Transformative Justice is a community-based approach to end inter-personal violence. It aims to transform the perpetrators and build up accountability towards the harm that has been committed within the community. It critiques the criminal justice system as being insufficient and oppressive because of its racist, sexist, classist core. It criticises liberal conflict mediation as being insufficient in dealing with systemic oppressions and in failing to taking a stance towards challenging those systemic oppressions.
Solidarity means giving support to a stranger on their own terms; so solidarity differs from community because it is extended to strangers, and differs from philanthropy because it is given on the stranger’s own terms, not that of the giver. Solidarity is the fundamental ethic of the workers’ movement, obliging workers to support the struggles of all other oppressed people. We extend this logic to be not class-reductionist but instead develop an intersectional understanding while at the same time keeping a horizon that is abolitionist and anti-capitalist.
Transformative justice is therefore a series of practices designed to create change in social relations where harm has been committed. To build up accountability to rebuild trust and confidence based on the self-determination of communities.
It aims at alternatives to criminal justice in cases of interpersonal violence, to eventually break free from the patriarchial racial capitalism we live under.
We also find these videos by the Barnard Center for Research on Women super helpful for understanding Transformative Justice as a framework and its role in our lives:
See our resources page for more!