October 26, 2023 • 31 mins
In this two-part podcast series, Mo talks with DeAnn Alcantara Thompson and Sid Jordan about Mapping Prevention, a community participatory action research project. that helped shape the direction of prevention funding in King County, WA.
For more information and transcripts visit www.nsvrc.org/podcasts
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(00:00):
Welcome to Resource on the Go, a podcast from the National Sexual Violence
Resource Center on understanding, responding to, and preventing sexual abuse
and assault. I'm Mo, and in this two part series, I'll be talking
with Syd and Diane about the Mapping Prevention Project, what we did and
what we learned. I just wanna thank you both for being here again.
(00:39):
I'm really glad that we get to talk again about mapping prevention.
And I was wondering if you wanted to introduce yourselves. Sure.
I'm Syd Jordan, I'm a co researcher on the Mapping Prevention Project.
And I'm also an assistant professor at Portland State University, in the
School of Social Work. And I'm Diane. I'm one of the other co
(01:00):
researchers, and I am currently a manager at API Chaya. And yeah,
really excited to be here. So when we left off last time,
you had introduced us to the core ideas in practice that came from the work
being done by Mapping Prevention. And it was just all of these great
(01:21):
interviews and surveys and a think tank. And so I'm wondering if,
before we talk about those core ideas, could you say a little bit
about how you used research or a data driven process to arrive at
those core ideas? Yeah, I could start with that. So this part of
a study where we talk about these four core ideas or what we
(01:42):
might think of as theories of prevention, these are really driven by the
interviews that we did, and we conducted 46 in depth interviews
and used those interviews through a collaborative process. Part of our participatory
research approach included not only conducting those interviews as a team,
but also analyzing them together. So we used that data, transcripts from
(02:05):
those interviews, as a way to really arrive at our thinking about these
four forms of practice that we saw most occurring in the community that
we're working in, King County, and with the kinds of organizers that we
decided to interview. So I might let Dee talk a little bit about
who we interviewed and why, how we approached people, and then what the
(02:27):
interviews look like. Great. So yeah, we sent out an email to,
I don't know, quite a bit of people, and on a couple of
lists, let people know we were gonna be doing this. It was amazing
actually, to hear from people. We definitely wanted to focus on
a couple of specific communities BIPOC folks, especially Black and indigenous
(02:51):
people, and people of color, and also the queer and trans community.
We had some ideas about... To hear from a certain number of young
people or people under the age of 25,
also some elders. And we had a really positive response from people.
People were really excited about it. In addition to
(03:15):
sharing that we were doing these interviews, we reached out to people individually,
and I don't think there was a single person that I reached out
to individually that didn't get back to us. I have the list in
front of me, of folks that we did do the interviews with and,
I don't know, it just brings me so much joy right now,
just thinking about... Seeing their names altogether. And then
(03:36):
the other thing that was fun was that we really thought about...
I was thinking about listening to a couple of the interviews and just,
there was just so much laughter and enjoyment in the process of interviewing,
and we wanted to make sure that when people left the meetings,
they really felt like it had been a good experience of being at
the meetings. And so, similar with the interviews, we wanted people to be
(03:59):
having a good time and having it feel productive. And I remember
in some of the interviews that I did, coming back to people later
with like, "You wanted to hear more about this, or this resource,
and so I have that for you." And
in addition to emailing with people, there were some people that we texted
with or just had more one on one
(04:23):
outreach to. And I think a lot of the people that...
Some of them met through this process and have stayed connected,
so that's also really sweet. I think it might be useful to say
that we were really invested in talking with people who were doing anti
violence work, broadly defined, who saw their work as anti racist or anti
(04:46):
oppressive in some central way, and also thought about
their work as preventing domestic and sexual violence specifically. And
we put out a call for people who wanted to participate in these
interviews too, through the community, with those criteria. So we had a
mix of people that we knew and reached out to and people who
(05:07):
responded to that call to participate. I think in the end,
almost everyone we spoke to, I think 43 out of 46 percent of
the interviews were Black, indigenous, or people of color,
or I should say Black, indigenous and/or people of color, and a really
good portion of those people were also queer
(05:28):
and trans and/or organizing in queer and trans communities
as part of their anti violence work. Yeah, I was part of the
interview process and it was really great to do
and to be a part of. So what were some of the kinds
of questions that you wanted to make sure you included in the interviews?
(05:48):
We had definitely a list of questions that we asked, and we brought
people through a training before the interview process. We really wanted
people to gain the skill around interviewing but also
a lot of the interviews ended up being very conversational, but trying to
ask folks, "What brings you to an interview like this? How are you
connected to gender based violence, to domestic or sexual violence?" And
(06:12):
we had some really cool responses from people there just, I think,
trying to offer really broad questions so people could
share about the depth of their work, how they saw their work connecting
to anti oppressive frameworks, talking about their anti racism work.
(06:32):
I think one of the exciting things about a participatory research project
is when we have this group that could really develop the kinds of
questions that we felt like would be interesting for us to talk to
people about, and not just for the purpose of the end goal,
which was creating these recommendations, but also just what would help
(06:53):
strengthen our relationships with each other in the community, and what
would help us to find our own violence prevention practices. So, that was
sort of the heart of the idea of even doing interviews to begin
with. And Dee made this really sweet idea of matching people in our
group with somebody who she thought or knew from what she knew about
(07:17):
both members of our group or people would be interviewing, about who might
make a good match in terms of community connections on learning.
