Survivors “Surviving Well” and “Surviving Poorly”: Reflections on the Limitations and Possibilities of Transformative Justice

Abstract

Amid the uprisings of 2020 and the ongoing global pandemic, social workers saw how systemic antiblack violence continues to harm Black communities as well as the richness of Black abolitionist communities envisioning anticarceral futures. At the same time, we were reminded that police violence “stems from the very function of policing to enforce an unjust racial order.”1 One of the common demands made in response to prison abolition was replacing police with social workers. Although I understand the call for social workers to step in rather than the police, social workers also reproduce the dynamics and logics of carcerality.2 If and when police are taken out of the equation and social workers are called into action, how can social workers hold ourselves accountable for the real ways we, even as social workers located in the margins, also engage in carceral and punishment-based practice?Transformative justice, “a political framework and approach for responding to violence, harm and abuse” seeks “to respond to violence without creating more violence and/or engaging in harm reduction to lessen the violence.”3 Transformative justice has been increasingly suggested as a way to decenter carceral systems when dealing with harm. However, it has also become a popularized catch-all phrase with an often unclear meaning in how it is applied. As a graduate student studying the theory/praxis divide within transformative justice movements, a prior survivor advocate working with and for unhoused survivors of violence on a daily basis, and a survivor myself, I see transformative justice as something practiced by everyday people in the name of not relying on police state intervention when it comes to dealing with harm.4 Although sometimes those everyday practices might be antithetical to ideas on how to practice transformative justice, I believe these everyday acts continue to transform the ways we envision survivors5 and harm-doers practicing accountability in ways that move away from police state intervention.Speaking on a personal level, and perhaps with a similar narrative for many folks involved in the fields of survivor advocacy and domestic violence, I came into this line of work by becoming a survivor. In particular, a survivor of familial child sexual abuse. As a young person, the police were sought on my behalf in order to try and intervene. As much as the folks who sought support were trying to protect me from ongoing sexual violence, this outing experience brought me more harm. My vulnerability around surviving a very difficult and unfortunately common experience translated into the state descending into my home to try and “fix” my broken family. I was forced to attend psychological evaluation appointments, social worker appointments, youth support groups, supervised visitations, doctor's appointments, all the while pushed to give incriminating statements about my harm-doer to the police. Although I can easily recall the multiple appointments and meetings I attended, what I most viscerally remember was trying to share as little as possible about how I actually felt or what actually went on throughout my survivorship. I remember saying enough to satisfy whoever was in front of me because I already knew if I said more, worse things would and could happen. Whether I was mistranslated by racist social workers and psychologists pathologizing me as being “too smart” or acting “too mature” to be considered a “real” victim to my harm-doer being made houseless as a direct response to the harm enacted onto me to police officers confusing who was the harm-doer and who was the survivor due to perceived language barriers. It was obvious to me at the time that being vulnerable about surviving familial child sexual abuse meant being intimately tied to the shame, terror, and threat associated with surviving that form of abuse as well as navigating the state's projection of fear and abuse of power on how to address familial child sexual abuse.Although I didn't have the language to name what was going on or the political awareness to articulate prison abolition at the time, I knew the process for dealing with harms such as the one I survived did not give me what I really wanted or needed to heal. The process itself hindered my ability to be vulnerable about my experience for a long time due to the ways systemic interventions made my vulnerability a consequence for me and a punishment for my harm-doer. At the same time, if I could go back and suddenly be given agency throughout that process, I am not entirely sure if I would have gone a different route. I honestly don't know what a transformative justice process looks like for children surviving ongoing familial child sexual abuse let alone how to hold rapists of children accountable to their harms.6 I also think that question is a tricky ask of survivors because it can make children bear the weight of accountability and responsibility on behalf of their adult harm-doers. However, what I do think is fair to ask is: How can we be more spacious and gracious to the needs of survivors currently surviving violence? How can that spaciousness be about centering the fullness of survivors in all their complexities, especially fullness that might not make sense? How can that graciousness also be about crafting community-based responses, including consequences, to