Description

Moving Beyond Critique: Creative Interventions and Reconstructions of Community Accountability

In 2002, two new social movement organizations, Incite! Women of Color against Violence and Critical Resistance, forged a “Joint Statement on Gender Violence and the Prison Industrial Complex.” This statement mapped an emerging landscape for the transformation of underlying concepts, principles, and practices bridging the antiviolence and prison abolitionist movements. Within that space, a number of social movement initiatives, informal and institutionalized, arose with alternative responses to violence aligned with the principles and mandates set forth in this document. This article explores the efforts of one organization, Creative Interventions, which was explicitly established in 2004 to move beyond critique and to create pragmatic models, instruments, and practices embodying liberatory community-based responses to gender-based and other forms of intimate and community violence. The experiences of this organization point to some of the limits and challenges faced in the construction of on-the-ground alternatives. The entrapments of an existing gender binary paradigm and reproduction of a punitive criminal legal apparatus are among the contradictory patterns emerging in efforts to create and transcend existing antiviolence responses.

domestic violence, gender-based violence, community accountability, transformative justice

Citation: Social Justice Vol. 37, No. 4 (2010-11): 14-35.