Then we saw just some very sweet things come out of that,
where people then joined other people's projects or started working together,
collaborating on something else in the world. So I feel like that was
(07:37):
one of those benefits of doing the research in this way,
and that we saw as an outcome of that. So I know out
of these interviews and out of the surveys and the work that was
done came really four theories of practice. And I'm wondering if you can
just say more about those. That's been such a big finding of this
group. So the idea of using data to really understand what violence prevention
(08:01):
work meant in the lives and work and community building practices of the
people that we interviewed, meant that we were really using the transcripts
to explore what people were doing, why they were doing it,
what was sort of underneath their ideas about how they organized and how
that related to preventing domestic and sexual violence. That's what we
(08:23):
were looking for when we read the transcripts. The first category I wanted
to talk about was what we called community and belonging. It actually shows
up fourth in the report. I wanted to talk about community and belonging
first, because it's an all encompassing framework, and it's sort of an idea
that's central to all the themes, but it also stands alone.
(08:45):
So we just saw patterns across all of our interviews, people talking about
building community, strengthening community as really central to any sort
of other kinds of violence prevention and violence intervention work that...
Community, strengthening relationships and communities are a sort of antidote
(09:06):
to the kinds of isolation and separation that we know that patterns of
domestic and sexual violence rely on. So people who are more isolated and
do not have as many community contacts become more vulnerable to these kinds
or forms of violence, and therefore really doing the work
to forge a sense of belonging, a sense of kinship, a sense of
(09:30):
relation is, in itself, inextricably linked to preventing violence.
So central to this theory is that we can prevent violence by really
cultivating a sense of belonging, not only to prevent vulnerabilities from
being targets of violence, but from also enacting violence so that communities
are also... Are the site of being held accountable for our actions.
(09:56):
It was also like the sense of being connected to a community was
really considered a prerequisite for some of the transformative community
level interventions we also had seen in our practice, and some people talk
about in the interview. So of course, when we think about intervening in
domestic and sexual violence, outside of the criminal legal system, we're
thinking about the ways that communities can sort of
(10:19):
engage in some of these practices that really relies on having close relationships.
Yeah, Dee, do you wanna talk about some of how community and belonging
showed up in the interviews and practice? Yeah,
the first group that came to my mind when thinking about this theory of
practice was... Actually, I think the first interview that I did,
(10:42):
and thinking about a group that was working with young people
that were interested and connected to sports, is also pretty place based
in King County. And I was also just thinking about... We interviewed a
lot of people that work at culturally specific programs, so
either working in Muslim community or working in EPI community or... And
(11:08):
we talked to folks working in the African American community locally,
the Somali community. And I don't know, I think it just
added so much depth to have all of these different kinds of identities
that people were connected to. I think the first thing too, is around
places where people already were or where they were actively choosing,
(11:30):
and then that being the place where folks were doing the prevention work.
We had a quote that came out of the interviews that I wanted
to share from one of the interviews, which was,
"I cannot imagine a way out of oppression, violence, domestic violence,
without a collectivist communal approach." I really love hearing that quote,
(11:51):
it totally brings me back to when we were doing the interviews and
reading what came from the interviews and doing that sort of data work
and finding the themes. It also makes me feel really hopeful,
which is something I could use right now. Okay, let's talk about the
next one, which is abolition and transformation. So abolition and transformation
(12:12):
as a theory of practice for violence prevention really relies on understanding
that certain institutions have created exceptional or additional vulnerabilities
to violence for some people. So when we're talking about abolition and transformation
and how they showed up through our interviews with organizers we spoke to,
(12:34):
we're talking about those who are thinking about violence prevention as
requiring us to eliminate and fundamentally change some of these institutions
where we know violence is incubated. So, people were talking about sort
of the whole gamut of institutions where they saw that harm was reproduced
or violence became more likely. And thinking about how to build alternatives
(12:58):
to those, and also work for a political and social change for those
kinds of institutions no longer became viable. So people were talking about
popularizing non institutional tools for violence prevention, so what I
mean by that is just thinking about, how can we
(13:18):
encourage everyday people to think of themselves as agents of change and
agents of care, that didn't rely on some of these systems that have
been built up to do that kind of care work for us,
that have in turn created more violence, especially for folks of color and
for queer and trans people and other marginalized groups. So this theory
(13:41):
of practice was engaged in a variety of ways. I think Dee is
gonna talk a little bit about some examples we saw. And even if
people weren't using that term, "abolition," we saw that as a through line
logic for how people were kind of relating to their work as violence
preventionists, really thinking about building up community approaches to
(14:04):
violence prevention. Yeah. We talked to a lot of people that were involved
in some of the mutual aid efforts here in King County,
and it's exciting just to think about folks that were just trying to
respond to so many needs in the beginning of COVID, that were
just so vast. People were responding to any kind of
(14:26):
need that was coming out though. Pretty exciting just to think about folks
that were just like, okay, the society, the government, people aren't showing
up. This is how we wanna do it, and this is how we're
gonna run it and we're gonna figure it out. And we had this
amazing quote, which was, "A lot of the times it felt like our
(14:47):
generational charge is just to be the dismantlers not the builders.