make accountability that much more tangible?One of the ways I believe I can be more spacious and gracious to the needs of survivors is by supporting survivors who are surviving in ways that might be in conflict with the ways I have imagined the practice of transformative justice. For example, Bresha Meadows “was arrested for allegedly killing her abusive father in Warren, Ohio on July 28, 2016. Bresha grew up in a home where her father terrorized her and family throughout her life. Bresha, her siblings, and her mother were all severely beaten by the father for over 17 years. Meadows tried to run away from home, and family members tried to take her out of the home. However, law enforcement refused to allow her to escape and threatened to charge family members with kidnapping if they took Bresha out of her home to safety.”7Bresha's experience of defending herself and her family against ongoing harm shows how important it is to contextualize and make specific how one might imagine and envision practicing transformative justice. For myself as a younger lower-middle-class college student first learning about transformative justice, I used to think transformative justice as a nonviolent universal way to address and reconcile harm, typically through community accountability processes with an emphasis on dialogue. Throughout my previous role as a survivor advocate working with unhoused survivors as well as harm-doers, there were times when community-based dialogue was a helpful tool for preventing and addressing ongoing harm. And there were times when dialogue was not enough to stop ongoing harm. In the cases of countless other stories of punished survival similar to Bresha's, where do the limitations and possibilities of dialogue begin and end? And even more so, how can social workers and domestic violence advocates recognize the transformative power of positioning dialogue and self-defense as both tools of preventing and ending harm?One of the harder questions I've been grappling with as a survivor, a survivor advocate, and someone who tries to practice transformative justice is whether I've become a social worker who engages in harmful best practices. Have I become one of those social workers with eyes glazed over who I hated dealing with as a young person? I remember a moment early on when I felt challenged by a social worker's labeling of survivors as either “surviving well” or “surviving poorly.”8 A fellow social worker labeled one of the participants of a past program as “sneaky” and “conniving” when asking for resources. At the same time, another social worker labeled the same participant as “having good survivor skills” and “being resilient.” I had a hard time reconciling these two binary descriptions because they both operate in the same way, just through different means. On the one hand, there is the idea of the “good” survivor whose self-advocacy skills show they take initiative and are self-sufficient. They know what they want and ask for it. They are proactive about their survival. On the other hand, there is the idea of the “bad” survivor who is lying about what they need in order to get things they don't deserve. They are lying to get resources out of us, therefore they are dishonest and acting with ill intention. They are unworthy. Though these ideas seem completely different when it comes to describing the same participant, they function similarly because the construct of a survivor “surviving well” or “surviving poorly” affects a survivor's access to resources and support. The systemic impact of this dichotomy of “surviving well” and “surviving poorly” are clear in experiences like Nan-Hui Jo's, an undocumented Korean mother who “fled her abusive American citizen partner with her child to seek safety for her and her young daughter. She was then arrested for child abduction, and the district attorney who prosecuted her tried to portray her as a manipulative illegal immigrant seeking to cheat U.S. systems, calling her a ‘tiger mom’ who was too competent to be a victim.”9Although the idea of the survivor “surviving well” may mean the survivor is self-sufficient in asking for their needs, “surviving well” also shrinks survivors into particular narratives around resiliency and ultimately who is deserving of care and support. What about survivors who are not “surviving well?” What about survivors who are retributive? What about survivors who don't feel grateful to have survived? And even more so, what is at stake in the power dynamics of social workers determining whether survivors are surviving “well” or “poorly?”One way I've tried to work through these questions is by moving at the pace of the survivor and meeting them where they are at. The fields of social work, especially homeless services, at large operate through incredibly racist and white savior logics of dumping material resources onto survivors and quickly moving on. In recognizing this, the prior organization I worked for tried to instead meet survivors where they were at through relationship and community building in the hopes of fostering intentional and individualized relationships of care. In particular, survivor advocates would intently listen to survivors and move at the pace of the survivor around their survivance. Sometimes this looked like offering material resources such as tents, hotel stays, and mobile phones to aid in survival or connecting them with other services not immediately offered. Other times this looked like