Justice Goals:
1) Survivor safety, healing, and agency
2) Accountability and transformation of those who abuse
3) Community response and accountability
4) Transformation of the community and social conditions that create and perpetrate systems of oppression

Here is a good starting point:

http://www.usprisonculture.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/G5_Toward_Transformative_Justice.pdf

There are also countless resources : https://transformharm.org/transformative-justice/