I didn't know that we would have a chance to be the builders.
It's both daunting, but also inspiring". As Syd was talking about some of
the things that emerged in this theory of practice, it was really exciting
to see people that were like, "These things aren't happening. What are we
(15:10):
gonna do about it? We don't know how to get everybody masks,
we don't know how to get people food that they need,
and just basic, essential needs. How can we make sure that's happening in
a way that is safe and also responsive to what's real right now?"
I really like the idea that this generation will get to also be
the builders, and that building is already happening. I love hearing this
(15:34):
come through from what we learned in the interviews and through people's
work, so thanks for talking about that. The next one is healing and
accountability. Can we talk more about that one?
Yeah. So in this theory of practice, organizers we spoke to,
practitioners of violence prevention, were really making the link between
(15:56):
experiencing violence and the trauma of experiencing violence, and the cycles
of re enacting violence. And so, healing and accountability acknowledges
cycles of harm, it acknowledges the needs of survivors, but also people
who have enacted harm, and thinks about healing work fundamentally reparative
(16:19):
and required for violence prevention. But I think what was so exciting about
the ways that we were able to think with people about healing was
also moving from only thinking about it in terms of an individual or
even a family system, to thinking about what it means to heal and
repair from sort of the fundamental terms of, let's say, the nation,
(16:44):
anywhere in the US, talking about this with people who
were thinking deeply about history of colonization and slavery, and how
we have to reckon with these systemic harms, historical harms, present day
harms, to really undo the problem of interpersonal violence.
(17:06):
So this theory of change is thinking at both levels or all levels
about what healing means too, not just in the interpersonal sphere or the
therapeutic, but also thinking in terms of political work that's about large
scale healing, whether that's reparations projects, about environmental
(17:27):
protections, about even unionizing social service workers as a way to
create response to the exploitation of workers, social service workers in
this case, 'cause many of the people that we talked to for this
project were in social service settings or had worked in those settings.
So really thinking expansively about what healing means, and this relationship
(17:50):
then of healing to accountability. So, creating accountable
institutions. The unionization example, I think, is a good analogy for how
we heard people talking about that more broadly, their work to create more
accountable institutions and how that would then refract back onto more
accountable relationships between people. I guess I would just say underlining
(18:15):
this theory is the idea that we can prevent domestic and sexual violence
by acknowledging harms, working to address those harms, and recognizing
that everyone has experienced harm and everyone can benefit from learning
how to address trauma. Yeah, this is one of my favorite aspects of
(18:35):
what was found through this work, because we talk a lot,
I think in the prevention field specifically about the different levels
of prevention, like community level prevention, societal level prevention,
and I love the way that this ties in how having healing and
accountability within institutions and communities can really create that
(18:58):
atmosphere where we really can prevent future violence. So thanks for talking
about that, I know you have a quote too that you want to
share right Diane? Yeah, so the traditional way of healing and Western culture
didn't really help me, but having access to indigenous medicine and ceremonies
has been really healing and... Yeah, I think when I think about the
(19:21):
interviews that come to my mind first, I think about different healers that
we talk to, both getting to work either as individual organizers or within
a culturally specific program where like ceremony and traditional medicine
got to be a part of the work that they were doing that
it wasn't a separate part of the work, that it was something that
(19:43):
happened inside of the work and... Yeah. I think about kids just getting
to grow up with their parents and with their elders, really getting to
be connected to their culture and having it be a valued
part of their childhood too. Knowing the names
(20:06):
for natural medicines and for plants, and even just for water,
or how do you enter the water in a way that's in line
with your ancestors, and how just being connected with other people who
are also trying to teach their kids those practices,
how that in and of itself is so healing and
(20:28):
what's possible. The world that we want to
live in being built actively. Thanks for sharing about this and these three
so far, there's one left, if you can even believe it,
we've covered so much already, and I feel like it encompasses so much.
So the last theory of practice is liberation and agency.
(20:50):
The last one might be most familiar to people who are listening in,
because I feel like it might have, and the most overlaps,
with what we might think of as sort of traditional domestic and sexual
violence prevention work, and that is a theory of liberation and agency.
So the people we spoke with talked about liberatory approaches or operation
(21:11):
based approaches to violence prevention in terms of freedom from oppression,
in terms of envisioning or enacting the kind of world that we want,
kind of world that exists when oppression has ended.
And the theory imagining a transformation of existing conditions of domination,
(21:33):
which we know underlying patterns of domestic and sexual violence.
I would say this was the theory that we heard about across
every interview, the word itself, liberation. And comes up in many of the
transcripts, it was spoken about as an aspirational concept, of course,
(21:53):
this coming of what we might bring forth.
But the language of liberation really was in everyday practice, it wasn't
sort of imagined, but it was something that people spoke about sort of
being manifesting in sort of an everyday way,
it was characterized by people working together to gain knowledge about
(22:15):
domination and oppression, really naming and articulating what oppression
is and how it shows up in people's lives as a way to
overpower the ways that those can become internalized.
