Resisting Transcarceral State Violence: Girls of Color and Trans Youth of Color at the Forefront of Building a Transformative Justice Movement

• In Event: 49.024 - Overpoliced and Underserved: Voices of Girls of Color and LGBTQ Youth on Discipline and Punishment

Abstract

Objectives: This PAR project analyzes the relationship between transformative justice and anti-sexual violence interventions organized by female and trans survivors of interpersonal, sexual, and transcarceral state violence. Transformative justice seeks to develop strategies to address intimate, interpersonal, community and structural violence from a political organizing perspective in order to move beyond state-imposed, institutionalized criminal legal and punishment systems. My primary research questions are: How do criminalized girls and trans youth of color experience interlocking forms of racialized and gendered violence? And how do they “learn in social action” (Foley, 1999) and deploy transformative justice processes to organize against violence? How can engaging in action research help to develop organizational capacity and establish effective anti-violence interventions?

Theoretical Framework: This research finds inspiration in the interdisciplinary theoretical and activist genealogies of race-radical Indigenous women and women of color feminisms (INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, 2006; James, 2000; Smith, 2005), transnational feminist prison studies (Oparah, 2005) and critical trans politics (Spade, 2011). Also informed by scholarship in feminist criminology and critical strands of popular education and social movement theory, this research focuses on the interconnected processes of informal learning, action research, and transformative justice praxis.

Methods and Data: The research is based on an ongoing participatory research project with a community-based organization for criminalized and formerly incarcerated girls and trans youth located in New York City. This project aims to advance the expertise and leadership capacity of organizational members and provide space for them to develop their own personal and collective narratives about their experiences surviving and organizing against violence. This action research project will be used as an educational tool and a pathway to support feminist anti-racist, anti-violence movement building as well as to inform policy and social service provision for female victims of both sexual and state violence. Knowledge mobilization activities developed with co-researchers center on building a research collaborative that will strengthen the policy skills and leadership capacity of girls and trans youth in the areas of violence prevention advocacy and transformative justice practice.

Conclusion: Many mainstream feminist anti-violence organizations advocate for state-driven, criminalization-based strategies and seek to intervene after interpersonal violence happens (Bumiller, 2008; Richie, 2012). This research reveals the ways in which community-based, anti-violence organizations led by survivors of both sexual and state violence, however, organize to increase safety, to dismantle structural inequalities, to abolish prisons, and to reform criminal justice polices that harm abused girls and trans youth of color, and to strengthen community accountability led by survivors and their allies.

Significance: No academic research to date has closely examined how criminalized and abused girls and trans youth facilitate transformative justice processes in their daily lives; particularly the ways in which they foreground their experiences and expertise in order to contribute to organizational and social movement capacity building as well as to larger theoretical, activist, and policy debates. This research makes a significant contribution to both feminist criminology and transnational feminist prison scholarship.

Author

• Lena Carla Palacios, City University of New York