Transformative Justice
According to Philly Stands Up!, Transformative Justice is a way of practicing alternative justice that acknowledges individual experiences and identities and works to actively resist the state’s criminal injustice system. 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.
From Generation 5: Transformative justice [is] a liberatory approach to violence…[which] seeks safety and accountability without relying on alienation, punishment, or State or systemic violence, including incarceration or policing.
Three core beliefs:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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.”
Source: Toward Transformative Justice (PDF) by Generation 5
According to Philly Stands Up!, Transformative Justice is a way of practicing alternative justice that acknowledges individual experiences and identities and works to actively resist the state’s criminal injustice system. 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.
From Generation 5: Transformative justice [is] a liberatory approach to violence…[which] seeks safety and accountability without relying on alienation, punishment, or State or systemic violence, including incarceration or policing.
Three core beliefs:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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.”
Source: Toward Transformative Justice (PDF) by Generation 5
ARTICLES
MEDIA
CURRICULUM
OTHER
Articles

What is/isn’t transformative justice?
by Adrienne Maree Brown Original article found here I’ve been thinking a lot about transformative justice lately.In the past few months I’ve been to a couple
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Building Community Safety: Practical Steps Toward Liberatory Transformation
by Ejeris Dixon Original article found here Mom, when you were growing up, did you ever call the police? I can’t remember any time that
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A LOOK AT FEMINIST FORMS OF JUSTICE THAT DON’T INVOLVE THE POLICE
by Kristian Williams Original article found here This is an excerpt from the book Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America, whose third
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Still Choosing to Leap: Building Alternatives
by Mia Mingus Original article found here I am engaged in the work of building transformative justice responses to child sexual abuse with the Bay
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What Would it Take to Actually End Intimate Violence?
by An Interview with Mia Mingus by Miriam Zoila Pérez Original article found here Transformative justice activist Mia Mingus reflects on responding to sexual assault
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Communities Need to Reduce Violence Against Women of Color Without Police
by Andrea J. Ritchie Original article found here Invisible No More is a timely examination of police violence against Black women, Indigenous women and other women
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Challenging Men, Changing Communities: Reflections on Male Supremacy and Transformative Justice
by Gaurav Jashnani, RJ Maccani, and Alan Greig Original article found here Since 2008, the three coauthors of this essay have been working together as the
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We Will Not Cancel Us
by Adrienne Maree Brown Original article found here We will not cancel us. We hurt people. Of course we did, we are human. We were
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Arresting the Carceral State
by Mariame Kaba & Erica R. Meiners Original article found here In 2013, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) published a listicle on Buzzfeed highlighting
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Prelude to Transformation
by Sean Norris Original article found here While both learning and doing Transformative Justice work there have been many eye opening moments, maybe none more
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Media
Play Video
Transformative Justice (Build Abolition 101 at CCSF)
Play Video
Introduction to Restorative Justice
S2 Ep12: Harm, Punishment, and Abolition with Mariame Kaba
By Finding Our Way
S2 Ep7: Navigating Conflict with Kazu Haga
By Finding Our Way
Play Video
Transformative Justice in the Apocalypse: Beyond Survival One Year Later
The Practices We Need: #metoo and Transformative Justice Part 2
By – A PODCAST FROM THE BROWN SISTERS
Play Video
Sexual Violence and Transformative Justice in Abolitionist Times
This week we hosted Mimi Kim and Mia Mingus, who sat down with our executive director, Cat Brooks, to discuss strategies to intervene, disrupt and heal from interpersonal violence without relying on the state. We’ll talk about what transformative justice is, how it centers survivors’ needs, and how it provides us with a roadmap for building a world without police.
*About our panelists*
Mimi Kim is the founder of Creative Interventions and a co-founder of Incite! She has been a long-time activist and advocate challenging gender-based violence at its intersection with state violence. As a second generation Korean American, she locates her political work in global solidarity with feminist anti-imperialist struggles, seeking not only the end of oppression but of the creation of liberation here and now.
Mia Mingus is a writer and educator for disability justice and transformative justice. She is passionate about building the skills, relationships and structures that can transform violence, harm and generational cycles of abuse within our communities and that do not rely on or replicate the punitive system we currently live in. Her writings can be found on her blog, Leaving Evidence.