It was also linked to this idea of collective agency then and solidarity,
so what can be brought together by people learning together about oppression
(22:36):
by naming oppression and by working together to
overpower and change the ways oppression works. People really spoke about
developing a liberatory form of violence prevention in an intersectional
way, so really not thinking about gender oppression alone, but always thinking
about it in relation to racism especially, since that was at the center
(23:00):
of our study, but also other forms of oppression. And then to think
then that sort of a liberatory approach requires us to think and learn
together about how those systems of oppression interact, so really thinking
about how to reach and utilize these theories of practice with people who
(23:21):
are particularly vulnerable, and thinking about self determination itself
as sort of inherent to, but also requiring collective action so not
theory in which an individual can, on their own, just
rise above oppressive circumstances, but to really think about liberation
(23:42):
based theory as one that requires people to come together and work together.
Yeah, so a quote that we had, that dovetails with this was "Everyone
is internalizing information about white supremacy and imperialist patriarchal
world, and you have to actively unlearn it to not reproduce it",
(24:03):
and I was thinking about one of the
specific programs or organizing efforts that this makes me think about is
actually working on defense campaigns or criminalized survivors
campaigns, and trying to fight back and say, "Actually what the state is
(24:24):
saying about this is just totally not true, and we're gonna have a
whole other analysis in a way that we think about
what should happen for this person," and I think this really speaks to
too how that kind of organizing or a huge group of people,
even internationally or... Is trying to say, "This person should not be
(24:48):
criminalized for protecting themselves," really fits in neatly, I think,
to some of the other categories that we talked about, and in particular
in the last minute, I was like, "Maybe I should talk about
defense campaigns actually in the abolition and transformation
area," really fits in there, and I think this was a common thing
(25:10):
that came up when we were doing the...
Looking more closely at the research was like, and the interviews in particular
was like, they all in some way or another could fit into different
categories or these different sections, and we had a, Syd, I thought really
(25:33):
brilliantly came up with a way to describe that a couple of different
ways, but one was like a Venn diagram where we looked at how
they were overlapping all of these categories, and that many of the folks
that we interviewed and many of the projects
really could fit in to all of these categories, and a lot of
the work around anti racism does as well. So just wanted to speak
(25:57):
to that. We also have, on page 45 of the report,
we actually did also try to make a table where we
distinguished these four theories of practice in a more simplified version
than we just describe them now, it's just one page.
And while we saw all the overlaps between these practices, we actually found
(26:21):
it useful and productive to try to articulate that there are multiple theories
of practice operating here, and to try to name and clarify what some
of them are, can help programs and projects and organizers really think
through where they're intervening and where they're working, sort of what
(26:43):
angle they're working, 'cause we need all these angles happening at the
same time, but it doesn't necessarily mean that it makes sense for every
program to try to enact and do every theory at the same time.
I will say for me, it's really expanded the way that I view
my work and what the possibilities are in prevention, when we're thinking
(27:04):
about things like community level prevention or societal level prevention.
I feel like more doors are open than I thought were in the
past, and more possibilities exist, and I'm really excited about that.
What do you most want people to know or to integrate into their
work based on what came out of the Mapping Prevention Project?
(27:27):
I think I would love for people to know
that they're probably doing a lot of the things already that need to
be done, and maybe they're doing that in a way that isn't
very supportive, I think especially when we're thinking about queer and
trans community and BIPOC community and just you're doing a lot of amazing
work already, and one quote that I was just trying to scroll through
(27:51):
and find was around, "If you're doing gender based violence prevention work
and doing it well, then that also comes with doing anti racist work
and doing other forms of anti oppression work and vice versa".
And then also something about how the funders aren't the bosses,
I think something around... We saw this as an opportunity to get to
(28:14):
lift up the work that was already happening and sort of showcase
it, and how amazing and how awesome it was and how transformational it
was, and also to say back to funders,
there's a lot of really amazing work happening already, how can we sort
of fund it in a way that isn't
gonna be holding people back, and I think that research doesn't have to
(28:38):
be scary or it can really support and help you, and
it doesn't have to be a gruelling time
while you're getting to it and you can learn just as much from
the process as you do from the product at the end,
so. Yeah, there has been a dominant idea of violence prevention,
(29:00):
of domestic and sexual violence prevention, that is pretty narrow in terms
of where it thinks that that happens, and who are the sort of
imagined beneficiaries of those programs, like the middle school classroom
concept of domestic and sexual violence prevention. So one thing I really
(29:21):
love about this project is not that it's developing other kinds of violence
prevention work rather that it's recognizing and acknowledging other kinds
of violence prevention work, and I think that by doing that,
then we also could build and develop other kinds of programs and that
funding to follow that impulse, you could follow that
(29:42):
and research, that we could think beyond just measuring the impact of a
one time or one workshop series in a school
that I think it's really imperative that we begin to think about violence
prevention as really much more expansive way in the field.
(30:02):
Thank you both. It's so great to talk about this project all the
time, it always makes me feel so happy and so hopeful.
I wanna let folks know about where you can go to read more
about the project, read about the people who are involved, get a hold
of the resources, look at the map, go to mappingprevention.org. And then
(30:25):
we also wanted to just let you know that if you are curious
about what people who are part of the mapping prevention project are up
to now, we'll be putting some of that information in our show notes.
