The following is an excerpt from their  guide for caregivers of children whose parents have been arrested or are incarcerated. 

Learn more about CLAIM's mission and services here.

To learn more about the Voice of Witness book series and oral history projects, go here.

To pre-order Inside This Place, Not of It: Narratives from Women’s Prisons, visit the McSweeney's Store

Sarah Chase’s narrative is one of the oral histories that appears in the forthcoming book Inside This Place, Not of It: Narratives from Women’s Prisons. Edited by Ayelet Waldman and Robin Levi, Inside This Place will be available in stores in October 2011 from Voice of Witness. The ninth title in the Voice of Witness series, Inside This Place reveals some of the most egregious human rights violations within women’s prisons in the United States. In their own words, the thirteen narrators in this book recount their lives leading up to incarceration and their experiences inside—ranging from forced sterilization and shackling during childbirth, to physical and sexual abuse by prison staff. Together, their testimonies illustrate the harrowing struggles for survival that women in prison must endure.

To learn more about the Voice of Witness book series and oral history projects, go here.

To pre-order Inside This Place, Not of It: Narratives from Women’s Prisons, visit the McSweeney's Store.

SARAH CHASE - 21, Currently Imprisoned

Sarah Chase sits in a prison several states away from her family, friends, and everything she has known. She keeps busy with books, crafts, and writing, but she is lonely. She was sent here because of her relationship with a guard at her previous prison. Because of her new prison’s inaccessibility and the high cost of phone calls, Sarah shared her story with us through letters and one short phone call. She described her experiences of childhood neglect and brutal rape, and how, in 2007, she was sentenced to twenty years to life for the murder of her stepmother. In one letter, Sarah included a picture of herself. It showed a petite young woman with large eyes and very long blonde hair, wearing prison sweats and smiling cautiously at the camera. In this excerpt, Sarah describes the events leading up to her incarceration.

I WAS NUMB TO THE WORLD

The summer I was fourteen, after a three-day binge on meth where I hadn’t slept, my stepmother told me that she was taking me to get drug tested and that I was going to jail, so I ran next door to stay with my best friend’s mom. My best friend wasn’t there at the time—he was in California with his aunt and uncle. I would smoke weed with her, sometimes several times a day. One day, my friend’s mom also allowed her forty-seven-year-old uncle to start shooting me up with meth—I had never shot up before—and then he raped me. For the next week they shot me up and raped me over and over. Then they sold me to their drug dealer to pay for drugs. He watched my friend’s mom do things to me, and I had to do stuff to him and sleep with him. As brutal as the rapes were physically, psychologically I suffered the deepest wounds that would take years to heal.

Once, when I was being raped, some friends of my rapists saw what was going on and went next door to my stepmom. They told her where I was and what was happening to me, but she just told them to leave. Then she pretended not to know where I was or what was happening to me. She even called the police asking if they’d found me yet, saying that she knew something bad was happening to me and that they just had to find me. And all the while she knew I was next door, being raped.

The people who my stepmother turned away went to the police, but unfortunately one had a warrant out for her arrest, and she was put in jail. Two days later, the police came to get me. By then I’d been at that house for six days, and I believe I was totally brainwashed or something, because when the police came, I was protecting the people who had done horrible things to me. I actually had it in my head that my rapists were trying to protect me from my dad and stepmom, and that they cared about me. I was messed up. After the police got me, I was placed in a foster home for several weeks, and finally I was released to live with my sister Mary in Sparks, Nevada. I’d just turned fifteen. I was so messed up from the rapes that I had no respect for myself. I was embarrassed, ashamed, and blamed myself for it all. I was numb to the world. I dressed trashy and would sit at bus stops waiting until a stranger would come by and pick me up. I didn’t care if anything happened to me. I also started having blackouts at that time.

I was spun out when I showed up for my court date about the rapes. The judge ordered me to be detained until I could get into treatment for both the drug abuse and the rapes. So I was then taken to Western Nevada Regional Youth Center, where I stayed for three months in an empty cell. I was locked down for twenty-three hours a day, awaiting an open bed at Spring Mountain Treatment Center in Las Vegas, Nevada. Then a bed opened and I was transported to Las Vegas, where I spent the next year.

During that time, the post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from the rapes caused me to have night terrors, flashbacks that resembled seizures. I had conversations I have no memory of, and blackouts where I would get violent. Other girls at the treatment center would make comments and then I would freak out and beat them up. Afterward I’d have no memory of any of it.

I punched walls and doors, bloodying my hands. At night when I was asleep, I would claw at my private parts and be screaming and thrashing around, and staff would have to wake me up. The medications were not helping. I had one good counselor, and she had me do packets from a book on PTSD, and that really helped me. The packets were designed to help me deal with guilt, denial, blame, anger, mistrust, feelings of hopelessness and self-hate. It made me draw pictures and remember details that I desperately wanted to forget, but it made me see things clearer and feel confident that I could protect myself in the end. I pretty much had no choice but to get over it. I was tired. I wanted to be happy.

I THOUGHT THIS WAS HOW THE REST OF MY LIFE WOULD BE

I was released at sixteen years old back to my father, and I was still on probation. For the most part I tried to stay clean and sober, but I was not happy. I really didn’t have friends at that point, and the trial for the rapes was starting.
We lived in a small farm town with a few horse ranches around. When I was seventeen my dad and I got into a big fight about a horse that was supposed to be mine, but that he had put in his name. I don’t think I’d ever seen my dad that mad. I left the house and went to my boyfriend’s, and then I got a call from my dad saying I needed to pack up all my stuff and get out of his house. He said I needed to be home in ten minutes to do that or else. I was really, really scared. I don’t know why, but I had a bad feeling that my dad was going to hurt me, so I asked my brother to come with me.

I made it exactly on time, but my dad told me that he’d already spoken to my probation officer because I hadn’t got there within ten minutes, and that I was going to be locked up. All that was going through my mind was the last time I was locked up and how horrible it was. I don’t remember anything after that. I blacked out, like I did after I was raped. The next thing I remember is being in my parents’ room inside the house, holding a gun from my boyfriend’s house. My ears were ringing so bad and my stepmom was on the floor. I went to the church where my grandparents used to go, and I think I blacked out again. The next thing I remember is crawling through fences from the police.

As soon as the cops came to get me, I got to see how I would be viewed and treated for the rest of my life. I was dragged through the gravel in front of the house, even though I no longer had the gun and I wasn’t resisting. The cops told my dad that they would do anything and everything to make sure that I got the max.