Beyond Survival
By – How To Survive The End Of The World
For this week's episode, Autumn and adrienne sit down with Ejeris Dixon (@ejeris) and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (@brownstargirl), the editors of Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement. We discuss book touring, their journeys to this work, and transformative justice in this time.
Play Video
Feminist Abolition & Transformative Justice: A Conversation
By – Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and Leila Raven
Angela Davis taught us that abolition needs feminism. Learn about bringing our histories to abolition as a vision and practice, as well as healing after harm and community-based processes for care and accountability in our communities and movements.
This open event is part of the Building an Asian American Feminist Movement Network Gathering for the 2020 Allied Media Conference. We see Asian American feminism as both a political and identity home. Like a home, it requires care for both the space and also the people who live within. By bringing together our lived experiences, memories, and collective histories, we aim to confront the multi-dimensional ways we encounter systems of power and structures of harm in order to create pathways towards liberation and justice. Come dream, create, and build with us towards moving and acting in solidarity within and across our communities.
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a queer disabled femme writer, organizer, performance artist and educator of Burgher/Tamil Sri Lankan and Irish/Roma ascent. The author of many books including Tonguebreaker, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home, Bodymap , and Consensual Genocide; with Ching-In Chen and Jai Dulani, she co-edited The Revolution Starts At Home: Confronting Intimate Violence in Activist Communities; she co-edited Beyond Survival: Stories and Strategies from the Transformative Justice Movement with Ejeris Dixon.
Leila Raven is a queer mama, prison abolitionist, community organizer, and New York City native. From 2015 to 2018, she served as Executive Director of DC-based grassroots organization Collective Action for Safe Spaces (CASS) where she worked to develop comprehensive, community-based strategies to address racialized, gendered harassment. She also worked to build educational programs like the Safe Bar Collective to equip bar and restaurant workers with strategies for intervening to stop harassment and prevent violence in nightlife. Leila was an organizer with DecrimNow DC to end the criminalization of sex work in the nation's capital, and she now organizes with Decrim NY to decriminalize, destigmatize, and decarcerate sex work in New York City and State. Her work has been featured in the Washington Post, Rolling Stone, Slate, and more.
This event is coordinated by 18 Million Rising and the Asian American Feminist Collective.
Co-sponsored by Equality Labs and the South Asian Power Building Network Gathering.
Play Video
#WeTakeCareOfUs Webinar #7: Transformative Justice
Justice Teams Network
This week we hosted Mimi Kim and Mia Mingus, who sat down with our executive director, Cat Brooks, to discuss strategies to intervene, disrupt and heal from interpersonal violence without relying on the state. We’ll talk about what transformative justice is, how it centers survivors’ needs, and how it provides us with a roadmap for building a world without police.
*About our panelists*
Mimi Kim is the founder of Creative Interventions and a co-founder of Incite! She has been a long-time activist and advocate challenging gender-based violence at its intersection with state violence. As a second generation Korean American, she locates her political work in global solidarity with feminist anti-imperialist struggles, seeking not only the end of oppression but of the creation of liberation here and now.
Mia Mingus is a writer and educator for disability justice and transformative justice. She is passionate about building the skills, relationships and structures that can transform violence, harm and generational cycles of abuse within our communities and that do not rely on or replicate the punitive system we currently live in. Her writings can be found on her blog, Leaving Evidence.
Play Video
Liberate Ways of Addressing The Critical Criminologist
Alex Vitale interviews Ejeris Dixon and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
Alex Vitale interviews Ejeris Dixon and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha about their edited book Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement.
Play Video
Liberate Ways of Addressing Harm
Freedom to Thrive | A webinar conversation with movement leaders.
A webinar conversation with movement leaders from the fields of transformative justice, healing justice, and prison abolition .
Participants:
Mariame Kaba, Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective
Mia Mingus, Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective
Nathaniel Shara, generative somatics
Xochitl Bervera, Racial Justice Action Center This series is brought to you by: Freedom Cities, Freedom to Thrive, Movement Generation, New Economy Coalition, Climate Justice Alliance, Black Alliance for Just Immigration & Reinvest in Our Power, Ella Baker Center, Million Hoodies, PolicyLink, and the Center for Community Change.