So make sure to check that out too, and you can find the links there
also. Well, thank you so much for being here. It's always such a
(30:46):
pleasure to talk with you about this project and think about the good
memories of us working together. Thanks for listening to this episode of
Resource on the Go. For more resources and information about preventing
sexual assault, visit our website at nsvrc.org. You can also get in touch
with us by emailing resources@nsvrc.org.
Welcome to Resource on the Go, a podcast from the National Sexual Violence
Resource Center on understanding, responding to, and preventing sexual abuse
and assault. I'm Mo, and in this two part series, I'll be talking
with Syd and Diane about the Mapping Prevention Project, what we did and
what we learned. I just wanna thank you both for being here again.
(00:39):
I'm really glad that we get to talk again about mapping prevention.
And I was wondering if you wanted to introduce yourselves. Sure.
I'm Syd Jordan, I'm a co researcher on the Mapping Prevention Project.
And I'm also an assistant professor at Portland State University, in the
School of Social Work. And I'm Diane. I'm one of the other co
(01:00):
researchers, and I am currently a manager at API Chaya. And yeah,
really excited to be here. So when we left off last time,
you had introduced us to the core ideas in practice that came from the work
being done by Mapping Prevention. And it was just all of these great
(01:21):
interviews and surveys and a think tank. And so I'm wondering if,
before we talk about those core ideas, could you say a little bit
about how you used research or a data driven process to arrive at
those core ideas? Yeah, I could start with that. So this part of
a study where we talk about these four core ideas or what we
(01:42):
might think of as theories of prevention, these are really driven by the
interviews that we did, and we conducted 46 in depth interviews
and used those interviews through a collaborative process. Part of our participatory
research approach included not only conducting those interviews as a team,
but also analyzing them together. So we used that data, transcripts from
(02:05):
those interviews, as a way to really arrive at our thinking about these
four forms of practice that we saw most occurring in the community that
we're working in, King County, and with the kinds of organizers that we
decided to interview. So I might let Dee talk a little bit about
who we interviewed and why, how we approached people, and then what the
(02:27):
interviews look like. Great. So yeah, we sent out an email to,
I don't know, quite a bit of people, and on a couple of
lists, let people know we were gonna be doing this. It was amazing
actually, to hear from people. We definitely wanted to focus on
a couple of specific communities BIPOC folks, especially Black and indigenous
(02:51):
people, and people of color, and also the queer and trans community.
We had some ideas about... To hear from a certain number of young
people or people under the age of 25,
also some elders. And we had a really positive response from people.
People were really excited about it. In addition to
(03:15):
sharing that we were doing these interviews, we reached out to people individually,
and I don't think there was a single person that I reached out
to individually that didn't get back to us. I have the list in
front of me, of folks that we did do the interviews with and,
I don't know, it just brings me so much joy right now,
just thinking about... Seeing their names altogether. And then
(03:36):
the other thing that was fun was that we really thought about...
I was thinking about listening to a couple of the interviews and just,
there was just so much laughter and enjoyment in the process of interviewing,
and we wanted to make sure that when people left the meetings,
they really felt like it had been a good experience of being at
the meetings. And so, similar with the interviews, we wanted people to be
(03:59):
having a good time and having it feel productive. And I remember
in some of the interviews that I did, coming back to people later
with like, "You wanted to hear more about this, or this resource,
and so I have that for you." And
in addition to emailing with people, there were some people that we texted
with or just had more one on one
(04:23):
outreach to. And I think a lot of the people that...
Some of them met through this process and have stayed connected,
so that's also really sweet. I think it might be useful to say
that we were really invested in talking with people who were doing anti
violence work, broadly defined, who saw their work as anti racist or anti
(04:46):
oppressive in some central way, and also thought about
their work as preventing domestic and sexual violence specifically. And
we put out a call for people who wanted to participate in these
interviews too, through the community, with those criteria. So we had a
mix of people that we knew and reached out to and people who
(05:07):
responded to that call to participate. I think in the end,
almost everyone we spoke to, I think 43 out of 46 percent of
the interviews were Black, indigenous, or people of color,
or I should say Black, indigenous and/or people of color, and a really
good portion of those people were also queer
(05:28):
and trans and/or organizing in queer and trans communities
as part of their anti violence work. Yeah, I was part of the
interview process and it was really great to do
and to be a part of. So what were some of the kinds
of questions that you wanted to make sure you included in the interviews?
(05:48):
We had definitely a list of questions that we asked, and we brought
people through a training before the interview process. We really wanted
people to gain the skill around interviewing but also
a lot of the interviews ended up being very conversational, but trying to
ask folks, "What brings you to an interview like this? How are you
connected to gender based violence, to domestic or sexual violence?" And
(06:12):
we had some really cool responses from people there just, I think,
trying to offer really broad questions so people could
share about the depth of their work, how they saw their work connecting
to anti oppressive frameworks, talking about their anti racism work.
(06:32):
I think one of the exciting things about a participatory research project
is when we have this group that could really develop the kinds of
questions that we felt like would be interesting for us to talk to
people about, and not just for the purpose of the end goal,
which was creating these recommendations, but also just what would help
(06:53):
strengthen our relationships with each other in the community, and what
would help us to find our own violence prevention practices. So, that was
sort of the heart of the idea of even doing interviews to begin
with. And Dee made this really sweet idea of matching people in our
group with somebody who she thought or knew from what she knew about
(07:17):
both members of our group or people would be interviewing, about who might
make a good match in terms of community connections on learning.