I was seventeen years old, I was terrified, I had no clue what was going to happen to me, and I had absolutely no one fighting for me. I was taken to county jail. In county the cops were horrible to me. For the first couple of weeks I was kept in a rubber cell, with only a mattress, a blanket, and a roll of toilet paper. There wasn’t even a toilet, only a hole in the ground. I slept on the mattress on the ground, and sewage would rise up on the floor. Ants would crawl all over the ground and all over me, not to mention the bugs that would crawl up from the hole in the ground. When I was let out at night to shower, the porters would clean the rubber room with ammonia and bleach together, and the cops would put me back in there. I would be coughing and choking and I’d hear them laughing.

The worst thing was that one of the men who raped me when I was fourteen was in the jail that was housed right next to me. For two weeks, the cops would let him yell at me and taunt me. There was only one cop who treated me well. I wanted someone to be nice to me, so I didn’t care why he was doing it. He would stand out of the camera’s view and he’d put his hands through the bars and touch my breasts, or put his hands down my pants. Sometimes he’d take me to another room without a camera and “pat search” me, feeling all over me and inside me, but the room was right by other officers, so we didn’t have sex. In December 2007 I was sentenced as an adult for first- degree murder. Everyone told me that if I didn’t take a deal I would get one hundred years for shooting and killing my stepmother, so I pled guilty. The trial judge gave me twenty years to life.

The women’s prison is in southern Nevada, so women in northern Nevada who are sentenced to prison are taken to the men’s prison first to await transportation to the women’s prison. For eight days, me and an old lady sat in a cell with nothing. We were given dirty orange jumpsuits to wear, and we never got to change them. The room was freezing, and the blankets didn’t keep us warm; they were dirty and had holes. We had nothing to properly bathe ourselves, no way to comb our hair. The cell was disgusting, and we were locked in it 24/7. The officers would ignore us altogether or call us whiny, needy bitches if we asked for anything. It really scared me, because I thought this was how the rest of my life would be.  

The authors of From The Big House To Your House preface their cookbook with the following welcome:

“ This book is the result of our cooking experiences while confined at the Mountain View Unit, a woman’s prison in Gatesville, Texas. We met and bonded in the G-3 dorm, housing only prisoners with a sentence in excess of 50 years. While there isn’t much freedom to be found when incarcerated, using the commissary to cook what YOU want offers a wonderful avenue for creativity and enjoyment! We hope these recipes will ignite your taste buds as well as spark your imagination to explore unlimited creations of your own! We encourage you to make substitutions to your individual tastes and/or availability of ingredients. We are confident that you will enjoy the liberty found in creating a home-felt comfort during unfortunate times. Happy Cooking!”

Barbara, Celeste, Ceyma, Louanne, Tina Marie, and Trenda proceed to share over two hundred creative paths to comfort food. They transform crushed potato chips, sandwich cookie crème filling, powdered milk, cream cheese packets, and chili seasoning into snacks, dips, desserts, and even complete meals. The spicy gumbo they concoct entirely from commissary purchases is an especially impressive feat, as they create six servings of a meal so elaborate that its preparation is daunting even with unlimited ingredient availability.

While Zesty Tuna Tacos. Mississippi Mud Cakes, and Sweet Rice Casseroles fill the pages of From the Big House to Your House , the collection shares much more than the ingredient lists and instructions of a typical cookbook. On each page, the authors include small, unassuming fact boxes. These “Did You Know?” installments appear after every recipe, revealing harsh realities of the systems that have inspired these whimsical cooking projects.

Some entries cite newspapers and legal journals; just after we learn to make potato salad with jalapeno chips and mustard, we discover that, according to the New York Times, more prisoners than ever are now serving life terms. Almost 9.000 of these inmates are incarcerated in the authors’ home state, Texas.

Most entries in the “Did You Know?” series, however, come directly from the authors’ experiences in the G-3 dorm of the Mountain View Unit at Gatesville. These glimpses into life at the Unit , like the recipes, reveal a struggle to work within the confines of extreme restriction. In one entry, we learn “Inmates can share food in the chow hall as longs as they are seated at the same table. They are not allowed to share food in the dorm even if they are seated at the same table.” And right at the ends of a Zesty Tuna Taco recipe, we learn “Inmates are not allowed to talk in the bedroom are not allowed to talk in front of the TV. They haven’t quite figured out where in the dorm the are allowed to talk.” In fact, the cookbook shows us that we can’t quite figure out any example of behavior that doesn’t break some rule.

Barbara, Celeste, Ceyma, Louanne, Tina Marie, and Trenda document survival in an environment where “appropriate” behavior has been all but legislated out of existence by arbitrary and inconsistent laws. And while the recipes invite readers to imagine themselves within this system, their accompanying facts inspire us to challenge and critique it. Ultimately, these women make Lemon Coconut Bars and fun facts tell a very complicated, compelling story.

From The Big House To Your House can be purchased here or here.
 

Allegations of rape and sexual violence of political prisoners by authorities began to emerge after the Islamic Republic of Iran was established in 1979 and have continued, to varying degrees, to the present. However, not surprisingly, there is no reliable estimate of the number of prisoners raped in the Islamic Republic’s prisons; no data or comprehensive report has ever been compiled that portrays the full scope of sexual violence in Iran’s prisons. The reasons are simple: few rape victims are willing to speak about their experiences due to (1) government pressure and acquiescence, and (2) social stigma. Iranian authorities have and continue to acquiesce to rapes of prisoners by guards and interrogators who use rape to crush detainees' spirits, inflict humiliation, discourage their dissent, force them to confess to crimes, and ultimately to intimidate them and others.

Rape is always traumatic and has long-term physical, psychological and social effects on victims. Understandably, this means that many victims are unable to publicly acknowledge their experiences, even many years later.1 Many have never even told their families. Given these circumstances, therefore, it is very likely that the few witnesses who have come forward to report rapes they witnessed and experienced in Iranian prisons represent only a small percentage of the total number of cases.

This report documents the ordeals of five former prisoners – two women and three men. They span the almost 30 years of the Islamic Republic’s existence. Four witnesses were raped; one was threatened with rape and saw rape victims. Three of the rape victims were politically active, one in the early days of the revolution and the other two during the last few years. All experienced overtly violent and gang rape. One of the victims in addition to being ganged raped, was sexually exploited by a guard. All were traumatized and some considered suicide...

Rev. Melissa Mummert is the lead producer and driving force behind the film. She has been and continues to be a strong advocate for people who are incarcerated and their families. Melissa is known for her first award winning film Perversion of Justice, in which she told the story of Hamedah Hasan, a woman who received two life sentences for her first non-violent drug offense.

Life Without can be purchased for individual or educational use at http://www.LifeWithoutMovie.com
 

Life Without (2011) Trailer from Jessie Whitman on Vimeo.