Play Video
Resisting Gender Violence Without Cops or Prisons
Victoria Law | Angola 3 News
Activist and journalist Victoria Law is the author of "Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women" (PM Press, 2009). Law has previously been interviewed by Angola 3 News on two separate occasions. Our first interview focused on the torture of women prisoners in the US. The second interview looked at how the women's liberation movements of the 1970s advocated for the decriminalization of women's self defense. Taking this critique of the US criminal "justice" system one step further, Law presented a prison abolitionist critique of the how the mainstream women's movement, then and now, has embraced the same "justice" system as a vehicle for combating violence against women.
Play Video
Philly Stands UP - TRANSFORMATIVE JUSTICE
Jenna Peters Golden | Horizontal Power Hour
Philly Stands Up is small collective of individuals working in Philadelphia to confront sexual assault in our various communities using a transformative justice framework. We believe in restoring trust and justice within our community by working with both survivors and perpetrators of sexual assault. We believe that sexual assault comes in many forms and we are doing what we can to actively combat it.
We work with people who have assaulted others to hold them accountable to the survivor(s) and restore their relationships within their communities. In dealing with perpetrators, we seek to recognize and change behavior, rather than ostracizing and allowing future assaults elsewhere. We support their healing process, and challenge them on their behavior in order to prevent future assaults.
Play Video
Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective
Mia Mingus | Bay Area Transformative Justice
In this conversation about transformative justice and healing, Mia Mingus of the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective poses the questions, “What is accountability? What is justice?” How can our movements be survivor centered? What IS community?
The Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective (BATJC) is a community collective of individuals working to build and support transformative justice responses to child sexual abuse. We are based in Oakland California. We envision a world where everyday people can intervene in incidences of child sexual abuse in ways that not only meet immediate needs such as stopping current violence, securing safety and taking accountability for harm; but that also prevent future violence and harm by actively cultivating things such as healing, accountability and resiliency for all — survivors, bystanders, and those who have abused others.
Play Video
Transformative Justice
By | Zehr Institute for Restorative Justice
Zehr Institute for Restorative Justice February 15, 2017/Guest:RJ Maccani, Nathaniel Shara and Ejeris Dixon/Host:Dr. Johonna Turner What is transformative justice? What can restorative justice thinkers, scholars and practitioners learn from the contemporary transformative justice movement? This webinar offers an introduction to transformative justice. It will also highlight leading organizers’ current work to conceptualize transformative justice praxis and create responses to intimate violence.
The Practices We Need: #metoo and Transformative Justice Part 2
Mariame Kaba | How to Survive the End of the World
Today the Brown sisters talk with transformative justice practitioner Mariame Kaba (@prisonculture) and get our minds blown with frameworks and breakthroughs on how to really address harm and grow beyond it.
Music by Mother Cyborg
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www.patreon.com/Endoftheworldshow
www.endoftheworldshow.org/
@endoftheworldPC
Interview with Leah Lakshmi Piepzna Samarasinha
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna Samarasinha | Everyday Abolition
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a queer disabled femme writer, organizer, performance artist and educator of Burgher/Tamil Sri Lankan and Irish/Roma ascent. The author of Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home (ALA Above the Rainbow List, short-listed for the Lambda and Publishing Triangle Awards), Bodymap (short-listed for the Publishing Triangle Award), Love Cake (Lambda Literary Award winner), and Consensual Genocide, with Ching-In Chen and Jai Dulani, she co-edited TheRevolution Starts At Home: Confronting Intimate Violence in Activist Communities. Leah’s next two books, Tonguebreaker and Exploring Transformative Justice: A Reader (co-edited with Ejeris Dixon) are forthcoming in 2019.
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http://brownstargirl.org
Play Video
Moving at the Speed of Trust: Disability Justice and Transformative Justice
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and Elliott Fukui
Curriculum
Building Violence Free Communities
Workshop by | Escuela Popular Norteña
Transformative Justice - A Curriculum Guide
By | Project NIA
Ending Child Sexual Abuse
By | Generation Five
Transformative Justice
By | Mia mingus
Support New York is dedicated to healing the effects of sexual assault and abuse. Our aim is to empower survivors, to hold accountable those who have perpetuated harm, and to maintain a community dialogue about consent, mutual aid, transformative justice, and our society’s narrow views of abuse. We believe that everyone has a role to play in ending inter-personal violence, and we look to those who have been most affected to guide us. We value experience over experts, passion over professionals, and devotion over degrees.
