How does Russo suggest that we start to “shift paradigms to end violence?”

Answer the questions below:

1. How does Russo suggest that we start to “shift paradigms to end violence?” (Chapter 4)

Requirements: 200 words

NYU PressChapter Title: Shifting Paradigms to End Violence Book Title: Feminist Accountability Book Subtitle: Disrupting Violence and Transforming Power Book Author(s): Ann Russo Published by: NYU Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvwrm4mg.7JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/termsNYU Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Feminist AccountabilityThis content downloaded from 144.37.44.35 on Mon, 07 Aug 2023 07:05:45 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Part IICommunity Accountability and Transformative JusticeThis content downloaded from 144.37.44.35 on Mon, 07 Aug 2023 07:05:45 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

This content downloaded from 144.37.44.35 on Mon, 07 Aug 2023 07:05:45 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

854Shifting Paradigms to End ViolenceWe seek to build movements that not only end violence, but that create a society based on radical freedom, mutual ac-countability, and passionate reciprocity. In this society, safety and security will not be premised on violence or the threat of violence; it will be based on a collective commitment to guaranteeing the survival and care of all peoples.— Incite and Critical Resistance, Incite! Color of ViolenceOver the last seventeen- plus years, a newly inspired feminist antivi-olence movement in the United States led by feminists of color has been gaining momentum among activists, scholars, writers, and art-ists. Reignited and imagined by the visionary work of Incite! Women of Color Against Violence— a national organization of radical women of color— small and large groups across the country have worked to shift feminist- informed antiviolence efforts from institutionalized social services and legal advocacy to community- based mobilizing for community accountability and transformative justice. At the center of leadership initiating and developing these organizing communities are collectives led by women of color and immigrant, queer, and trans people of color.This movement grew out of growing disillusionment and frustration with both the realities of ongoing endemic violence and the limits of institutionalized social services and criminal legal advocacy in mak-ing inroads to end it. While the feminist antiviolence movement in the United States of the early 1970s began as a grassroots mobilization to transform the social conditions that perpetuate, justify, and normalize violence against women, over time it has congealed into social service agencies (e.g., crisis support services, domestic violence shelters), legal advocacy organizations, public policy initiatives, and community educa-tion focused on definitions and available resources.This content downloaded from 144.37.44.35 on Mon, 07 Aug 2023 07:05:45 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

86 | Shifting Paradigms to End ViolenceAs a result, most people in the United States continue to view sexual and gender- related harassment, abuse, and violence that occur in the United States as individual, private problems, rooted in personal and familial gender dynamics, and perpetrated by psychopaths. As leaders of the Seattle- based group Communities Against Rape and Abuse aptly suggest, “Sexual violence is often treated as a hyperdelicate issue that can only be addressed by trained professionals such as law enforcement or medical staff. Survivors are considered ‘damaged,’ pathologized beyond repair. Aggressors are perceived as ‘animals,’ unable to be redeemed or transformed. These extreme attitudes alienate everyday community members . . . from participating in the critical process of supporting survivors and holding aggressors accountable for abusive behavior.”1While support and advocacy agencies perform the urgent and neces-sary crisis work of supporting and advocating for thousands of indi-vidual survivors who live in a world where their experiences are mostly not validated or understood, their efforts are often not directed to trans-forming the historical social, economic, and political roots of violence, and so they often reproduce systemic oppression and violence. This is, in part, a result of the increased reliance for funding on the state and private foundations who then shape the structures, approaches, and agendas of the movement. For instance, many service and advocacy agencies support and rely on the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) for funding. This state funding is primarily for law enforcement, polic-ing, and incarceration strategies, some of it is for individualized social services, and a minuscule amount of money is earmarked for preven-tion, with none designated for community organizing. With neoliberal policies that mandate severe cuts to social services, including mental and physical health services and crisis intervention services, and with the simultaneous increase of funding for police and prisons, agencies increasingly focus on a narrowly defined image of “innocent” individual survivors of violence.2No longer tied to the transformative goal to end violence through broad- based social change, much feminist antiviolence work became more desperately focused on managing pervasive violence by providing support for individual survivors of violence, stiffening and expanding criminal penalties, and increasing conviction rates for sexual assault and domestic violence.3 This shift in the antiviolence movement coincided This content downloaded from 144.37.44.35 on Mon, 07 Aug 2023 07:05:45 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Shifting Paradigms to End Violence | 87with the expansion of the prison industrial complex through mass incar-ceration of people struggling with poverty, mental health issues, home-lessness, violence, and more. These policies, initiated in the 1980s under the rubric of public campaigns like the “war on drugs” and “get tough on crime,” criminalize already- marginalized communities. They produce heightened surveillance, policing, and administrative violence against working- class and poor communities of color, queer and trans commu-nities, and immigrant communities (particularly those from the global south). The mainstream antiviolence efforts around public policy, then, have contributed to the deepening of the structural roots of violence by contributing to the buildup of the prison nation and prison industrial complex.4 The feminist antiviolence movement has not challenged the state’s criminalization of communities marginalized by poverty, racism, xenophobia, homophobia, and transphobia or addressed in any signifi-cant way the devastating impact of these policies on these communities.Annanya Bhattacharjee’s signature report, Whose Safety? Women of Color and the Violence of Law Enforcement, published in 2001, made vis-ible the systemic violence of law enforcement against women of color, including abuse and violence by police, immigration authorities, and prison guards; she also documented the criminalization of pregnancy and childbearing among women of color.5 The interconnectedness of structures, systems, and practices of intimate, interpersonal, and insti-tutional violence was drawn out in the landmark anthology by Incite! Women of Color Against Violence, The Color of Violence, followed by the group’s call for shifting our paradigms outside of the restrictions of nonprofit social service and legal reform in The Revolution Will Not Be Funded.6 Beth Richie’s Arrested Justice shows how mainstream antivio-lence efforts not only fail to address the systemic state, community, and interpersonal violence Black women face, but in many ways contribute to them. The narrow focus on particular forms of interpersonal sexual assault and domestic violence excludes many of the forms of violence poor Black women face. The “innocent victim” often is constructed within the narrow confines of white, middle- class, heteronormative gen-der prescriptions, which functions to not only marginalize poor Black women but criminalize them. The lack of attention to the way com-munity and state violence interconnect with and compound interper-sonal violence means that the layered and complex contexts of violence This content downloaded from 144.37.44.35 on Mon, 07 Aug 2023 07:05:45 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