Forgiving one self. Why is it so hard to do?
How is it something so simple sounding can
Be so hard and complex? There are things in my life,
Big things, that have happened,Some being my fault, and
Some not. Certain events
With certain outcomes I had
Nothing to do with, but yet
Felt responsible for… It’s
An interesting quandary, one
I’d like to examine out loud,
Out of sheer puzzlement and objectivity,
Forgiving one self seems so
Obvious and telling someone
Else to just “forgive themselves”
Is so easy. But why, as an
Individual, do I have such a
Hard time, just forgiving myself
And letting go? So easy to
Say, so hard to accomplish!

At times, I’ve actually picked
Up baggage (or/garbage) that
Wasn’t even mine (and by baggage
I mean something bad, wrong, broken,
Or heavy ‘an issue’) and I’ve
Found myself traveling great
Distances with it, even though
It continually obscures and intrudes
On everything I do. I will go to
Great lengths to accommodate this
Bulky, oversized luggage, although
I get absolutely nothing positive
Back from it. It serves absolutely
No real purpose, it only pains me,
And when I realize it, when it finally
Becomes clear to me that I’m dragging
This stuff around with me for no reason,
I simply set it down and walk away,
Feeling lighter and free. Unobstructed
And capable, and I wonder if its that
Easy, what took me so long, just to let go?
Something that hurts me makes me
Tired and intolerant, yet I lug it
Around like its an actual appendage!?
How strange is that? Is it that obvious
To others? When I could just set
It down, and leave it, move on? That’s
How I tend to see self-forgiveness.

It’s truly a simple conscious
Act of just letting go of the hurt, the pain
Of something that wasn’t in our control
And never will be. Why should
Someone feel responsible for
Something that’s wrong, that’s
Over, or that’s in the past?
Something that can’t be altered? It’s
Like getting mad at a statue!
What’s the point? And if you
Catch yourself doing it. You’d
Be embarrassed at your own goofiness.

So what is it that makes it so
Hard to forgive ourselves? It’s the
Most valuable present we could
Ever give ourselves, to our loved
Ones, to our futures, and
It’s free, it’s freeing. It’s
A valuable asset that can
pass through for generations. You
can actually give it to
others, by taking for yourself.
Are you hauling baggage around
With you, letting it affect the
Color of your life. Is there a heavy
Issue you lug around that crowds
Your space? Every once in a while
Let it be OK to just set it down and
Walk away. Let it go, just let it be
And see who you can be without it!

You deserve it, I deserve it, your
Kids and family deserve it.
Just know you can’t change
The past, but you can affect
The future. It could be the
Easiest weight you ever lost.
But if you must yell at statues
Don’t be like me and get caught.
 

This last weekend was the second time I’ve gone with him to visit women’s prisons in central California. Valley State Prison for Women and Central California Women’s Facility are across the street from one another out in the fields near Chowchilla. Bland, concrete structures, they look a lot like my junior high school had its chain link fences been topped with razor wire and surveyed by guard towers.

Being in prison is like being in a hellish version of junior high school—where your every movement is monitored and controlled, subject to the prison version of a hall pass, called ‘duckets’—a word which I find extremely irritating for some reason, maybe because I suspect it’s really supposed to be ‘dockets’? I don’t know—of all the humiliations and assaults of prison it’s probably the least significant, but still it bugs me.

Although I’ve been arrested and jailed numerous times for political actions, I’ve never served time in prison. “Short time is hard time,” one of the lifer women told me. When you’re in for life, or for a long time, as many of these women are, something happens to you. Your ties to the outside world fade, and the prison becomes your world. You let go of the hopes and dreams you once had, and find new, smaller things to hope for within the narrow world to which you are confined.

All the more reason why these celebrations and moments of spiritual commitment take on a greater importance, here, than they do for us outside. When we have infinite opportunities to revel in flowers or dance on the grass or connect with those who share our spirituality, we get blasé. “Maybe I’ll go to the ritual—maybe I’ll stay home and watch kitty videos on YouTube.”

In prison, if you’re Pagan, you might get a chance to connect once or twice a year. If you are Christian, of course, there are weekly services, Bible study groups, special programs, Christian Alcoholics Anonymous meetings—but if you’re Pagan, your religious rights to meet, to study, to learn about your tradition, to celebrate your holidays and practice your tradition are not generally respected. Patrick and others have fought major battles to gain the limited access we have, and although he is recognized as a chaplain by the State of California, he still has trouble bringing in ritual supplies, books, or volunteers.

I went with Patrick and Johanna and Tiki from the Pagan Alliance. http://thepaganalliance.org/. To get down to Chowchilla by 9 am, we need to leave the Bay Area by 6 am, which means waking up at something like 4:30 am, which is something I try never to do. I don’t take 6 am planes or go power jogging before dawn, and I’m not one of those writers who like to work in the wee hours of the morning. Back in the ‘80s, when we were doing some of those political actions mentioned above, we’d wake up at 4 am to get into place to blockade early workers at nuclear plants. Since then, I’ve grown to favor actions that start at noon. But waking up that early is inextricably linked, in my mind, with going to jail, still, so it seems appropriate.

At VSPW, they have ‘lost’ our paperwork, which Patrick has dutifully submitted and had approved. They’ve also moved us out of the gym and field so they can set up for a Christian group’s dedication of a new, interfaith outdoor chapel which is still days away. However, the warden showed up and intervened, not only putting us back in the gym but actually helping to carry in the Maypole! (Which Patrick has constructed from plastic pipes, so it’s light.) However, while 160 women have asked to come to the ceremony, only about forty actually have gotten their duckets and been allowed to come. There are a surprising number of Pagans in prison—Patrick estimates something like 20,000 in the U.S. Most of them become Pagan while they’re incarcerated. While the numbers of Christians are higher, the Pagans have some of the highest numbers of active, participating members of any religious group—and are among the least served, with no paid chaplains and endless barriers for volunteers.

For me, it’s especially heartbreaking to see so many women locked up for life, or for very long sentences. Many, many of them were arrested as teenagers and tried as adults when they were sixteen or seventeen years old—a practice which is, in my mind, itself criminal and unjust. Teenagers are not adults and do not yet have adult understanding—not just of their actions and consequences but also of what their rights are, how the legal system works and how to negotiate it. The most common reasons they’re there are drugs, getting caught up in their boyfriends’ drug deals and attacking or killing a pimp or a rapist. They end up with heavy sentences, sometimes, out of loyalty—they won’t rat out the boyfriend while the men have less compunction about throwing the women under the bus. In prison, boyfriends and husbands generally stop visiting after around six months. Women connected to male prisoners visit them for years.

The women themselves created our ritual. They asked me to invoke the Goddess, and I called in the She Who Blesses All Forms of Love. One reason prisoners embrace Paganism is that we accept people as they are. We think sexuality is a good thing—including gay sexuality, and we tell people that they are children of the Goddess, who loves them even if they might have messed up badly at some point in life. Even in prison, you can continue to grow and develop spiritually, to serve the Goddess and to serve the community. And a number of the women have stepped up to learn how to create and priestess rituals.

