- [Narrator] Welcome to
a PreventConnect Podcast,
where we explore the prevention
of violence against women.
This is a project of the
California Coalition
Against Sexual Assault.
- Hello everyone, this is
Meghna Bhat from PreventConnect.
I am so excited to be here today
with Colby Lenz and Rachel Caidor.
- On today's podcast
we'll highlight the work
that Survived & Punished
has been accomplishing
and envisioning to end the cycle
of sexual and domestic violence,
and other forms of
intersexual oppressions.
So, how are you doing Rachel and Colby?
- All right.
- Good, thank you.
- Doing well? Excited to be here?
- [Both Guests Agreeing.]
- Okay great, so yeah.
To start with please tell
us a little bit about
Survived & Punished and how it originated.
- Sure. So I'll start
and then turn to Rachel,
but Survived & Punished
basically is a coming together
of various freedom campaigns for survivors
of domestic and sexual violence
who've been criminalized.
And organizations who do work
with incarcerated survivors.
So basically through conversations between
the campaign to free Nan-Hui,
the campaign to free Marissa Alexander,
and then Love & Protect which
Rachel will speak more to,
and the California Coalition
for Women Prisoners.
We came together to see what
could happen when we bring
more, you know, more people,
more organizations, more force,
behind trying to build a movement to
decarcerate and decriminalize survival.
- So, I am based in Chicago as you know.
And so Chicago's chapter
of Love & Protect which was
which came out of
the campaign to free Marissa Alexander,
the Chicago Alliance to
free Marissa Alexander,
once Marissa's case was sort of settled
we morphed into Love & Protect
which is a support committee
rather than a defense committee.
And members of Love &
Protect had been working with
members of Survived & Punished,
so what happened a couple of years ago
was there was a convening here in Chicago
called the "No Perfect Victim Convening"
that sort of brought the
folks from California
out to Chicago and we
started having sort of a
larger conversation
around the ways survivors
of domestic violence specifically,
but also sexual violence,
are being criminalized for surviving.
And so now this is a national network,
and we're thinking through ways of
whether and how to grow,
but that's where we're at right now.
- Wow, so I mean I'm sure that all this
connective organizing,
community organizing,
hasn't happened overnight.
I'm sure it needs a lot of, you know,
minds together, hands
together, you know what I mean?
Like just, you need all
these different voices.
And I think we've seen these
conversations and you know,
as I mentioned community
organizing revolving around
especially these social justice movements
and how it intersects you know,
to the cycle of gender violence.
So, the next question is how do you see
the criminalization of survival,
either through the prison
industrial complex,
or you know we talk about
school to prison pipeline,
played a role in continuing the cycle
of sexual and domestic violence?
- Well, I think that there is,
I think that we share sort of
an idea that it's a
multiple tiered situation.
First of all, we know that people are
experiencing violence inside
the criminal legal system.
And so we know that people are at risk
for being sexually assaulted,
we know overwhelmingly women especially,
or women identified people
who are incarcerated
are often already survivors of
sexual and domestic violence,
and then that trauma is being compounded
in a place where they're
being made vulnerable.
Not only vulnerable to
harm by other people
that are incarcerated,
but vulnerable to harm by
the people who work there,
guards, et cetera, et cetera.
So there is that direct level,
but what we also understand
is that prisons themselves,
the criminal legal system,
is an inherently violent apparatus, right?
And so we see that, you know,
especially those of us who work, you know,
in domestic violence and sexual violence,
are really relying on
a system that is based
on power based violence to solve a problem
addressing like, impacting people who
have already been impacted
by power based violence.
And so it's continuing that cycle
in sort of multiple ways and sort of
keeping alive this idea
in our society that
somehow prison is a solution
for either
addressing the harm that someone has done,
and/or keeping someone sort of like,
locked away from the rest of the community
where they actually can receive healing.
- Wow. So I see this...
the effort to you know,
I guess this vision of
shifting from you know,
the whole criminalization
and the whole you know,
prison as a solution to you know,
littering crime or any kind of this
but it's just going to be uhm
it doesn't help in this whole cycle right?