88 | Shifting Paradigms to End Violenceagainst poor Black women are not within the scope of most agencies. Instead, they uncritically rely on the criminal legal system that is simul-taneously a major source of violence for poor Black women.7 Andrea Ritchie’s book Invisible No More: Police Violence against Black Women and Women of Color offers a powerful and significant analysis of the in-terlocking historical roots of policing and police violence against Black women and women of color, including colonialism, white supremacy, patriarchy, heteronormativity, and ableism. She tells the stories of hun-dreds of Black women and women of color, including trans women and gender- nonconforming people, in a multitude of circumstances across a range of identities and experiences, including women in the sex trade, women in prison, women with disabilities, and women defending them-selves from violence, who have been injured and killed by the police. This is a vital contribution to our understandings of the connections be-tween intimate and interpersonal violence, on the one hand, and police and state violence, on the other.8These works, among many others, form the backdrop for the resur-gence of radical feminist- of- color- led antiviolence projects rooted in the social realities of communities of color, queer and trans communities, and immigrant communities. These projects work to imagine, create, and practice community- based collective responses to incidents of vio-lence that seek “safety and accountability without relying on alienation or punishment, including prison and policing.”9 The goal is to cultivate more intentional communities through the building of critical con-sciousness and skills for communal support and healing, for interven-tion and accountability, and for prevention and social transformation. This is the essence of community accountability and transformative justice.In this chapter, I illustrate how community accountability and trans-formative justice approaches shift the focus and direction of antiviolence efforts from social services and legal advocacy to community- based movement building, from viewing violence as a problem of individ-ual conflict to viewing it as one rooted in systems of oppression, from agency expertise to community- based knowledge and leadership, and from punishment to accountability. In the chapter, I draw from the work of many scholars, community organizers, and activists, as well as proj-ects and organizations. This includes the work of the Women and Girls This content downloaded from 144.37.44.35 on Mon, 07 Aug 2023 07:05:45 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Shifting Paradigms to End Violence | 89Collective Action Network (WGCAN), a Chicago- based group that I actively participated in from 2005 to 2009. In 2007, we issued a re-port that I co- wrote with Melissa Spatz, founding director of WGCAN, called Communities Engaged in Resisting Violence. It was based on re-search and analysis developed by WGCAN, which had been convening Chicago- based groups to share ideas and strategies to increase commu-nity engagement and accountability for sexual and domestic violence. The report documents a number of projects in Chicago that were doing community- based organizing around intimate, interpersonal, and com-munity violence. These projects created space for specific communities to build knowledge, skills, and strategies to address intimate and inter-personal oppression and violence, and each sought to shift out of a social service model to one that was more grounded in community organizing. I also draw on the work of organizations in Chicago and beyond that have since worked to build community accountability and transforma-tive justice projects across the country. While some of these groups have officially folded, their work and many of the organizers who led and participated in these groups continue to shape current conversations. A few projects that have been instrumental to and inspired my own think-ing include the Young Women’s Empowerment Project, Young Women’s Action Team, Project Nia, and Just Practice in Chicago, as well as Gen-eration Five: Ending Child Sexual Abuse in Five Generations, Commu-nities United Against Violence, Creative Interventions, the Storytelling and Organizing Project in the Bay Area, and the Audre Lorde Project’s Safe Outside the System in New York, Ubuntu in North Carolina, and Southerners on New Ground, based in Atlanta.I have chosen in this book to talk about community accountability and transformative justice together— as in CA/TJ— because the frameworks are interconnected, they have built upon one another, and many doing the work often use the words interchangeably. And yet the frameworks have their own histories that are important to recognize as well. The women- of- color- led shift to community accountability, first mobilized through Incite! Women of Color Against Violence and further developed through Creative Interventions, envisioned that rather than rely on exter-nal authorities— i.e., social service and legal advocacy professionals and agencies— to manage everyday violence and oppression— we needed to seek to engage community members in building the critical conscious-This content downloaded from 144.37.44.35 on Mon, 07 Aug 2023 07:05:45 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