We set up the Maypole in the center of the running track. After some time spent untangling the ribbons, which the wind had whipped into a tangle, we danced. I had to sit down for a while—between the blazing heat, the early morning, the lunch of Complete Carbohydrates—veggies and dip, French fries, a biscuit and cake—I was having a bad blood-sugar moment. It was beautiful to watch the dance, however, and see how much the women enjoyed it—the hilarity of moving in and out, under and over, mostly getting it slightly wrong but nonetheless the ribbons weave. Then it was time to go.

Between the heat and the stress, we were nearly comatose by the time we got to our hotel. We went out for Mexican food with Sister Mary Ann, who is the Catholic Chaplain at CCWF, where we were going the next day. Sister Mary Ann is a true Christian—dedicated to the women and the work, selfless, and very supportive of Patrick and all our efforts. She reminded me of the many wonderful nuns, priests and ministers I’ve met through the years, especially when I was teaching at Matthew Fox’s institute back in the ’80s and ‘90s. We may hold different beliefs, but we share common values.

But our visit to CCWF did not go well. Again, they had ‘lost’ our paperwork—this time, five separate copies of our event package which Sister Mary Ann had personally delivered to five separate officials. The warden was not on site on a Saturday—nor were other personnel who could have okayed the event. The Watch Commander, who could have authorized it, said “No way.” We were allowed in as visitors—which meant a much more exhaustive process of listing every single thing we were wearing or carrying. Tiki’s underwire bra would not go through the metal detector, and she had to go out, change into a bathing suit, and put up with snide comments about her breasts. But, we got in, though Patrick was quietly fuming while being ever so polite to everyone.

We met in the Chapel, where about twenty of the sixty or so women who had asked to come were assembled. The group at CCWF had been much, much larger—but the prison had systematically transferred out anyone whom they identified as a Pagan leader, so it’s now slowly recovering. We weren’t allowed to bring in our Maypole, our flowers or any of the ritual food we’d brought, but we had ourselves.

We set up a simple altar with materials on hand, and I led a grounding and taught some basic energetic exercises. We talked with the women and had time to do some counseling one on one, while four volunteers went to get our lunch from the food service.

Then suddenly we got word that the Watch Commander had stopped our food volunteers and sent back the carts, while throwing three of them into Administrative Detention—‘the hole’—for doing what they’d been asked to do. Sister Mary Ann was now in trouble for supporting us, and we needed to go before the rest of the women also got into trouble. While Christians get rewarded for attending their services, and their faith is a mark in their favor at parole hearings, Pagans run huge risks. They can get written up, they are often threatened or persecuted, and their faith can be used against them in parole hearings and earn them years more jail time. Nevertheless, they still come.

So we left, going back out through the succession of control points and sally ports. At the visitor’s gate, we had to confirm that every single earring and hair ornament we’d brought in was accounted for. Unfortunately, one of us had lost track of her Chapstick. That resulted in frantic calls back to the chapel—and Patrick eventually went back in to find it while we waited. He came back, at last, triumphantly bearing the ‘contraband’, and we got out. Luckily, one of the chapel clerks had found it—just as the Watch Commander was about to order the guards to put us all into Administrative Detention until they ‘investigated’ the incident.

The world always looks brighter when you get out of jail—even after a short visit. But any encounter with the system always makes me angry. I’m angry at the discrimination Pagan prisoners face, and I’m even more angry at the system as a whole, which targets poor people and people of color so disproportionately. The prison industrial complex has become a profit-making industry, a new form of slavery. Instead of rehabilitating and reintegrating offenders, it creates a permanent underclass. Draconian sentencing laws, the ‘War on Drugs’ which is really a war on poor people who use drugs, especially people of color, the whole punitive orientation of our society means we in the U.S. imprison more people than any other country in the world.

Fighting for prisoners’ religious rights is just one small way to challenge some of the injustices inherent in the system. Patrick has been carrying the ball for many years now, and has spent tens of thousands of dollars of his own money doing it. He has important court cases making their way upward through the system. Check out his website, below, and if you can support him with a small donation, that will be a huge help.

When Pagans get our rights, everyone gets their rights!

Patrick’s website:

http://www.patrickmccollum.org/

Retrieved from: http://starhawksblog.org/?p=472 (copyright Starhawk (c) 2011, used by permission)

With poetry, you can express your thoughts and release your feelings in a very few words. It can help you reach out and feel less alone. And because so many women have had the reality of their experiences denied or ignored, writing your life story can be a way of putting the record straight and taking chargeof your life.

Introduction

This book was written for you. Of course, I don’t know who you are and the women who wrote the poems and life stories in this book don’t know you personally. But we decided it was important to share what some women have thought and felt about their lives and about self-harm, in the hope that their experiences will mean something to you. And whatever your relationship to self-harm might be, maybe these women’s words will encourage you to write your own story.Writing can be a good way to explore, and show, what’s going on inside of you. As Anne-Marie, one of the poets in this book, told me, ‘Writing helps me make sense of my emotions, helps me understand how I feel. It helps me communicate and offload’. And as Anne Frank* wrote in her diary, ‘Paper is more patient than people’. The piece of paper you write your thoughts on won’t tell you that you’re stupid, wrong, or ‘crazy’ and it won’t say ‘That didn’t happen’ or ‘You didn’t see that’.

With poetry, you can express your thoughts and release your feelings in a very few words. It can help you reach out and feel less alone. And because so many women have had the reality of their experiences denied or ignored, writing your life story can be a way of putting the record straight and taking chargeof your life.

As a poet, I write about issues that are important to me – about being a woman, about being the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, about the mental health system. I also help others to write what they want to and for the past eight years I have been running creative writing workshops in prisons. I was inspired to do this work by Mark, who had been in prison for a long time when I met him and who taught me how writing was his freedom. He taught me that no-one can lock up your mind, no-one can dictate where your imagination can and can’t take you.I do the work I do because I want us as women to feel good about ourselves and I want us to have places where we can speak openly and honestly about our lives. This is an essential part of building a future where women are no longer mistreated, put-down, abused or seen as ‘less than’. I also want women to have safe outlets for painful feelings, so that no woman would feel a need to hurt herself.

Many women in and out of prison self-harm. Although only 5% of prisoners in this country are female, women account for almost 50% of reported cases of self-harm in prison. As women, we’re not born wanting to hurt ourselves, not born feeling bad about ourselves or struggling to let our feelings out. But things happen to us that leave us feeling that we deserve to be hurt, just for being female and for being young or Black or poor or any of the other identities women have.There are, of course, many ways a woman can hurt herself. Feeling like she’s worthless might mean that she ends up in a series of abusive relationships or numbs herself with drugs, alcohol and other addictions.