And kind of contributes to that and,
but the question comes to is like
who has been the most affected
in this never ending cycle of
criminalization and gender violence?
- Yeah, we believe, and
it's backed up by statistics
that women of color in particular,
and trans women of color in particular,
have been most impacted by this
intersection of criminalization
and gender violence,
racial violence, and this
continued cycle of the abuse
both as Rachel was saying in you know
what we see as more intimate partner
or community settings as well
as within the prison system.
And so all of this mimicking of the cycles
of abuse and power in
this kind of endless cycle
right the compounds all
these forms of oppression.
And certainly poor people, poor women,
and gender nonconforming people,
and immigrants both
documented and undocumented,
I think Rachel you can add in,
I think these are some of the main places
where we see people most marginalized
and disappeared into carceral systems.
- And I think specifically,
in regards to survivors of
intimate partner violence,
domestic or sexual,
people who end up appealing to like
having to defend themselves
physically from harm
are often people that have tried,
have moved through systems already
and those systems have failed them.
And then when they are
criminalized for self-defense
what it's also impacting
is a community of survivors
that recognizes that like when they like
A) these systems are not
built to protect them,
and B) that when they do
something to protect themselves,
like the very system that
we're told to appeal to
is what's going to cause
them the most harm.
And so it like I think
that like a third layer of
people impacted are those of us who are
in the social services
who then have to grapple
with this contradiction of
asking survivors to appeal
to a system that will indeed
punish them for surviving.
- So as I mentioned I know
the PreventConnect is largely
focused on primary prevention
of sexual and domestic violence.
So how do you see primary prevention
playing a role in this work?
- Like I think that those of us that do
prevention education
work especially around
sexual and domestic violence need to
really come to terms with
the reality that we are,
like a lot of our prevention
education is rooted in
a sort of like ignorance
of how we understand
addressing the harm right?
And so we do a lot of like
bystander interventions,
we do a lot of harm reduction,
we do a lot of sort of
like risk reduction things,
but we don't talk about
the fact that we are
part of the people that
put survivors in harms way
by exposing them to the system
and that's where we have to be accountable
and that's where we have
to really start thinking
through whether we are
an anti-violence movement
and then like how we're going to
teach people prevention from there,
or if we're a punishment or
retribution movement right?
And if we are thinking about
sexual violence for example
as a crime of power and control,
we can't really start
we can't really sort of
help people dismantle ideas
of power and control without
talking about the fact
that we use power and control ourselves to
"heal" or find justice.
So that's a direct kind of
prevention education thing
but there's also like helping
people understand that
we really have to be better
about like intervening
on the lives of survivors
before it escalates
to a point where they have to
defend themselves physically.
So what is going on in the
way that we are talking
to people about their experiences of harm,
that is making them, like
that is failing them right?
And that's not giving them
sort of skills or safety nets
to get out of uhm or to
sort of like minimize
abusive systems and also how
not to be abusers right like,
we're also not focusing
on the fact that you know
all of these people who are
incarcerated for surviving
are victims of someone who themself
who was probably a
survivor themself right?
And so we, we're not
sort of educating people
who may potentially be perpetrators,
and sort of like the ripple effect of
what like power based violence has on
individuals and communities.
- Thank you, yeah I think
that's a lot of like,
I think some of the
things that you addressed
is like the underlining risk factors that
you know we kind of may fail to see
or overlook while creating
our prevention approaches
or primary prevention programs.
And I think also it's
about as you mentioned,
dismantling the systemic oppression
and you know tackling the root causes,
that's going to help shift the culture
by having these dialogs
with our communities
and our you know, our members,
and our family and friends.
- [Narrator] Thank you for listening
to this PreventConnect Podcast.
PreventConnect is a project of the
California Coalition
Against Sexual Assault.
With funding from the
Centers for Disease Control Prevention.
The views presented on
PreventConnect are not
necissarily the views of the
United States government,
the CDC, or CALCASA.
To learn more about PreventConnect,
visit www.PreventConnect.org
for more information
about CALCASA's mission
or to show your support,
visit CALCASA.org
that's (spelling aloud)
C-A-L-C-A-S-A dot O-R-G.