90 | Shifting Paradigms to End Violenceness and tools so that we might turn to one another to create commu-nal collective support, intervention, accountability, prevention, and transformation. At its most basic, community accountability envisions community members (e.g., friends, family, coworkers, peers, neighbors) collectively responding to violence by cultivating communal healing and accountability rather than punishment and shame. This may include de-veloping communal support for those harmed, and/or intervening when we witness mistreatment and violence. It also may include engaging with those who have caused harm to take responsibility, to make things right, and to change and transform themselves and their actions. And it may include creating collective understanding of oppression and violence so that community members can engage in prevention and transformation of the roots of abuse and violence, and the underlying power relations and systems of oppression that sustain them. As Incite! writes, “Com-munity accountability is not just a reaction— something that we do when someone behaves violently— it is also proactive— something that is ongo-ing and negotiated among everyone in the community. This better pre-pares us to address violence if and when it happens.”10Along with the work around community accountability, Generation Five, a visionary organization with goals of ending child sexual abuse in five generations, offered an initial framing of transformative justice in 2007 with its report Toward Transformative Justice: A Liberatory Ap-proach to Child Sexual Abuse and Other Forms of Intimate and Commu-nity Violence. It suggested that transformative justice practices would open up paths for responding to child sexual abuse in particular in ways that draw upon and strengthen communal relationships rather than give in to the divisions and isolation created by violence. They write,This [approach] creates possibilities for those who have experienced vio-lence to safely remain in relationships, families, and communities if they choose. This approach also creates possibilities for those who are abusive to maintain relationship with their community. Rather than removing for past behavior, transformation of future behavior is supported and enforced by those with whom they have invested relationships. It builds a network of support to build and maintain healthy, loving and non- violent families and communities. And it uses interventions in incidents to prevent future vio-lence through broader community awareness, education and involvement.11This content downloaded from 144.37.44.35 on Mon, 07 Aug 2023 07:05:45 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Shifting Paradigms to End Violence | 91In order for such approaches to become realistic possibilities, com-munity members must intentionally become invested in shaping their relationships and communities by cultivating the knowledge and skills necessary for support, intervention, and accountability, as well as committing to dismantling the social and political roots of abuse and violence. This means, in part, that we must shift from seeing ourselves solely as individuals with individual relationships to seeing ourselves as members of communities who are accountable to one another and responsible for the dynamics and patterns of the ways we relate to one another.From Agency Expertise to Community Knowledge and LeadershipHeavily influenced by neoliberal ideology, most nonprofit service and advocacy organizations have professionalized staff and volunteers who respond to interpersonal violence at the level of the individual. The focus is on the immediate individuals involved, rather than their com-munities of relationship and belonging. This means that agencies are not set up to deeply engage community members to be actively involved in the processes of support, healing, or accountability.Community accountability projects seek to build knowledge, skills, and leadership of community members to address abuse and violence. This shifts the expert- driven social service and advocacy framework to one that is community engaged. Social service and advocacy agencies are organized to serve communities, but are not necessarily commu-nity driven. Most are organized through a hierarchical “helper- helped” structure that separates experts from clients, and organizations from the communities they serve. The distinct hierarchical division between staff professionals and community members limits the community’s depth of engagement in addressing community- based issues, concerns, and needs. Agency professionals tend to retain the knowledge, skills, and expertise, and community members then depend upon them for infor-mation, resources, and services that tend to be more generic. Commu-nity members are not seen as experts on their own lives, and do not necessarily have a say in what they need or want in addressing the very issues that are seriously impacting their lives. Instead, it is the agency This content downloaded from 144.37.44.35 on Mon, 07 Aug 2023 07:05:45 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

92 | Shifting Paradigms to End Violenceboards and their accountability to the state and corporate funders who determine what is best.12A community accountability approach means that community mem-bers intentionally build their critical consciousness and skills to increase our capacity to respond to oppression and violence as well as to work toward prevention and transformation. Rather than assume pregiven and static community formations, people engage in intentional and collective practices of building community in groups to which they are connected. The community may be small or large; for instance, it could be a neighborhood, a block, a friendship group, an organization, a nu-clear, extended, and/or chosen family, a workplace, a hobby group, a musical community. As Generation Five offers, a community can be any “group of people in relationships based on common experience, iden-tity, geography, values, beliefs and/or politics.”13 Within this framework, communities are also seen as works in progress, rather than as static entities, where our relationships to each other and to the whole can be remolded toward support, intervention, accountability, and justice— not from without, but from within. From this vantage point, a key practice in many CA and TJ groups is to create spaces for members to talk about what brings them together, what values they share, and what norms they agree upon to guide their relationships and activities over time. As In-cite! envisions, “Networks of people can develop a community account-ability politic by . . . building relationships based on values of safety, respect, and self determination, and nurturing a culture of collective responsibility, connection and liberation.”14Thus, community accountability and transformative justice proj-ects often organize communities along different lines. For instance, the Northwest Network of bisexual, transgender, lesbian, and gay abuse survivors organized groups of friends as a “community” through their FAR Out (Friends Are Reaching Out) Program; Sista II Sista defined themselves as a group of young, working- class, Black and Latina women based in Brooklyn, New York, the Young Women’s Empowerment Proj-ect (YWEP) in Chicago defined its community as “girls, including trans-gender girls, and young women, including trans women who trade sex for money, are trafficked or pimped and who are actively or formerly involved in the street economy. We are activists, artists, mothers, teach-ers, and visionaries— our vision for social justice is a world where we can This content downloaded from 144.37.44.35 on Mon, 07 Aug 2023 07:05:45 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Shifting Paradigms to End Violence | 93be all of these things, all the time.”15 Females United for Action (FUFA) began as a group of young women of color, and as it grew, more queer women and gender queer youth became involved, and they shifted their identity.16 Drawing from this model, in my classes on transformative justice, I encourage students to develop community accountability proj-ects based in their own self- defined communities; for some, community means their family, for others their musical community, for others their friends, for others their racial, ethnic, sexual, or gender- identity com-munity, for others their religious community. I also encourage students to see our class as a community to which we must each contribute and be responsible for each other’s learning and well- being.Rather than service organizations providing information about the existence of violence and the resources available to address it, CA and TJ projects often create space to build shared knowledge, expertise, and understanding among community members. In a radical shift from a so-cial service model, YWEP in Chicago, for instance, led by young women impacted by the sex trade and street economy, built knowledge based on the experiences of those who made up the project. Their projects ran up against the controlling ideas of adult scholars, activists, and service providers about the sex trade and the youth involved in it; in fact, they described their community- initiated research project that guided their work as “a response to all of those researchers, doctors, government of-ficials, social workers, therapists, journalists, foster care workers and every other adult who said we were too messed up or that we needed to be saved from ourselves.”17 Instead, they assert, “We recognize that girls have knowledge and expertise in matters relating to our own lives that no one else will have. We are not the problem— we are the solution.”18 Ad-ditionally, rather than seeing their project as another space that provides one- size- fits- all approaches to the multitude of experiences and issues the girls and young women may bring to the project, they say, “We don’t tell girls what to do, we don’t give advice, and adults don’t take control of youth projects.”19YWEP created knowledge and strategies for resilience and resistance to violence grounded in their lived realities. They developed shared language around the “sex trade” and “street economy” to describe their experiences. Moving outside of the legalistic language of “prostitution” and “trafficking,” they defined the sex trade as “any form of being sexual This content downloaded from 144.37.44.35 on Mon, 07 Aug 2023 07:05:45 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