making time for survivors to parse through their experiences, thoughts, and feelings at the speed that feels right for them or holding other social services organizations accountable for the resources they said they would share. However, this organization still struggled to maintain and engage in best practices when it came to working with the participants. For example, larger organizations’ decisions were made to ensure survivors who were Black, Indigenous, and People of Color as well as folks affected by gender and sexuality based violence would most benefit from access to the organizations’ resources. However, in the thick of direct service and in the front lines, decisions were often made right in front of the survivor about whether or not they were going to get access to a specific resource. And often, negotiating access to that specific resource was routinely based on this idea of who is “surviving well” and “surviving poorly” within the nonprofit industrial complex's idea of scarcity. This person is suffering more than this person so they can get a phone. That person isn't suffering as much so they don't get a phone. That participant frequently tries to con us of our resources so they are softly banned. In many ways, I found this practice challenging because it not only reproduced state carceral logics of proving your innocence and victimization, but it also reinforced the metrics of “surviving well” and “surviving poorly” through access to material resources. The unhoused participants also found this process challenging and often used their agency to directly ask why one person received a resource over another and whether or not these governance decisions being made were fair to everyone.Although I have qualms with how the idea of choice doesn't consider the material conditions underlying that ability to choose, I do believe we all have some form of agency when it comes to relationship building, responsibility, and accountability. System advocates, survivors, aunties, legislative folks, and unhoused folks all have some form of agency in how we show up both for and as survivors “surviving well” and “surviving poorly.” Speaking for myself personally, I have engaged in behavior centered on the idea of a survivor “surviving poorly.” I cut ties with a close friend who was in multiple ongoing abusive relationships because it reminded me of the times I felt and was trapped in abusive relationships with loved ones and my family. My sense of safety felt threatened and I enacted a boundary for my own self-preservation. And I cut off a connection to someone surviving a lot of harm. I still grapple with how I could've gone back and dealt with my friend in a more spacious and gracious way, knowing what I know now, that maybe we could've met each other where we were both at during that time. I share this not to alleviate myself of the choices I've made, but to nudge at how the idea of agency, “surviving well” and “surviving poorly,” are so intimately tied together when it comes to navigating one's own concepts of safety and boundaries. In particular, how are our own individual concepts of safe and unsafe mediated by power, access, and resources? How are concepts of “safe” and “unsafe” affected by our systems? How can our own concepts of agency be at odds with survivors “surviving poorly?”Rachel Herzing of Center for Political Education says, “. . . truth is most people most days are trying something. And I think we really need to honor and elevate the kind of everyday things that people do to intervene in situations of harm at all scales, that don't get the kind of fanfare and the attention more complicated processes sometimes get.”10When I think about the everyday things people do to intervene in harm, I think about friends and chosen family who supported me during very difficult times in ways that felt good and ways that felt bad. Whether it was activist friends warning me about serially harmful people in community spaces, to a chosen sibling buying me ramen after ending an abusive personship, to another chosen sibling asking me to stop empathizing with my abusers survivance over the harms they enacted onto me. In the end, we all were doing something to try and intervene against harm utilizing the skills we had. At the same time, these acts remind me of what it means when we all do have the agency to try and support survivors through the complexities of “surviving well” and “surviving poorly.” Some of those acts were helpful, some were not very helpful, and some were really hard to stomach.I still don't have clear cut answers on how transformative justice could intervene in instances of ongoing sexual violence or how the field of social work can be more critical of its expansion in a post-police future, but I do know everyone reading this will at some point be in intimate proximity to someone who is actively surviving sexual violence. Whether you are a transformative justice facilitator, a social worker, or a friend supporting a friend/loved one/parent/partner as they currently survive, we are all connected to survivors in some intimate way. I leave you here with a set of questions to ask yourself when in the midst of supporting survivors “surviving well” and “surviving poorly.” These questions help me move toward a working practice of transformative justice, especially when in community with survivors I find challenging. If you aren't willing to ask yourself these questions, then what do you think you are doing?