For some women, injuring themselves seems like the only way to deal with painful emotions, the only way to get through their life or through their time in prison. When I was employed by the Writers in Prison Network to be a writer- in-residence in a women’s prison, women told me over and over again about their early experiences of abuse, humiliation, abandonment, violence or threats of violence – experiences that left them with unbearable feelings that seemed impossible to face. One result of these experiences is that women blame themselves and hurt themselves before someone else can.This book is an example of women writing the truth about their lives. I met all of the women in prison and they wrote their poems and stories in my workshops or whilst working one-to-one with me. Their experiences are sometimes painful to read but I hope you’ll find it inspiring to learn what other women have survived. Maybe you’ll be encouraged to write your story.

On pages 58–66, I offer some ideas to help you find a way into writing and also for dealing safely with feelings that may come up as you write.Why not have a go?

Ann-Marie // An Outlet for Pain

I was roughly twelve when I first self-harmed. I still have half the letter M (for Mum) on my left shoulder. It was about the time I was being sexually abused by my uncle.

I wanted and needed an outlet for all the anger and pain I was feeling inside.I broke a bottle and cut a letter M. I was a bit scared to do it, I thought it would be painful. I managed to somehow turn off mentally to the pain. I was surprised that I actually felt good during and after I’d done it.

Prison has actually helped by talking to other self-harmers who’ve stopped. I don’t do it that often any more. I mainly do it when I’m angry or very low in mood. I don’t worry about my scars. If I’m asked, I tell people honestly howI’ve got them.

Writing helps because I’m able to express my feelings in a positive way. I would love to be a non self-harmer now.I’m going to try. I would like to be able to encourage others to stop.

Shut

I learnt

to slice

to cut

to help

my mind’s thoughts

shut.

Mohawk // I Never Forget

I am gay and have known it from very young. I lived in a very small village up North. The only people to talk to were either your parents or your doctor or anyone at school you could trust.I started cutting at fourteen. I needed to meet other gay people. I got taunted at school so I would go to the toilets and cut the tops of my arms with a compass. I had no-one to talk to about my sexuality, certainly not my parents as they made it perfectly clear being gay was disgusting.

At first, I cut out of anger. This is the time when the blade came out – it gave me the release that I needed. I do believe that if I had had someone to talk to at fourteen, the self-harm would not have been as bad.This should have been picked up at the age of fourteen but I hid my scars well so no one noticed. My family let me down by not noticing the signs, like the difference in my behaviour at that young age.

At fifteen, I was brutally beaten up by a large gang of men because of my sexuality. I was left for dead in a bus shelter. I was hospitalized for three months on a ventilator because I took all the blows to my face and neck and I was barely able to breathe. I lost twelve weeks of my life in hospital.As I recovered, I changed as a person. I was full of hatred and anger. I had become one of them. The self-harming became worse and worse and the deeper I cut the better I felt.

I went out and bought three knives, which I used on myself and intended to use on my attackers. At fifteen, I was too young to get my revenge but I’d think, One day, just one day.Seven months later, (I was now sixteen years old), I was raped. Everything now had been taken away from me, even my purity. Self-harming became my best friend.

I reaped revenge and I am now paying for it. I go through different stages of self-harm to get release. If I do not self- harm, someone else would be on the receiving end.I can’t say prison makes it worse because I have lived with those two incidents for twenty nine years, day in and day out. I go to bed every night and cry at what happened to me. I tend to self-harm at night when all is quiet and there are not too many people to stop me. I’ve had two near death experiences by self-harming because I lost so much blood. I have tried coping strategies but to no avail. It only needs one slight thing to trigger me off.

I am now classed as unpredictable, violent and dangerous and I do agree, but the two incidents that happened to me changed me. I never forgive and I never forget.My left arm is so bad I now have crevices in it from top to bottom, like driving on a bumpy road. I try to cover them up with tattoos but I keep on self-harming so it’s impossible to cover them. It’s like being a junkie. You just get hooked and there’s no going back.

During the last decade, the growing movement toward prison abolition, coupled with mounting recognition of the need for community responses to gender violence, has led to increased interest in developing alternatives to government policing. Moving away from the notion of women as victims in need of police protection, grassroots groups, and activists are organizing community alternatives to calling 911. Such initiatives, however, are not new. Throughout the twentieth century, women have organized alter- native models of self-protection. This piece examines past and present models of women’s community self-defense practices against violence. By exploring the wide-ranging methods women across the globe have employed to protect themselves, their loved ones, and communities, this piece seeks to contribute to current conversations on promoting safety and account- ability without resorting to state-based policing and prisons.

Storytelling to connect past, present, and future

Connecting past efforts to current initiatives allows us to both envision a future in which police and prisons are not the sole solutions to gender violence and to know that such possibilities can – and, in some small pockets, do or did – exist. In 2004, Mimi Kim launched Creative Interventions, a resource center to promote community-based responses to interpersonal violence. Recognizing that, while activ- ists and others are increasingly embracing the idea of community-based accountability as an alternative to the police, many have difficulty envisioning what accountability processes might look like. The group developed STOP (StoryTelling and Organizing Project), a resource for people to share their experiences with community-based accountability models and interventions to domestic violence, family violence, and sexual abuse. ‘In a lot of ways, we are building a long, long history of everyday people trying to end violence in ways that don’t play into oppressive structures,’ she stated (Huang, 2008, p. 60).

In their 2001 statement on gender violence and incarceration, Critical Resistance and INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence challenged communities to not only come up with ways to creatively address violence, but also to document these processes: ‘Transformative practices emerging from local communities should be documented and disseminated to promote collective responses to violence’ (Critical Resistance and INCITE! 2001). By connecting past and current organizing initiatives from across the globe, ‘Where Abolition Meets Actions’ hopes to contribute to the conversations around safety and abolition as well as inspires readers to organize in their own communities.

The 1970s (women’s liberation: defending themselves and each other)

Women’s liberation movements of the 1970s allowed women to begin talking openly about their experiences of sexual assault. Discussions led to a growing realization that women need to take their safety into their own hands and fight back. Some women formed street patrols to watch for and prevent violence against women. In Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, members of Women’s Liberation group Cell 16 began patrolling the streets where women often left their factory jobs after dark.

‘We were studying Tae Kwan Do and decided to intentionally patrol, offering to accompany women to their cars or to public transportation,’ recalled former Cell 16 member Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. ‘The first time two of us went to the nearby factory to offer our services to women workers, the first woman we approached looked terrified and hurried away. We surmised that my combat boots and army surplus garb were intimidating, so after that I dressed more conventionally.’ Later efforts were better received: Dunbar-Ortiz recalled that one night Cell 16 members met Mary Ann Weathers, an African-American woman, at a film screening. ‘After the film we introduced ourselves and told her we provided escorts for women. We asked her if she would like us to walk her home, as it was near midnight.