94 | Shifting Paradigms to End Violence(or the idea of being sexual) in exchange for money, gifts, safety, drugs, hormones, or survival needs like housing, food, clothes, or immigra-tion and documentation— whether we get to keep the money/goods/service or someone else profits from these acts.”20 Grounded in the com-plexities of their own experience, they rejected the polarized language of choice versus coercion and of prostitution versus sex work. In their words, “Some of us have been forced to participate, some of us have chosen to participate in the sex trade, some of us have had both kinds of experiences. Others feel that the question of choice is irrelevant or more complicated than choice/no choice.”21 They further say they never use the word “prostitute” because they feel it dehumanizes them, and they do not use the phrase “sex work” because it does not include girls and young women who are forced or those who do not see what they are doing as “work.”While antiviolence educators and policy makers have sought to de-fine experiences of “rape,” “sexual harassment,” and “domestic violence” in order to build public awareness as well as to help shape social poli-cies to address them, the result is often narrow, generic, and legalistic definitions that require sharp lines of demarcation. This legalistic ter-minology makes it hard to talk about the everyday messy ways in which mistreatment and abuse live out in our minds, bodies, and hearts. In my experience with thousands of people who have experienced intimate, interpersonal, and community violence over the past thirty years, I find that mostly people are not sure if their experience qualifies as “violence” or if it meets the legal criteria. Many assume that verbal, psychological, and other nonphysical forms of violence do not add up to “domestic vio-lence” or “sexual harassment” and so do not seek out resources, or that what they feel is a “bad experience” of forced and even violent sexual ac-tivity does not constitute rape. In Latoya Peterson’s powerful essay, “The Not- Rape Epidemic,” she explores the gulf between the legal definition of rape and young women’s own experiences of rape; she writes, “Yes, we learned a lot about rape. What we were not prepared for was every-thing else. Rape was something we could identify, an act with a strict definition and two distinct scenarios. Not- rape was something else en-tirely.”22 She proceeds to tell many stories of “not- rape”— stories of viola-tions, abuses, aggressions, and pressures that did not fit the definition. This content downloaded from 144.37.44.35 on Mon, 07 Aug 2023 07:05:45 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Shifting Paradigms to End Violence | 95Again, she writes, “My friends and I confided in one another, swapping stories, sharing our pain, while keeping it all hidden from the adults in our lives. After all, who could we tell? This wasn’t rape— it didn’t fit the definitions. This was not- rape. We should have known better. We were the ones who would take the blame.”23 Lynn Phillips’s book Flirt-ing with Danger explores this further through her analysis of interviews with college students who consistently did not name or recognize their experiences within the available definitions of rape, even when their ex-periences closely resembled these legal definitions.24Additionally, because most agencies focus on heterosexual male vio-lence, most educational materials and resources emanate from a het-erosexist and heteronormative framework that does not resonate with LGBTQ experiences and communities, and so, as Lori Girshick’s book, Woman- to- Woman Sexual Violence: Does She Call It Rape? demonstrates, it becomes quite hard to name and process our own experiences.25 Even within the work around LGBTQ violence, there is a tendency to create one- size- fits- all models, rather than take into consideration the com-plexities and nuances of intimate and sexual violence. The book Queer-ing Sexual Violence offers a powerful set of essays and stories about violence outside of gender and sexual binaries that has differential and complex impacts. Queering sexual violence means opening up space to talk about how people can abuse and be abused, how our experiences of sexual violence can and sometimes do impact our sexual and gender identities, and how healing is a long- term, complex, and multifaceted process. The generic approach does not create space for people to be able to address their everyday experiences of sexual violation, assault, and rape that do not look like what is presented as normative.Community accountability projects open up the terms and meanings to community- specific conversations. The goal is to develop vocabu-lary and understandings of oppression and violence that attend to the specific identities, experiences, and contexts that are shaped by specific interlocking systems of oppression and privilege. Some projects create spaces to build shared language on what positive, loving, and caring re-lationships look and feel like, as well as those involving mistreatment, abuse, and violence. A multivocal vocabulary can help shift a commu-nity conversation from debating whether an experience is “bad enough” This content downloaded from 144.37.44.35 on Mon, 07 Aug 2023 07:05:45 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

