Resources
Here are some introductory resources for transformative justice work. Most QTJAC Transformative Justice 101s cover and reference this work.
Recommended Reading
From Toward Transformative Justice collected by Generation Five:
“Transformative Justice responds to the lack of —and the critical need for—a liberatory approach to violence. A liberatory approach seeks safety and accountability without relying on alienation, punishment, or State or systemic violence, including incarceration and policing. We premise the Transformative Justice approach elaborated in this paper on three core beliefs, namely:
- 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 a both a liberating politic and an approach for securing justice.
- State and systemic responses to violence, including the criminal legal system6 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 community responsibility and access to on-going support and transformative healing for people who sexually abuse.
In addition, Transformative Justice also seeks to transform inequity and power abuses within communities. Through building the capacity of communities to increase justice internally, Transformative Justice seeks to support collective action toward addressing larger issues of injustice and oppression. The goals of Transformative Justice as a response to all forms of violence are:
- Survivor safety, healing and agency
- Accountability and transformation of those who abuse
- Community response and accountability
- Transformation of the community and social conditions that create and perpetuate violence, i.e. systems of oppression, exploitation, domination, and State violence
The term “Transformative Justice” emerged directly out of Generation FIVE’s work on child sexual abuse as the term that best describes the dual process of securing individual justice while transforming structures of social injustice that perpetuate such abuse. While we developed this model as a response to child sexual abuse, we imagine Transformative Justice as an adaptable model that can and will be used to confront many other forms of violence and the systems of oppression they enable and require.”
Full text of Toward Transformative Justice by G5 (86 pages)
http://www.usprisonculture.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/G5_Toward_Transformative_Justice.pdf
Transformative Justice: By Mia Mingus
https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2019/01/09/transformative-justice-a-brief-description/
we will not cancel us by adrienne maree brown
http://adriennemareebrown.net/2018/05/10/we-will-not-cancel-us/
Pod-mapping by Mia Mingus
https://batjc.wordpress.com/pods-and-pod-mapping-worksheet/
Many of the resources are listed in this collection curated by Mariame Kaba along with other Transformative justice advocates, educators, and practitioners. Most of the resources are accessible free of cost and in plain language. There is a deep well of wisdom and experience available to us in this work.
Here’s the full site:
Some Basics Everyone Should Know (46 pages)
https://www.dropbox.com/s/prkhobxxw8rhrcz/Basics Everyone Should Know.pdf?dl=0
A collection of handling harms in organizations by Dean Spade
http://www.deanspade.net/2019/09/25/building-organizations/?fbclid=IwAR3Ij6YUrzlJxHXm0dKLnX7az629-CX-v_TyO6tekAE_bRxeqckwrvZIDRw
Full Creative Interventions Toolkit here (578 pages) : http://creative-interventions.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/CI-Toolkit-Complete-FINAL.pdf
The Revolution Starts at Home (111 pages)
Own, Apologize, Repair
https://norasamaran.com/2016/08/28/variations-on-not-all-men/
The Opposite of Rape Culture is Nurturance Culture
https://norasamaran.com/2016/02/11/the-opposite-of-rape-culture-is-nurturance-culture-2/
Learning Good Consent zine
https://www.phillyspissed.net/sites/default/files/learning good consent2.pdf