Mary Ann Weathers, who joined our group, marveled over the bizarre and wonderful experience of having five white women volunteer to protect her’ (Dunbar-Ortiz, 2001, p. 136). Dunbar-Ortiz also recalled that she traveled around the country speaking and encouraging women to form similar patrols. Students at Iowa State University and the University of Kentucky responded, forming patrols on their campus. The lack of police and judicial response to gender violence led to increasing recog- nition that women needed to learn to physically defend themselves from male violence. In 1969, Cell 16 established Tae Kwan Do classes for women. Unlike existing police offered self-defense classes that promoted fear rather than empowerment, Cell 16’s classes challenged students to draw the connections between their learned sense of helplessness and their role in society as women (Lafferty & Clark, 1970, pp. 96–97).

In 1974, believing that all people had the right to live free from violence and recognizing that women were often disproportionately impacted by violence, Nadia Telsey and Annie Ellman started Brooklyn Women’s Martial Arts (BWMA) in New York City. ‘I have felt that it [self-defense] is connected to self-determination,’ stated Ellman. ‘We wanted to take our training into our own hands to prevent and avoid violence. We developed programs to reflect and understand that many people who came to our program were oppressed not just because they were women; there were multiple oppressions going on and we felt it was important to address them all.’ By the mid-1970s, the concept of women’s self-defense had become so popular that the demand for training sometimes exceeded the number of available instructors. A 1975 issue of Black Belt Woman, a feminist martial arts publication, ran an ad for certified women teachers by the Meechee Dojo in Minneapolis to fill the daily requests for self-defense workshops by schools, community groups, and continuing education programs (Lehmann, 1975, p. 19).

The idea of women taking training into their own hands to protect them from violence did not dissolve after the 1970s. Some of the programs and schools founded in the 1970s, such as the BWMA (renamed the Center for Anti-Violence Education or CAE in 1989) and Feminists in Self-Defense Training (FIST) in Olympia, Washing- ton, continue teaching women’s self-defense today. Women’s groups that emerged in later decades also took on the task of teaching women to defend themselves.

In 1992, women in Taos, New Mexico, responded to police indifference to gender violence by forming the Taos Women’s Self-Defense Project. Within two years, the Project had taught self-defense to over 400 women, presenting classes in public schools, busi- nesses and health departments (Giggans, 1994, p. 41). Although much of the 1970s rhetoric and organizing around gender violence presupposed that women were attacked by strangers, women also recognized and organized against violence perpetrated by those that they know, including spouses and intimate partners. In Neu-Isenburg, a small town near Frankfurt, Germany, a group of women called Fan-Shen decided that, rather than establish a shelter for battered women, they would force the abuser out of the house. When a battered woman called the local women’s shelter, the group arrived at her home to not only confront her abuser, but also occupy the house as round-the-clock guards to the woman until her abuser moved out. When the strategy was reported in 1977, Fan-Shen had already been successful in five instances (‘Women’s Patrol,’ 1977, p. 18).

Anti-violence organizing in communities of color Women’s Liberation groups were not the only ones to recognize the need for alterna- tive models of preventing gender violence. Communities of color in the USA also developed methods to ensure women’s safety without relying on a system that has historically ignored their safety or further threatened it by using gender violence as a pretext for increased force, brutality, and mass incarceration against community members.

In 1979, when Black women were found brutally murdered in Boston’s primarily Black Roxbury and Dorchester neighborhoods, residents organized the Dorchester Green Light Program. The program provided identifiable safe houses for women who were threatened or assaulted on the streets. Program coordinators, who lived in Dorchester, visited and spoke at community groups and gatherings in their areas. Residents interested in opening their homes as safe houses filled out applications, which included references and descriptions of the house living situation. The program screened each application and checked the references. Once accepted, the resident attended orientation sessions, which included self-defense instruction. They were then given a green light bulb for their porch light; when someone was at home, the green light was turned on as a signal to anyone in trouble. Within eight months, over 100 safe houses had been established (Dejanikus & Kelly, 1979, p. 7).

At a 1986 conference on ending violence against women at UCLA, Beth Richie spoke about a community-based intervention program in East Harlem, a New York neighborhood that was predominantly Black and Latino. Community residents orga- nized to take responsibility for women’s safety. ‘Safety watchers’ visited the house when called by the abused person or the neighbors. They encouraged the abuser to leave; if the abuser refused, the watchers stayed in the house. Their presence prevented further violence, at least while they were present. ‘Beth feels violence will probably continue but community consciousness has been raised,’ noted one confer- ence attendee. ‘In these communities, people do not call the police fearing more violence from the police. Men are not going to jail because the communities are work- ing together’ (Bustamante, 1986, p. 14).

Precedents and influences Women’s collective action and organizing to protect themselves and each other did not originate in the 1970s. In fact, some of the methods that emerged during the 1970s had been utilized by women’s groups of the past. In the 1920s, as more women began working in Shanghai’s cotton mills, they formed jiemei hui or sisterhood societies. In addition to providing acceptable ways for women to spend time together in a gender-segregated society, the jiemei hui also offered protection to their members. Local hoodlums gathered at the mill gates and seized women’s wages on paydays; on ordinary days, they collected money by ‘strip- ping a sheep’ (robbing a woman of her clothes and selling them for money). Female gangsters specialized in the lucrative business of kidnapping young girls to sell to brothels or as future daughters-in-law. Sexual abuse was a pervasive threat: many workers had family members or friends who had been raped, beaten, or kidnapped by neighborhood hoodlums. Members of sisterhoods walked together to and from the mills to protect each other from harassment and attacks. The number of jiemei hui increased during the Japanese occupation of Shanghai when women faced the addi- tional threat of assault by Japanese soldiers (Honig, 1997, p. 490).

During the same period, another form of women’s communal self-defense emerged in rural China. During the uneasy alliance between the Kuomintang (Nation- alist Party) and the Communists during the 1920s, women propagandists organized Women’s Associations in rural villages to provide support for the armies. Village women, however, began mobilizing around their immediate concerns such as foot binding, women’s education, a woman’s right to divorce, and abuse. Women’s Associations assumed the right to punish abusive husbands and in-laws, often through public humiliation (Croll, 1978, p. 202). In Hankou and other areas, the Women’s Associations forced the offending spouse or in-law to walk through the streets wearing a dunce cap and shouting slogans on behalf of women’s freedom (Strong, 1928, p. 126).