96 | Shifting Paradigms to End Violenceto constitute the legal definition of domestic violence, for example, to being able to address the multiple forms and dynamics of mistreatment and abuse within specific contexts and the power lines that shape them. This would create a context in which people would not have to wait until relational abuse fits the legal definition by escalating to a more threaten-ing level for it to be addressed.Generation Five and other CA and TJ projects approach harassment, abuse, and violence not as individual aberrations with roots in an indi-vidual’s psyche but as social, community, and political problems with roots in the interconnected social systems of inequity and domination, including white supremacy, capitalism, patriarchy, heteronormativity, and colonialism, among others. In addition, they recognize that vio-lence impacts people far beyond those immediately involved; it impacts all those in relationship with those harmed and those doing the harm as well as the broader community. Thus, as community members, we are in a position to become responsible for creating responses that pro-mote communal healing, accountability, and broader social change. In building the skills of intervention, we must become more cognizant of how we are impacted as well as implicated within the violence sur-rounding us as well as how we may contribute to the harm in the ways that we respond or do not respond to any given incident. In this re-gard, both community accountability and transformative justice are embedded in broader social justice movements oriented toward social transformation.By expanding the lens to include the impact of violence on commu-nity relationships, and the power lines and social dynamics that shape them, these approaches recognize that systems of oppression/privilege actively shape people’s identities and relationships, and inform people’s responses to each other’s experiences of and/or involvement in violence. And so rather than presuming automatic “safety” or “equality” or “re-spect” on the basis of a shared identity or experience, CA and TJ compel communities to commit to creating a culture of accountability for power dynamics and abuses of power. As Emi Koyama envisions in the context of women’s organizations, “[I]t would be more helpful to acknowledge that there are many power imbalances among women that are very diffi-cult to eliminate than to hastily move to make them disappear. That way, we could hope to create structures that would actively counter the power This content downloaded from 144.37.44.35 on Mon, 07 Aug 2023 07:05:45 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Shifting Paradigms to End Violence | 97relationships that already exist, that would hold ourselves accountable to each other.”26 Within this context, rather than assuming “we” are all the same in our victimization, survivorhood, or identity, we would be more attentive to the differences constructed by our experiences and relation-ships to these interconnected systems of power.Moving beyond the Binary of “Victims” and “Perpetrators”Mainstream feminist antiviolence discourse often constructs the catego-ries of perpetrators and victim- survivors as inherently and essentially distinct groups— often along the lines of male/female; and even in same- gender relationships, there is an assumption that people fall within one category, not both. The us/them categorization schema freezes people into static identities as “perpetrators” or “victims,” and their identities and experiences are constructed to fall in line with these categories. To talk about them as overlapping groups creates discomfort and has often meant that when people’s experiences fall outside of this dichotomy, their experiences do not get addressed.A consequence of this static divide is that socially constructed no-tions of who is a legitimate and innocent victim and who is a real and always/already perpetrator are often tied up in dominant power rela-tions of race, gender, class, and sexuality. Innocence is most often tied to white, middle- class, heterosexual, cis- gendered, able- bodied femi-ninity, and so the violence against women of color, lesbian, bisexual, queer, trans, and gender- nonconforming women, immigrant women, and women with disabilities, among others, is often minimized, ratio-nalized, and the women themselves are blamed. Similarly, violence and criminality are projected onto people of color, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people, immigrants, people with disabilities, and other so-cially and economically marginalized groups, while white, middle- class men are rarely held accountable for their violence as their identities are not criminalized, there is a huge latitude for their behavior, and they are seen as always/already redeemable.27 The result is that the interpretation and response to violence often solidifies these power lines and structural hierarchies.In addition, the conflictual, binaristic process of naming the violence within a community often divides members who are enlisted to take one This content downloaded from 144.37.44.35 on Mon, 07 Aug 2023 07:05:45 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

98 | Shifting Paradigms to End Violenceside or the other. Those who support the one harmed become invested in punishing, banishing, or criminalizing the person who did the harm, and those who support the person who did the harm become invested in defending that person and demonizing or blaming the one harmed. Addressing sexual assault and/or domestic violence within a community often feels, then, like a divisive, destructive, and irreparable process. The consequences of this binary are either that people deny, ignore, and/or minimize the mistreatment, abuse, and violence so as not to “take sides” or that people do take sides and the communities break apart along those divides. In either case, there is little opportunity for support, heal-ing, accountability, or transformation within the community that would both support the person harmed and work with the one who created the harm to take accountability and commit to change.Integral to transformative justice and community accountability is a belief in the inherent humanity of all people— the recognition that none of us is inherently “good” or “evil,” that no one is born a rapist, sexual harasser, racist, or transphobe, and that no one is inherently a victim. As Generation Five suggests, “People that commit violence are not born that way; they are created by their histories and given per-mission by the inequitable practices and arrangements of power within the society in which we live.”28 Rather than pushing for punishment, incarceration, and banishment of the person who causes harm, or mini-mizing, denying, victim blaming, and abandoning the person who has been harmed, CA and TJ approaches lead us to rethink accountability and justice in ways that strive to build and deepen individual and com-munity accountability in the face of violence. Ubuntu, an organization based in North Carolina, for instance, writes of their approach, “We are committed to thinking about justice in terms that do not instantly repolarize our community. We recognize that a stark division between ‘us’ and ‘them’— ‘we survivors of violence’ and ‘they, the perpetrators of violence’— could not lead to a transformative healing of our community, but only to the continued fragmentation of it.”29 This follows from their name— “Ubuntu”— which connotes that “a person is a person through other people” so that a justice process that “dehumanizes or oppresses any of us does violence to us all.”30This approach seeks to make visible the multiple systems of oppres-sion and privilege that create the power lines within and through our re-This content downloaded from 144.37.44.35 on Mon, 07 Aug 2023 07:05:45 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Shifting Paradigms to End Violence | 99lationships. This means that we are all both impacted by and implicated within the inequitable systems that structure our relationships with one another. And so as we approach those who harm, or as we recognize the harms we ourselves are implicated in, we do not approach “them” as completely distinct from “us”; instead, we come to see the intercon-nectedness of our identities and actions in our shared historical, eco-nomic, social, and political contexts. As bell hooks so eloquently writes, “To the extent that I remain ever- mindful of the potential for me to be ‘the enemy,’ I am able to view my colleagues who maintain allegiance to dominator culture with compassion. When I demonize them or see them as only and always capable of being enemies, I become part of the problem and not part of the solution.”31Thus, within a group of survivors of violence, we might be compelled to consider not only our victimization but also our complicity in in-terpersonal and systemic violence and oppression. In a small Chicago- based survivor organization, FIRE, for instance, members committed themselves to talking with one another about “how we may perpetuate what we are working to end; so we ask ourselves— do we use/support ways of thinking about violence that allow it to continue? Does how we frame the issue of violence in our publication prop up systems of violence? We feel that these are important questions for us to ask.”32 Such a reflective community- building process was also built into the work of the Young Women’s Empowerment Project. In describing their efforts to build community among themselves, they write, “We do this by helping girls find connections with each other, by looking closely at how we might play out sexism (like by calling girls ‘ho’s’) and by creat-ing a respectful, free of judgment space where girls can get informa-tion about how to change the world.”33 In addition, projects find ways to draw needed attention to how racism or ableism may be shaping the dynamics and relationships within their antiviolence efforts.34The Broadway Youth Center (BYC), an organization in Chicago that works primarily with queer, gender queer, and trans youth of color, does not organize its services as solely for “survivors” of violence. In fact, no one has to identify as a victim or survivor to receive services, and those who have been involved in violence are not turned away. According to Lara Brooks, who was a key leader in building this intentional BYC space, the organization decided not to separate out “victims” from “per-This content downloaded from 144.37.44.35 on Mon, 07 Aug 2023 07:05:45 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