Then we saw just some very sweet things come out of that,
where people then joined other people's projects or started working together,
collaborating on something else in the world. So I feel like that was
(07:37):
one of those benefits of doing the research in this way,
and that we saw as an outcome of that. So I know out
of these interviews and out of the surveys and the work that was
done came really four theories of practice. And I'm wondering if you can
just say more about those. That's been such a big finding of this
group. So the idea of using data to really understand what violence prevention
(08:01):
work meant in the lives and work and community building practices of the
people that we interviewed, meant that we were really using the transcripts
to explore what people were doing, why they were doing it,
what was sort of underneath their ideas about how they organized and how
that related to preventing domestic and sexual violence. That's what we
(08:23):
were looking for when we read the transcripts. The first category I wanted
to talk about was what we called community and belonging. It actually shows
up fourth in the report. I wanted to talk about community and belonging
first, because it's an all encompassing framework, and it's sort of an idea
that's central to all the themes, but it also stands alone.
(08:45):
So we just saw patterns across all of our interviews, people talking about
building community, strengthening community as really central to any sort
of other kinds of violence prevention and violence intervention work that...
Community, strengthening relationships and communities are a sort of antidote
(09:06):
to the kinds of isolation and separation that we know that patterns of
domestic and sexual violence rely on. So people who are more isolated and
do not have as many community contacts become more vulnerable to these kinds
or forms of violence, and therefore really doing the work
to forge a sense of belonging, a sense of kinship, a sense of
(09:30):
relation is, in itself, inextricably linked to preventing violence.
So central to this theory is that we can prevent violence by really
cultivating a sense of belonging, not only to prevent vulnerabilities from
being targets of violence, but from also enacting violence so that communities
are also... Are the site of being held accountable for our actions.
(09:56):
It was also like the sense of being connected to a community was
really considered a prerequisite for some of the transformative community
level interventions we also had seen in our practice, and some people talk
about in the interview. So of course, when we think about intervening in
domestic and sexual violence, outside of the criminal legal system, we're
thinking about the ways that communities can sort of
(10:19):
engage in some of these practices that really relies on having close relationships.
Yeah, Dee, do you wanna talk about some of how community and belonging
showed up in the interviews and practice? Yeah,
the first group that came to my mind when thinking about this theory of
practice was... Actually, I think the first interview that I did,
(10:42):
and thinking about a group that was working with young people
that were interested and connected to sports, is also pretty place based
in King County. And I was also just thinking about... We interviewed a
lot of people that work at culturally specific programs, so
either working in Muslim community or working in EPI community or... And
(11:08):
we talked to folks working in the African American community locally,
the Somali community. And I don't know, I think it just
added so much depth to have all of these different kinds of identities
that people were connected to. I think the first thing too, is around
places where people already were or where they were actively choosing,
(11:30):
and then that being the place where folks were doing the prevention work.
We had a quote that came out of the interviews that I wanted
to share from one of the interviews, which was,
"I cannot imagine a way out of oppression, violence, domestic violence,
without a collectivist communal approach." I really love hearing that quote,
(11:51):
it totally brings me back to when we were doing the interviews and
reading what came from the interviews and doing that sort of data work
and finding the themes. It also makes me feel really hopeful,
which is something I could use right now. Okay, let's talk about the
next one, which is abolition and transformation. So abolition and transformation
(12:12):
as a theory of practice for violence prevention really relies on understanding
that certain institutions have created exceptional or additional vulnerabilities
to violence for some people. So when we're talking about abolition and transformation
and how they showed up through our interviews with organizers we spoke to,
(12:34):
we're talking about those who are thinking about violence prevention as
requiring us to eliminate and fundamentally change some of these institutions
where we know violence is incubated. So, people were talking about sort
of the whole gamut of institutions where they saw that harm was reproduced
or violence became more likely. And thinking about how to build alternatives
(12:58):
to those, and also work for a political and social change for those
kinds of institutions no longer became viable. So people were talking about
popularizing non institutional tools for violence prevention, so what I
mean by that is just thinking about, how can we
(13:18):
encourage everyday people to think of themselves as agents of change and
agents of care, that didn't rely on some of these systems that have
been built up to do that kind of care work for us,
that have in turn created more violence, especially for folks of color and
for queer and trans people and other marginalized groups. So this theory
(13:41):
of practice was engaged in a variety of ways. I think Dee is
gonna talk a little bit about some examples we saw. And even if
people weren't using that term, "abolition," we saw that as a through line
logic for how people were kind of relating to their work as violence
preventionists, really thinking about building up community approaches to
(14:04):
violence prevention. Yeah. We talked to a lot of people that were involved
in some of the mutual aid efforts here in King County,
and it's exciting just to think about folks that were just trying to
respond to so many needs in the beginning of COVID, that were
just so vast. People were responding to any kind of
(14:26):
need that was coming out though. Pretty exciting just to think about folks
that were just like, okay, the society, the government, people aren't showing
up. This is how we wanna do it, and this is how we're
gonna run it and we're gonna figure it out. And we had this
amazing quote, which was, "A lot of the times it felt like our
(14:47):
generational charge is just to be the dismantlers not the builders.