The 1927 split between the Kuomintang and the Communists halted the burgeon- ing women’s movement. The Kuomintang suppressed Women’s Associations, arrest- ing, punishing, and even executing known members. During the Japanese invasion, however, women propagandists once again followed the Communist armies to rural villages and instigated the formation of new Women’s Associations. Unlike their predecessors, Communist propagandists were met with skepticism about the possibility of ending abuse and gaining social and economic equality. The breakthrough came with the ‘speak bitterness’ meetings in which women were encouraged to talk about their sufferings. While propagandists originally encouraged women to hold these meetings against their local landlords, many identified their husbands and in-laws as their immediate oppressors. In these meetings, each woman learned that many other women in her village experienced the same oppressions. These women, who had been raised with the ancient notion that women were inferior, began recognizing and demanding their right to equality. They also realized the advantage of collective over individual action: ‘If we form a Women’s Association and everyone tells their bitterness in public, no one will dare to oppress you or any woman again,’ stated one rural woman (Belden, 1949, p. 24).

The new Women’s Associations also utilized group action to punish wife abuse, sometimes temporarily imprisoning and/or physically beating abusive men. However, the Women’s Associations did not need to imprison or beat every abuser. Sometimes the mere threat of a confrontation with the Women’s Association was usually enough. In the village of Fanshen, for instance, the Women’s Association beat several violent husbands. After that, the women only needed to have a ‘serious talk’ with the abuser to change his behavior (Hinton, 1966, p. 159). Contemporary organizing against gender violence Recent legislation, such as the U.S. Violence Against Women Act (1994), recognizes the problem of gender violence and seeks to increase police responsiveness. However, legislation does little to protect women who are politically, economically, or socially marginalized. Instead, the focus on criminalization and incarceration often places them at further risk of both interpersonal and state violence as well as of arrest, incar- ceration, and, for immigrant women, deportation (Critical Resistance and INCITE! 2001).

Knowing this, women have acted both individually and collectively to defend themselves. Sex workers, for instance, have organized in different ways to protect themselves from violence. Some methods are fairly straightforward. In March 2006, police responded to the murders of three sex workers in Daytona Beach, Florida, by cracking down on prosti- tution. In one weekend, 10 people were arrested in a prostitution sting. Recognizing that the police response did more to target than to protect them, street prostitutes began arming themselves with knives and other weapons to both to protect them- selves and each other and to find the killer. ‘We will get him first,’ declared Tonya Richardson, a Ridgewood Avenue prostitute, to Local 6 News. ‘When we find him, he is going to be sorry. It is as simple as that’ (‘Daytona Prostitutes,’ 2006).

In Montreal, sex workers have taken a different approach to ensure their safety. In 1995, sex workers, public health researchers, and sympathizers formed Stella, a sex workers’ alliance. Instead of knives and other weapons, the group arms sex workers with information and support to help them keep safe. Stella compiles, updates, and circulates a Bad Tricks and Assaulters list, enabling sex workers to share information and avoid dangerous situations. It also produces and provides free reference guides that cover working conditions, current solicitation laws, and health information. Recognizing that the criminalization of activities related to the sex industry renders sex workers vulnerable to both outside violence and police abuse, the group also advo- cates for the decriminalization of these acts (Stella, n.d.). Sex workers are also taking direct action to stop sex trafficking.

In 1997, former sex workers began guarding checkpoints along the Nepal–India border to rescue adolescent Nepalese girls from being smuggled into India. The idea emerged with the women living at Maiti Nepal, a home in Kathmandu for women returning from Indian brothels. Many of the women, who had been kidnapped as adolescents and sold into the sex industry, were ashamed and angry about their experiences and wanted to trans- form their anger into action. They set up four guard posts along the border and began monitoring for human trafficking. During the first three years, the women caught 70 traffickers, saving 240 girls from India’s brothels. ‘All the girls want to go to the border,’ stated Anuradha Koirala, who runs Maiti Nepal. ‘They are angry but don’t know how to express themselves.’ Being able to rescue others from similar fates has helped many of the women reclaim their sense of self-worth: at the age of 14, Sushma Katuwal was sold to an Indian brothel where she was infected with HIV. After being held for 13 months, she returned to Kathmandu. ‘I came back from hell,’ she recalled. ‘I am trying to stop these girls from being sold like I was.’ In 2000 alone, the 19-year-old rescued 15 girls and caught four human traffickers. ‘As long as I survive, this is what I am going to do,’ she declared (Filkins, 2000, p. 1).

Women marginalized by other factors, such as racism and poverty, have also orga- nized to protect themselves against both interpersonal and state violence. In 2000, the police murders of two young women of color sparked a dialogue about violence against women among members of Sista II Sista, a collective of women of color in Brooklyn, New York. The group’s preexisting work had empowered young women of color to identify and work toward solving their own problems. Their response was to form Sistas Liberated Ground, a zone in their neighborhood where crimes against women would not be tolerated. ‘We wanted the community to stand up against violence as a long-term solution because our dependence on a police system that was inherently sexist, homophobic, racist, and classist did not decrease the ongo- ing violence against women we were seeing in our neighborhoods. In fact, at times, the police themselves were its main perpetrators,’ members of the group stated in 2007 (Burrowes, Cousins, Rojas, & Ude, 2007, p. 229).

Sista II Sista instituted an ‘action line,’ which women could call, inform the group about violence in their lives, and explore the options that they – and the group – could take to change the situation. In addition, Sista II Sista established Sister Circles which, similar to the ‘speak bitter- ness’ meetings of the Communist Women’s Associations in China, allowed women to talk about violence and other problems in their daily lives and encouraged the commu- nity – rather than the individual woman – to find solutions. In one instance, a woman at the Sister Circle talked about the man who had been stalking her for over a year. Although no physical violence had occurred, he was becoming increasingly aggressive toward her. Members of the Sister Circle confronted the man at the barbershop where he worked. When they learned about his actions, his male co-workers told the stalker that, if he continued to harass the woman, he would be fired. He stopped stalking her (Ude, 2006).

Creating communities to deter violence

Not all strategies to prevent gender violence are easily classified as ‘policing from below.’ Some grassroots groups and coalitions recognize that building communities is the first line of defense against violence and are organizing to create social structures and support networks that can collectively address harmful situations.