100 | Shifting Paradigms to End Violencepetrators” because it recognized that multiple systems of oppression and privilege shape the experiences of the mostly poor youth of color who turn to BYC for support. Most, if not all, have been victimized by inter-personal violence, and many have perpetrated it, and they are all im-pacted by the violence of multiple institutions (families, schools, police, social service agencies). Rather than assume that BYC can offer “safe” space by excluding those identified as “perpetrators,” BYC believes that safety is an ongoing negotiation that needs to be rebuilt when mistreat-ment, oppression, and/or violence occur within the space. According to Brooks, when faced with a situation of violence, BYC asks itself,How can we utilize our longstanding relationships to support the individ-ual growth, resilience, and survival of these two individuals? What does safety mean within the context of this relationship? . . . In our space, we have the opportunity to use our relationships with young people to discuss and explore— using a pace that the young person defines— the intersection of personal, community, and state violence. For us, this is healing work.35In 2009, the BYC created the Community Healing, Accountability, and Transformation Taskforce (CHAT) to create a model based in trans-formative justice and anti- oppression values that would offer strategies to “reduce harm and violence in our space through relationship build-ing, popular education, and youth organizing,” rather than punishment or banishment.36 Recognizing the structural problem of working be-yond capacity in the organization, they scaled back the number of youth served so staff could build stronger relationships with them and so that the staff could collectively reflect on and strategize responses to violence within the space. By creating approaches based in harm reduction and community accountability, they are less likely to permanently ban youth from their space. Instead, they work hard to keep youth connected to the space and/or to the resources that would best support their needs and goals. This reminded me of the powerful work of Roca, a youth organization outside of Boston, which centers its work in restorative jus-tice values and practices, including unconditional love and peacemaking circles. Their use of circles within the organization with youth, staff, and community members is documented in Carolyn Boyes- Watson’s book, Peacemaking Circles and Urban Youth: Bringing Justice Home.37This content downloaded from 144.37.44.35 on Mon, 07 Aug 2023 07:05:45 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Shifting Paradigms to End Violence | 101From One- Size- Fits- All to Community- Based Analyses and StrategiesThe institutionalization of the antiviolence movement has meant that most organizations operate from a one- size- fits- all, gender- exclusive framework, with standardized gender- based definitions, options, and strategies.38 These generic responses often do not “fit” the particulars of any community or multiple and interconnected forms of violence, and can, in some cases, be more dangerous than supportive. Normative ideals associated with white, middle- class, Judeo- Christian hetero-normativity often shape the goals and strategies of these mainstream organizations.39 The impact of systemic racism, classism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, and xenophobia in people’s experiences of violence is mostly unaddressed. Because of this, the organizational responses to violence often reflect and reproduce these systemic structures.40Alternatively, the Young Women’s Empowerment Project created its own analysis and its own support system to address the particularities and nuances of its members’ lived realities of being impacted by the sex trade and street economy. For instance, its research revealed that young women impacted by the sex trade in Chicago do not turn to the police for safety or accountability, because of their experiences of police sur-veillance, harassment, violence, and criminalization. The criminal legal system is not a realistic or safe option through which to address abuse and violence. Similarly, many of those interviewed reported avoiding social services because of mistreatment— including being turned over to the police, being called and stigmatized as “whores” and “sluts,” and facing people who wanted to “save” them, who threatened to take their children away, who did not want to listen to them, and/or who would only provide services if the young women agreed to end their involve-ment in the sex trade or street economy. It was for these reasons that YWEP sought to build community among the young women toward support, healing, resistance, and accountability. As its report expresses, “This is about girls uniting. . . . We want to show that we are capable of helping ourselves without relying on the systems that sometimes harm and oppress us.”41 In order to build and expand this community, it cre-ated zines, fliers, and outreach grounded in its members’ own experi-ences. The organization committed to a judgment- free, harm- reduction This content downloaded from 144.37.44.35 on Mon, 07 Aug 2023 07:05:45 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

102 | Shifting Paradigms to End Violenceapproach that honored young women’s understanding of their own lives, that valued and supported their self- determination, that met them where they were, and that shared skills with which to reduce the harm and oppression in their lives. YWEP’s research also became the basis for its organizing campaign Street Youth Rise Up, which protested the injustices youth face within these protective systems of social services, health services, and police, and which demanded changes in the system.From Individual to Social ContextSocial service approaches to support and advocacy focus on individual survivors and their immediate needs. The communal, institutional, or social contexts that shape and contribute to the violence may be vis-ible, but muted in terms of how efforts are directed. Most agencies do not have the capacity to engage communities to address the issue or to push for institutional change. The structure and funding of these agen-cies ensures this focus on individual services, and this then reinforces the broader hegemonic system that individualizes social inequities, and makes systems invisible.Community accountability and transformative justice frameworks bring into focus the social contexts in which violence takes place and highlight the role that legal, educational, religious, health, and social service institutions play in perpetuating violence. Expanding the lens from an individual one to a social and institutional one shifts the array of responses available, for instance, to harassment in the schools. Rather than creating policies to report and punish individual bullies, a CA/TJ approach examines how the school’s climate, staff and teacher training, curriculum, as well as institutional practices related to policies contrib-ute to harassment and bullying. Instead of pushing for better report-ing, investigation, and adjudication of individual cases, transformative justice directs us to understand and challenge the institutional cultures and structural hierarchies that produce the entrenched environment of hostility and violence. This would lead to a critical examination of the institutionalized homophobia and heterosexism that are normative in the culture of the school, including among school teachers and admin-istrators. We know that teacher preparation programs mostly do not focus specific attention on issues of sexual orientation and gender iden-This content downloaded from 144.37.44.35 on Mon, 07 Aug 2023 07:05:45 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Shifting Paradigms to End Violence | 103tity and the impact of institutions on them; for example, in 2012, the Il-linois Safe Schools Alliance 2012 Visibility Matters report found that the vast majority of schools of education did not address gender identity in their conceptual frameworks, nor did they have university- wide nondis-crimination policies. They also found that Illinois continues to accredit schools that have explicit anti- LGBTQ lifestyle statements, covenants, or mission documents.42From Criminal Legal System to Community AccountabilityIn general, the mainstream approach to addressing violence is through the criminal legal system; it is the primary option given to survivors to seek protection and/or accountability. This is despite the fact that most survivors are reluctant to use the system, and it often is not only oppressive and hurtful to those survivors who attempt to use it but also ineffective and highly discriminatory in achieving the goal of real accountability for violence and its impact. In the United States, only one in ten sexual assaults is reported, and of those reported very few end in conviction. Most survivors do not report their experiences to the police.The criminal legal system, and the law enforcers who implement its policies and procedures, as noted earlier, are also often a major source of violence in communities marginalized by systems of oppression— communities of color, queer and trans communities, young women in the sex trade, immigrant communities, and people with disabilities, among others. As noted earlier, the works of Bhattacharjee, Ritchie, and Richie, among others, have documented, analyzed, and been used to address the way this systemic violence by police, INS officials, and prison guards, among others, is intricately interconnected with inter-personal and familial violence, as well as women’s reproductive rights. Police, security, and immigration surveillance, harassment, brutality, and incarceration are daily realities for communities of color. And the push for greater police involvement and harsher sentences to address gender- based violence does not address the system’s violence, and ulti-mately has contributed to “the proliferation of prisons which now lock up more people per capita in the United States than any other country.”43 Rather than being the bad behavior of a few individuals, the violence by police, healthcare institutions, or other institutions is systemic and This content downloaded from 144.37.44.35 on Mon, 07 Aug 2023 07:05:45 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

