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Transformative Justice: Beyond Carceral Responses to End Sexual Violence
Barefoot, Abigail
Barefoot, Abigail
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Abstract
Transformative justice, which is part of the prison abolition movement and predominantly used for sexual violence is a political framework. It employs community support to help survivors’ healing, offenders’ accountability, and provide community safety instead of relying on state intervention. Existing studies on transformative justice have philosophically explored its possibility as an alternative to carceral systems. Nonetheless, they have not yet systematically delved into the ways that transformative justice is practiced in everyday life. As a result, it is unclear how survivors’ experiences of sexual violence and their needs for justice are incorporated to shape and challenge transformative justice. To explore how transformative justice is imagined and practiced as an alternative to the criminal legal system, this study has employed participant observations and interviews with facilitators, victim-survivors, and people who caused harm at a transformative justice program in California. I shed light on these social actors’ dilemmas: survivor-centered approaches that do not always satisfy them, non-punitive methods that turns out to be sometimes punitive, and belief in success that is not measurable. These multiple paradoxes create ambiguity and messiness at the intersection of carceral logic and its alternatives. I argue that transformative justice challenges legal constructions of sexual violence, namely challenging an objective truth, while simultaneously creating unsolvable paradoxes for survivors, offenders, and facilitators alike. Drawing from critical carceral studies and Angela Davis’ call for abolitionist feminism, I contend that transformative justice should not be seen as the alternative solution but rather should be viewed as an opportunity to better theorize lived experience of racial and sexual minorities in the hope that experimentation is a necessary process toward the end of sexual violence and the prison system.
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Date
2022-08-31
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University of Kansas
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Women's studies, Sociology, carceral feminism, critical carceral studies, sexual violence, transformative justice