In Durham, North Carolina, in the aftermath of the 2006 rape of a Black woman by members of a Duke University lacrosse team, women of color and survivors of sexual violence formed UBUNTU. UBUNTU, named after the Bantu meaning ‘I am because we are,’ is a coalition working to ‘facilitate a systematic transformation of our communities until the day that sexual violence does not occur’ (UBUNTU). Alexis Pauline Gumbs recounted an instance in which an UBUNTU member encountered a woman who had been beaten by her former partner:

This UBUNTU member called the rest of us to see who was home and available in the direct neighborhood, took the young woman into her home and contacted the spiritual leader of the woman who had experienced the violence along with other women that the young woman trusted from her spiritual community, who also came to the home, and made sure that she was able to receive medical care. She also arranged for members of our UBUNTU family to have a tea session with the young woman to talk about healing and options, to share our experiences, to embrace the young woman and to let her know that she wasn’t alone in her healing process. (Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2008, pp. 80–81)

Gumbs noted:

These responses were invented on the spot ... without a pre-existing model or a logistical agreement. But they were also made possible by a larger agreement that we as a collec- tive of people living all over the city are committed to responding to gendered violence. This comes out of the political education and collective healing work that we have done, and the building of relationships that strongly send the message ... you can call me if you need something, or if you don’t. You can call me to be there for you ... or someone that you need help being there for. I think it is very important that we have been able to see each other as resources so that when we are faced with violent situations we don’t think our only option is to call the state.

In that way, everything that we do to create community, from childcare to community gardening (our new project!), to community dinners, to film screenings, to political discussions helps to clarify how, why, and how deeply we are ready to be there for each other in times of violence and celebration. (Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2008, p. 81)

From this community-building, UBUNTU members began organizing around the idea of a Harm-Free Zone – an area in which violence would be addressed by the community rather than by the police.

‘We shall see [what this looks like in practice] because we’re still at the beginning of it,’ stated Gumbs in 2009, a year after the idea of a Harm-Free Zone emerged. ‘A lot of times we talk about community as if it already exists, but I don’t actually think that we have autonomous, completely sustained community. We live with all sorts of dependence on the state, [on] outside institutions. We have a lot of work to do to have the type of communications and support that would fulfill the needs of our community.’

Like the Dorchester Green Light Program, organizers of the Harm-Free Zone brought these ideas to the communities of which they were already a part. ‘Those of us who came together were already working in those settings, so it wasn’t just [us] going and taking over the local elementary school. Somebody’s mom was inspired by what somebody [on the committee] said and invited them to come and speak at [the school’s] Women’s History Month,’ recalled Gumbs. ‘For each of us, we’re thinking about how we bring that analysis and that ideal into our preexisting communities.’

Conclusion

Many early anti-violence efforts addressed immediate instances of gender violence, often focusing on the physical aspects of self-defense or a direct response to violence. Women’s organizations taught self-defense classes, confronted abusers and assailants, and formed protective groups to escort each other safely through the streets. In contrast, contemporary organizing often utilizes a multilayered approach, creatively addressing not only immediate instances of violence but also creating dialogue to challenge and change some of the root causes of gender violence. For instance, the efforts of Stella and UBUNTU are not traditionally seen as self-defense tactics, but they do work to keep women safe from violence. Despite these differences, each project emphasizes the importance of community – as opposed to individual – actions and responses. None of these projects – from the Women’s Associations of the 1920s and 1940s to the Dorchester Green Light program in Massachusetts to the contempo- rary organizing among sex workers – would have succeeded without a collective sense of responsibility toward each other.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs has described UBUNTU’s fledgling Harm-Free Zone as ‘building safety from the ground up’: ‘When we say “from the ground up,” [we’re talking about] really participating in the full life of a community and not just creating a special utopia of ten friends who have a vision that’s so abolitionist and radical,’ she elaborated.

Annie Ellman also talked about the importance of community and community- building: ‘What people gain here [at BWMA] besides self-defense skills is some understanding about collective action, about struggling with your community ... If we believe that people have the right to live free of violence, we have to work together to try to transform our communities as ones who will stand up and fight against different kinds of injustice.’

While not every project and group explicitly identifies as an abolitionist group, their practices work toward a radical re-envisioning of creating safety without relying on police. In addition, some groups do work with other antiviolence and abolitionist organizations.

BWMA has, at times, joined in coalition work against police brutality and in support of Mumia Abu-Jamal as well as women incarcerated for self-defense. By the time it changed its name in 1989, CAE had broadened its focus to teach self-defense to other populations disproportionately impacted by violence such as gay men, trans- gender people, people living with HIV and AIDS, and queer homeless youth (of all genders). ‘What we often do is we go out and do educational work for organizations that are more on the front lines doing organizing work,’ stated Ellman. After 9/11 increased racist violence against Arab American, South Asian, and Muslim commu- nities, CAE provided free self-defense and violence prevention workshops to women at grassroots organizations that served these communities (‘Spotlight on Community Action,’ 2004, p. 19).

Alexis Pauline Gumbs noted that UBUNTU’s Harm-Free Zone organizing was inspired and influenced by Critical Resistance organizing: one member had previously helped organize a Harm-Free Zone with the New York City Critical Resistance chapter and several people were part of both the Durham chapter of Critical Resistance and the Harm-Free Zone organizing committee.

Although each of the initiatives described works specifically in certain communi- ties, there is the potential for these models to be shared and adapted to other locations and situations.

Gumbs pointed to the Gulabi Gang, a group of women in India who physically punish abusive husbands, and to Sistahs Liberated Ground as inspirations for the Harm-Free Zone organizing in Durham: ‘We understand that work in that context while also understanding that our conditions are really specific.’

Other groups have also drawn on past and present models of collective action and community accountability processes. The 1970s German women’s group Fan-Shen derived its name from the model Chinese village where Women’s Associations stopped wife abuse. More recently, activists in Santa Cruz were influenced by a docu- mentary about a 1970s feminist group that collectively confronted sexual assaulters, forming Snap Back! in 2002. Snap Back! members used a similar tactic to confront a man who had sexually assaulted their friend. ‘We went to his house at night with her and we made him come outside,’ recalled Snap Back! member Megan Reed. ‘She talked to him about what had happened while the rest of us stood there showing soli- darity with her. She decided to go inside to have a longer conversation with him (about an hour). Then we left.’

Although nothing more happened, Reed believed that their action had further- reaching effects: ‘I think it scared the crap out of him and he’ll think twice before doing anything like that again,’ she stated. The action also ‘gave her [the survivor] a sense of closure. If you don’t want to go through the legal system, there are few alter- natives as to what you can do to get closure and confront that person and feel that a politically justifiable result has been attained.’ Knowledge about a past group’s approaches toward sexual assault enabled Snap Back! members to help their friend confront her assailant in a way that did not involve the police or prisons.

‘Where Abolition Meets Actions’ utilizes Mimi Kim’s storytelling approach to envision different possibilities of a world without policing and prisons. These models are important for imagining and then realizing abolitionist principles. By examining the variety of approaches in their vastly different contexts, we can begin to connect the abstract ideal with concrete actions that make another world possible. We should be drawing lessons from these projects and approaches to create models that work for our own locations and communities.

Dorothy Roberts from marissa faustini on Vimeo.