I didn't know that we would have a chance to be the builders.
It's both daunting, but also inspiring". As Syd was talking about some of
the things that emerged in this theory of practice, it was really exciting
to see people that were like, "These things aren't happening. What are we
(15:10):
gonna do about it? We don't know how to get everybody masks,
we don't know how to get people food that they need,
and just basic, essential needs. How can we make sure that's happening in
a way that is safe and also responsive to what's real right now?"
I really like the idea that this generation will get to also be
the builders, and that building is already happening. I love hearing this
(15:34):
come through from what we learned in the interviews and through people's
work, so thanks for talking about that. The next one is healing and
accountability. Can we talk more about that one?
Yeah. So in this theory of practice, organizers we spoke to,
practitioners of violence prevention, were really making the link between
(15:56):
experiencing violence and the trauma of experiencing violence, and the cycles
of re enacting violence. And so, healing and accountability acknowledges
cycles of harm, it acknowledges the needs of survivors, but also people
who have enacted harm, and thinks about healing work fundamentally reparative
(16:19):
and required for violence prevention. But I think what was so exciting about
the ways that we were able to think with people about healing was
also moving from only thinking about it in terms of an individual or
even a family system, to thinking about what it means to heal and
repair from sort of the fundamental terms of, let's say, the nation,
(16:44):
anywhere in the US, talking about this with people who
were thinking deeply about history of colonization and slavery, and how
we have to reckon with these systemic harms, historical harms, present day
harms, to really undo the problem of interpersonal violence.
(17:06):
So this theory of change is thinking at both levels or all levels
about what healing means too, not just in the interpersonal sphere or the
therapeutic, but also thinking in terms of political work that's about large
scale healing, whether that's reparations projects, about environmental
(17:27):
protections, about even unionizing social service workers as a way to
create response to the exploitation of workers, social service workers in
this case, 'cause many of the people that we talked to for this
project were in social service settings or had worked in those settings.
So really thinking expansively about what healing means, and this relationship
(17:50):
then of healing to accountability. So, creating accountable
institutions. The unionization example, I think, is a good analogy for how
we heard people talking about that more broadly, their work to create more
accountable institutions and how that would then refract back onto more
accountable relationships between people. I guess I would just say underlining
(18:15):
this theory is the idea that we can prevent domestic and sexual violence
by acknowledging harms, working to address those harms, and recognizing
that everyone has experienced harm and everyone can benefit from learning
how to address trauma. Yeah, this is one of my favorite aspects of
(18:35):
what was found through this work, because we talk a lot,
I think in the prevention field specifically about the different levels
of prevention, like community level prevention, societal level prevention,
and I love the way that this ties in how having healing and
accountability within institutions and communities can really create that
(18:58):
atmosphere where we really can prevent future violence. So thanks for talking
about that, I know you have a quote too that you want to
share right Diane? Yeah, so the traditional way of healing and Western culture
didn't really help me, but having access to indigenous medicine and ceremonies
has been really healing and... Yeah, I think when I think about the
(19:21):
interviews that come to my mind first, I think about different healers that
we talk to, both getting to work either as individual organizers or within
a culturally specific program where like ceremony and traditional medicine
got to be a part of the work that they were doing that
it wasn't a separate part of the work, that it was something that
(19:43):
happened inside of the work and... Yeah. I think about kids just getting
to grow up with their parents and with their elders, really getting to
be connected to their culture and having it be a valued
part of their childhood too. Knowing the names
(20:06):
for natural medicines and for plants, and even just for water,
or how do you enter the water in a way that's in line
with your ancestors, and how just being connected with other people who
are also trying to teach their kids those practices,
how that in and of itself is so healing and
(20:28):
what's possible. The world that we want to
live in being built actively. Thanks for sharing about this and these three
so far, there's one left, if you can even believe it,
we've covered so much already, and I feel like it encompasses so much.
So the last theory of practice is liberation and agency.
(20:50):
The last one might be most familiar to people who are listening in,
because I feel like it might have, and the most overlaps,
with what we might think of as sort of traditional domestic and sexual
violence prevention work, and that is a theory of liberation and agency.
So the people we spoke with talked about liberatory approaches or operation
(21:11):
based approaches to violence prevention in terms of freedom from oppression,
in terms of envisioning or enacting the kind of world that we want,
kind of world that exists when oppression has ended.
And the theory imagining a transformation of existing conditions of domination,
(21:33):
which we know underlying patterns of domestic and sexual violence.
I would say this was the theory that we heard about across
every interview, the word itself, liberation. And comes up in many of the
transcripts, it was spoken about as an aspirational concept, of course,
(21:53):
this coming of what we might bring forth.
But the language of liberation really was in everyday practice, it wasn't
sort of imagined, but it was something that people spoke about sort of
being manifesting in sort of an everyday way,
it was characterized by people working together to gain knowledge about
(22:15):
domination and oppression, really naming and articulating what oppression
is and how it shows up in people's lives as a way to
overpower the ways that those can become internalized.