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Other Resources | Links
SO YOU’RE READY TO CHOOSE LOVE – Free Conflict Resolution Workbook
Workbook by | Kai Cheng Thom, MSC
This free digital (and printable) conflict resolution workbook is intended as a gift and humble offering to anyone looking for trauma-informed, anti-oppressive conflict resolution resources. While SO YOU’RE READY TO CHOOSE LOVE is self-published in the tradition of queer zines and open source knowledge sharing, it is in many ways a practical companion to my more anecdotal/theoretical essay collection, I HOPE WE CHOOSE LOVE, which is distributed for purchase through the wonderful Arsenal Pulp Press.
Accountability Process Curriculum
Workshop by | Support New York
Support New York is dedicated to healing the effects of sexual assault and abuse. Our aim is to empower survivors, to hold accountable those who have perpetuated harm, and to maintain a community dialogue about consent, mutual aid, transformative justice, and our society’s narrow views of abuse. We believe that everyone has a role to play in ending inter-personal violence, and we look to those who have been most affected to guide us. We value experience over experts, passion over professionals, and devotion over degrees.
Transformative Justice: A List of Resources
By | Prison Culture
Prison Culture is an attempt to document how the current prison industrial complex operates and to underscore the ways that it structures American society.
I created this blog as way to make sense of all of the information that comes my way through the work that I do. I started the blog for myself. It was sort of a running work journal; a place to catalogue all of the ideas, thoughts, musings, and resources that I have about mass incarceration, transformative justice and the prison industrial complex (PIC).
Since launching the blog in late June 2010, it turns out that others have also found things that are of interest to them here. This is an added bonus. I hope that some of those who read the blog might also become motivated to take action to abolish prisons. We can use more abolitionists in the world. So welcome to Prison Culture!
A List of Readings & Media
About
The Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective (BATJC) is a community collective of individuals working to build and support transformative justice responses to child sexual abuse. We are based in Oakland California. We envision a world where everyday people can intervene in incidences of child sexual abuse in ways that not only meet immediate needs such as stopping current violence, securing safety and taking accountability for harm; but that also prevent future violence and harm by actively cultivating things such as healing, accountability and resiliency for all — survivors, bystanders, and those who have abused others.
The BATJC orients all of our work from our shared values, principles and practices.
Socialist Feminist Working Group: Transformative Justice Syllabus
What Really Makes Us Safe?
By | “What really makes us safe?” research project
About 'What Really Makes Us Safe?'
The “What really makes us safe?” research project began as an informal exchange between organizers working on community accountability and transformative justice responses to sexual violence. As the initiator of the project, I want to discuss how it evolved. Our fledgling transformative justice collective in Berlin, Germany was influenced by transformative justice thought and organizing in the U.S. but geographically far from the ‘mothership’. Dialoguing with those who had created and propelled this work became a mode of both giving and taking account of one another.
Addressing Sexual Harassment
Helping organizations deepen their knowledge, define and better align with their values, and conduct long term planning.
This workbook was collaboratively created by staff of the Virginia Anti-Violence Project (VAVP) and the Virginia Sexual & Domestic Violence Action Alliance (Action Alliance) after 6+ months of conversations and a desire to engage our communities around Transformative Justice and how we both respond to and prevent violence outside of state-based systems that target and criminalize people of color ( particularly black people and communities), queer and trans people, poor folks, immigrants and undocumented communities, disabled folks, and other marginalized communities.
An open letter to the former Commune Magazine editor who raped me
Open Letter by | Leila Raven
You asked me many times: “Why me? Why do you keep coming back?” I told you that I was listening to my body, and my body was hooked. I didn’t know then, but I know now, that when post-traumatic stress disorder is activated, it can feel a lot like being turned on. When the body is convinced danger is present, it won’t stop searching until it locates the source of the threat. Subconsciously, we repeat the events of the past in an attempt to rewrite the scripts of our lives, to master our trauma, to create a new ending.
Have content to share? Contact us.