104 | Shifting Paradigms to End Violenceinstitutionalized. And because the state, as a major funder of rape and domestic- violence crisis, service, and advocacy organizations, shapes their goals and mandates, these agencies are reluctant to critically chal-lenge the sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, and xenophobia of these state institutions.Moreover, the underlying logics of the state set the stage for the mis-treatment, oppression, and violence of social services and healthcare in-stitutions. These are the very institutions that are held up as the spaces of safety and support for those experiencing interpersonal violence, and yet this is not the case. For example, the Young Women’s Empowerment Project research report, Girls Do What They Have to Do to Survive, found that a significant source of violence was institutional, rather than solely individual; as they write, YWEP wanted to “show the reality that we face: everyday girls are denied access to systems due to participation in the sex trade, being drug users, being lesbian, gay or transgender, or being undocumented.”44 They found that “girls face as much institutional vio-lence (like from police or DCFS) as they do individual violence (like from parents, pimps, or boyfriends)”45 and that institutional violence made the individual violence much worse.46 In their follow- up 2012 re-search report on Bad Encounters, they found that police and healthcare institutions were the most frequently reported sources of mistreatment, including refusal to provide services as well as outright violence. The research also showed that a disproportionate amount of violence was directed against gender- nonconforming, gender queer, transgender, and intersex youth.47Given that these institutions often fail the most marginalized and criminalized survivors, and are a major source of oppression and vio-lence themselves, community accountability and transformative jus-tice activists seek both prison abolition and the creation of alternative forms of responding to and creating accountability for violence. Morgan Bassichis describes that Communities United Against Violence in San Francisco and Oakland decided to shift its response to violence away from a reliance on the state: “[W]e recognized that state systems set up to address violence in fact exacerbate violence by traumatizing peo-ple who have been harmed, people who have been harmful, and their communities, and by extracting vital resources that could otherwise strengthen communities.”48This content downloaded from 144.37.44.35 on Mon, 07 Aug 2023 07:05:45 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Shifting Paradigms to End Violence | 105Community accountability and transformative justice projects work to build knowledge as well as communication skills among community members so that they are able to collectively engage one another when they cause harm— to take responsibility for the harm(s), to respect and honor the needs of the person harmed, and to take steps toward their own healing, change, and transformation to prevent further violence. Organizations like Philly Stands Up have created support and account-ability teams who can work with people to address sexual assault within their own communities. They support members to create a process for supporting the person harmed and for approaching the person who com-mitted the assault to address his or her actions, the harm caused, and the personal and social roots of the problem. In these cases, the person causing the harm must, to some degree, admit that they caused the harm and be willing to take accountability. These efforts toward accountability are often complicated, difficult, and not always as successful as initially desired, and yet in most cases, they are important communal efforts to address the problem without relying on the violence of the state.Compartmentalized Issues to Interconnected RealitiesWhile the 1970s frame of “violence against women” emphasized the interconnectedness of the forms and contexts of violence, the process of institutionalization and funding led to scholars and activists creating ser-vices, advocacy, public policy, and research focused on specific forms of violence— i.e., rape, sexual assault, child sexual abuse, domestic violence, and sexual harassment. This has made it so that we understand types of violence to be separate and distinct from one another— that is, we talk about sexual harassment as separate and distinct from gender- based mur-der, as distinct from domestic violence as distinct from child sexual abuse as distinct from street harassment as distinct from rape in the context of war. Each type of violence has had its own trajectory of theories and research, public policies, organizational developments, and organizing ini-tiatives, and the interconnections between them often are lost.The result is that scholarship, public policy, and advocacy do not often consider how these forms of violence are interconnected— that sexual assault is integral to domestic violence, that child sexual violence is a form of domestic violence, and that sexual assault in the military is This content downloaded from 144.37.44.35 on Mon, 07 Aug 2023 07:05:45 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

