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Anti-Racism as Violence Prevention

These videos and discussion guides are intended to be used by domestic and sexual violence advocates and activists to spark conversations on the ways that racism and oppression have shaped our anti-violence movements and how we can dismantle racism in our organizations and communities. In these videos, you will hear from advocates and organizers who discuss their own experiences, perceptions, and journeys of practicing anti-racism as a means of ending gender-based and intimate violence. We invite you to view these videos with an open heart, on your own or with others.

  • For White people watching these videos, it is beneficial and important to sit with any feelings of discomfort, listen to feelings, stories, and perspectives of people of color, and move towards repair, action, and accountability.

Voices from Our Movement: a 3-part video series on ending racism and oppression as the heart of our anti-violence movement

Video 1: Connecting the Dots: Racism, Oppression, and Work to End Domestic, Sexual, and Intimate Violence Spanish language version coming soon!

Video 2: Racism in the Anti-Violence Movement: Impacts on Survivors, Advocates, and Communities Spanish language version coming soon!

Video 3: Transformation is Now: Toward an Integrated, Intersectional Movement Spanish language version coming soon!

If you have feedback about your experience using this set of resources or suggestions on how they can be improved, please share your thoughts with us! For questions about these videos and accompanying materials please contact Kate Vander Tuig at kvandertuig@futureswithoutviolence.org.

Resources

The following list is a limited collection of resources to support your anti-racism/oppression work and goals for liberation suggested by the developers and participants of these videos that closely match the themes discussed. For an expansive list of tools and resources visit racialequitytools.org.

Understanding racism, White supremacy, and oppression

  • RaceWorks video series is a educational video series about race as a doing, doing race and undoing racism through specific topic areas (e.g., immigration), and the role racial perception plays in doing race from Stanford.
  • MTV Decoded “A weekly series on MTV News tackling race, pop culture, and other uncomfortable things, in funny and thought-provoking ways. Half sketch comedy, half vlog.”
  • The Urgency of Intersectionality TED Talk from Kimberlé Crenshaw Civil rights advocate
  • Cracking the Codes: The system of racial inequity film series from World Trust “This film asks America to talk about the causes and consequences of systemic inequity. Designed for dialogue, the film works to disentangle internal beliefs, attitudes, and pre-judgments within, and it builds skills to address the structural drivers of social and economic inequities.”
  • Information about White supremacy, privilege, and White feminism from Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ)
  • Race: The Power of an Illusion “The three-part documentary series asks a question so basic it’s rarely raised: What is this thing called ‘race’? What we discovered was that many of our conventional assumptions about race—for instance, that the world’s peoples can be divided biologically along racial lines—are wrong.”

Intimate violence, racism, and oppression in the context of the United States

Individual anti-racism/oppression work and White allyship

Working against racism in our organizations and anti-violence movement

Working against racism in our communities and systems

Exploring solutions to violence outside of the criminal legal system

  • National Clearinghouse for the Defense of Battered Women End Mass Incarceration Webinar Series
  • Information about transformative justice from the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective 
  • Expanding our Frame: Deepening our Demands for Safety and Healing for Black Survivors of Sexual Violence A policy brief by Andrea J. Ritchie for the National Black Women’s Justice Institute
  • Building Accountable Communities Video Series “Accountability is a familiar buzz-word in contemporary social movements, but what does it mean? How do we work toward it? In this series of four short videos, anti-violence activists Kiyomi Fujikawa and Shannon Perez-Darby ask and explore: What does it look like to be accountable to survivors without exiling or disposing of those who do harm?”
  • What is Accountability? Panel discussion featuring Shannon Perez-Darby, Esteban Kelly, RJ Maccani, Mia Mingus, Sonya Shah, and Leah Todd. Moderated by Piper Anderson at Barnard College.
  • Fumbling Towards Repair: A Workbook for Community Accountability Facilitators is a workbook by Mariame Kaba and Shira Hassan that includes reflection questions, skill assessments, facilitation tips, helpful definitions, activities, and hard-learned lessons intended to support people who have taken on the coordination and facilitation of formal community accountability processes to address interpersonal harm & violence.
  • Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement (January 2020, AK Press) edited by Ejeris Dixon and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha “focuses on concrete alternatives to policing and prisons. From practical tool-kits and personal essays, to supporting people in mental health crises, to community-based murder investigations, this text delves deeply into the “how to” of transformative justice.”
  • TransformHarm.org  is a resource hub about ending violence. It offers an introduction to transformative justice. Created by Mariame Kaba and designed by Joseph Lublink, the site includes selected articles, audio-visual resources, curricula, and more.
  • Queering Sexual Violence “Often pushed to the margins, queer, transgender and gender non-conforming survivors have been organizing in anti-violence work since the birth of the movement…Moving beyond dominant narratives and the traditional “violence against women” framework, the book is multi-gendered, multi-racial and multi-layered.”
  • Organizing Resources from INCITE! on community accountability, violence from law enforcement, and more.
  • Decriminalizing Domestic Violence by Leigh Goodmark asks the crucial, yet often overlooked, question of why and how the criminal legal system became the primary response to intimate partner violence in the United States…It examines how social, legal, and financial resources are diverted into a criminal legal apparatus that is often unable to deliver justice or safety to victims or to prevent intimate partner violence in the first place.”
  • Love WITH Accountability: Digging up the Roots of Child Sexual Abuse (October 2019, AK Press) edited by Aishah Shahidah Simmons “features compelling writings by child sexual abuse survivors, advocates, and Simmons’s mother, who underscores the detrimental impact of parents/caregivers not believing their children when they disclose their sexual abuse. This collection explores disrupting the inhumane epidemic of child sexual abuse, humanely.”

Moving towards liberation

Many thanks to the following people who contributed their time, expertise, and stories to these videos!

Vanessa Timmons – Oregon Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence; Pablo Espinoza & Lidia Salazar – Community United Against Violence (CUAV), Amita Swadhin – Mirror Memoirs, Kelly Miller – Idaho Coalition Against Sexual & Domestic Violence, Maya Pilgrim – Texas Association Against Sexual Assault, Orchid Pusey – Asian Women’s Shelter, Jose Juan Lara Jr. – Casa de Esperanza/National Latin@ Network, María Limón – University of Colorado, Denver, Zoe Flowers – Women of Color Network, Lisa Fujie Parks – Prevention Institute, Debra Ward – YWCA of San Gabriel Valley, and Amina White – University of North Carolina School of Medicine.