106 | Shifting Paradigms to End Violenceconnected to US military violence against women in Afghanistan and Iraq. Moreover, this compartmentalization obscures the realities that most people experience more than one form of violence over the course of their lives, and that all forms of abuse and violence have roots in the multiple and interlocking systems of oppression, including heteronor-mative patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism, imperialism, and able-ism, among others.One organization in Chicago that worked to build these connections was the GABRIELA Network of Chicago in the mid- 2000s. It sought to build bridges between organizations focused on immigration or antico-lonial struggles and those focused on sexual assault and/or homophobia. It worked to cultivate awareness among Filipinos in Chicago about the connections between the violence against women that is integral to US colonialism, imperialism, and global terrorism and the interpersonal sexual and domestic violence, as well as homophobia, within Filipina communities in Chicago.49Bringing attention to the multidimensionality of both forms and con-texts for violence creates opportunities for cross- movement organizing. Generation Five’s Transformative Justice Report argues that pervasive child sexual abuse in this country has an impact on community- based organizing, but is rarely named or understood. The report suggests that child sexual abuse prevention could easily be integrated into “social movements and community organizing targeting intimate and state violence, economic and racial oppression, gender injustice, as well as age- based and cultural discrimination.”50 Such a strategy would ensure investment across issues by building a consciousness about how they are implicated in and connected to each other. Similarly, there has been increasing attention to the sexual harassment, abuse, and assault as well as dating and intimate partner violence within activist progressive com-munities and organizations. The book Revolution Starts at Home is an anthology of articles documenting both stories of violence within activ-ist communities and CA and TJ projects seeking to address it.51This content downloaded from 144.37.44.35 on Mon, 07 Aug 2023 07:05:45 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Shifting Paradigms to End Violence | 107From Defending Innocence to Taking Accountability as Community PracticeConnie Burk of the Northwest Network argues that community account-ability cannot simply be about making individuals who cause egregious harm accountable. She suggests that a focus on individuals as if their behavior is aberrant within the community can lead to the same bina-ries of us/them and often leads to default responses of punishment and banishment, rather than deeper healing and change within the whole community. Instead, she suggests we might commit ourselves to creating accountable communities. Rather than thinking solely about “a collec-tive process for holding individuals accountable for their behavior,” we might work to cultivate “individual and collective responsibility for building a community where robust accountability is possible, expected, and likely.”52 Burk approaches accountability as a skill, rather than an external process, a skill that “each of us must commit to developing as an internal resource for recognizing and redressing the harms we have caused to ourselves and others. Cultivating deep skills (and community investment) in personal accountability also better equips us to respect-fully request accountability from others and to be aware when someone is highly resistant to taking responsibility for their actions.”53 Inherent to building community in which accountability is integral must be the building of the interpersonal skills and practices that enable account-ability to flourish. Again Burk writes, “As more people develop these skills, the community becomes better able to expect and support ethical, organic accountability processes.”54Creating accountable communities necessitates the building of critical communication skills enabling members to talk openly about relational issues as well as difficulties, conflicts, and tensions within their relationships and within their communities. In my experience of feminist and queer activism, many groups have fallen apart over deep conflicts and divides, often connected to experiences of mistreatment, abuse, and violence. We often did not have the skills or understandings of how to shift the conflicts, and so often the group would become po-larized and divided. Given that so much in relationship building goes unsaid, when conflict arises, there is no basis for negotiating the con-flicts and tensions.This content downloaded from 144.37.44.35 on Mon, 07 Aug 2023 07:05:45 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

108 | Shifting Paradigms to End ViolenceFor instance, when we assume that our “private” lives are off limits and that it is inappropriate to ask one another questions, we may not ever say anything when we perceive problems, and so the issue often fes-ters, builds, and gets worse. Or because there may be a tendency within a community to avoid conflict, we do not tell each other when we are upset with decisions or behavior, or when we witness minor or even major patterns of mistreatment, we may overlook them. But they con-tinue to percolate underneath the group’s activities, to undermine the group, and often escalate to greater conflicts and abuse.If taking accountability for harm became a daily practice, rather than solely something that we demand of others in egregious situations, then taking accountability would be less fraught with guilt, shame, defensive-ness, punishment, and retaliation. It would create more compassion for one another when we make mistakes, when we speak and act in harmful and oppressive ways (intentionally or unintentionally), and/or when we contribute to harm in some way. And it would make it easier to admit wrongdoing.When I have hurt my friends and/or loved ones, I too have suffered and felt isolated. It helps immensely to have a space in which to talk with others to gain understanding and to figure out ways to make things right. There are few spaces in which to talk about the harms we have caused and the systems of oppression in which we have been complicit. Mostly it seems that when confronted, we try to prove that we are not responsible— to prove our “innocence.” Or we try to blame others, or to claim that we are the real victims. Making it a practice to take ac-countability and to create supportive spaces where we can talk about our actions and/or complicity would go a long way toward creating more justice in our everyday interactions.In the Building Communities project at DePaul University, we create spaces for people to explore and practice what it looks and feels like to address difficulties and conflicts in our communities. Rather than pre-sume that our relationships will be conflict free, we practice creating shared values to guide our relationship building, and we practice skills of talking through the differences and conflicts that create tensions and potential divisions in the group. Making a commitment with people in our families, peer groups, and organizations to practice direct commu-nication about everyday conflicts can create a solid ground for address-This content downloaded from 144.37.44.35 on Mon, 07 Aug 2023 07:05:45 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Shifting Paradigms to End Violence | 109ing more egregious behavior. Being open, honest, and direct about how we experience and witness one another’s behavior can prevent the esca-lation of abusive power relations, and can create more just relationships within our communities. This is not an easy practice, and we often fail at it. And yet, it is through practice that we learn. We must return again and again to practice to learn to embrace the process, rather than to see ourselves as failures or to gloss over the conflicts.CA and TJ as Living PracticeA core commitment of those doing the work in CA and TJ with whom I have worked and learned is that there are no easy answers or template solutions to building support, intervention, accountability, and broader social change. The practice is the walk and the mistakes are part of the process. A training collective in Chicago initiated by Shira Hassan calls itself Just Practice— and it is a great mantra for this work. Just Practice. It is in and through the commitment to practice that we see the pos-sibilities for change and transformation for a different future to build with one another. We learn through practice, and we need to be willing to face, and even embrace, our mistakes, our failures, and our missteps as well as our successes and our transformations. Practice is the way toward endless and radical possibilities, but only if we embrace the pro-cess with humility, openness, curiosity, and hope.This content downloaded from 144.37.44.35 on Mon, 07 Aug 2023 07:05:45 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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