It was also linked to this idea of collective agency then and solidarity,
so what can be brought together by people learning together about oppression
(22:36):
by naming oppression and by working together to
overpower and change the ways oppression works. People really spoke about
developing a liberatory form of violence prevention in an intersectional
way, so really not thinking about gender oppression alone, but always thinking
about it in relation to racism especially, since that was at the center
(23:00):
of our study, but also other forms of oppression. And then to think
then that sort of a liberatory approach requires us to think and learn
together about how those systems of oppression interact, so really thinking
about how to reach and utilize these theories of practice with people who
(23:21):
are particularly vulnerable, and thinking about self determination itself
as sort of inherent to, but also requiring collective action so not
theory in which an individual can, on their own, just
rise above oppressive circumstances, but to really think about liberation
(23:42):
based theory as one that requires people to come together and work together.
Yeah, so a quote that we had, that dovetails with this was "Everyone
is internalizing information about white supremacy and imperialist patriarchal
world, and you have to actively unlearn it to not reproduce it",
(24:03):
and I was thinking about one of the
specific programs or organizing efforts that this makes me think about is
actually working on defense campaigns or criminalized survivors
campaigns, and trying to fight back and say, "Actually what the state is
(24:24):
saying about this is just totally not true, and we're gonna have a
whole other analysis in a way that we think about
what should happen for this person," and I think this really speaks to
too how that kind of organizing or a huge group of people,
even internationally or... Is trying to say, "This person should not be
(24:48):
criminalized for protecting themselves," really fits in neatly, I think,
to some of the other categories that we talked about, and in particular
in the last minute, I was like, "Maybe I should talk about
defense campaigns actually in the abolition and transformation
area," really fits in there, and I think this was a common thing
(25:10):
that came up when we were doing the...
Looking more closely at the research was like, and the interviews in particular
was like, they all in some way or another could fit into different
categories or these different sections, and we had a, Syd, I thought really
(25:33):
brilliantly came up with a way to describe that a couple of different
ways, but one was like a Venn diagram where we looked at how
they were overlapping all of these categories, and that many of the folks
that we interviewed and many of the projects
really could fit in to all of these categories, and a lot of
the work around anti racism does as well. So just wanted to speak
(25:57):
to that. We also have, on page 45 of the report,
we actually did also try to make a table where we
distinguished these four theories of practice in a more simplified version
than we just describe them now, it's just one page.
And while we saw all the overlaps between these practices, we actually found
(26:21):
it useful and productive to try to articulate that there are multiple theories
of practice operating here, and to try to name and clarify what some
of them are, can help programs and projects and organizers really think
through where they're intervening and where they're working, sort of what
(26:43):
angle they're working, 'cause we need all these angles happening at the
same time, but it doesn't necessarily mean that it makes sense for every
program to try to enact and do every theory at the same time.
I will say for me, it's really expanded the way that I view
my work and what the possibilities are in prevention, when we're thinking
(27:04):
about things like community level prevention or societal level prevention.
I feel like more doors are open than I thought were in the
past, and more possibilities exist, and I'm really excited about that.
What do you most want people to know or to integrate into their
work based on what came out of the Mapping Prevention Project?
(27:27):
I think I would love for people to know
that they're probably doing a lot of the things already that need to
be done, and maybe they're doing that in a way that isn't
very supportive, I think especially when we're thinking about queer and
trans community and BIPOC community and just you're doing a lot of amazing
work already, and one quote that I was just trying to scroll through
(27:51):
and find was around, "If you're doing gender based violence prevention work
and doing it well, then that also comes with doing anti racist work
and doing other forms of anti oppression work and vice versa".
And then also something about how the funders aren't the bosses,
I think something around... We saw this as an opportunity to get to
(28:14):
lift up the work that was already happening and sort of showcase
it, and how amazing and how awesome it was and how transformational it
was, and also to say back to funders,
there's a lot of really amazing work happening already, how can we sort
of fund it in a way that isn't
gonna be holding people back, and I think that research doesn't have to
(28:38):
be scary or it can really support and help you, and
it doesn't have to be a gruelling time
while you're getting to it and you can learn just as much from
the process as you do from the product at the end,
so. Yeah, there has been a dominant idea of violence prevention,
(29:00):
of domestic and sexual violence prevention, that is pretty narrow in terms
of where it thinks that that happens, and who are the sort of
imagined beneficiaries of those programs, like the middle school classroom
concept of domestic and sexual violence prevention. So one thing I really
(29:21):
love about this project is not that it's developing other kinds of violence
prevention work rather that it's recognizing and acknowledging other kinds
of violence prevention work, and I think that by doing that,
then we also could build and develop other kinds of programs and that
funding to follow that impulse, you could follow that
(29:42):
and research, that we could think beyond just measuring the impact of a
one time or one workshop series in a school
that I think it's really imperative that we begin to think about violence
prevention as really much more expansive way in the field.
(30:02):
Thank you both. It's so great to talk about this project all the
time, it always makes me feel so happy and so hopeful.
I wanna let folks know about where you can go to read more
about the project, read about the people who are involved, get a hold
of the resources, look at the map, go to mappingprevention.org. And then
(30:25):
we also wanted to just let you know that if you are curious
about what people who are part of the mapping prevention project are up
to now, we'll be putting some of that information in our show notes.
So make sure to check that out too, and you can find the links there
also. Well, thank you so much for being here. It's always such a
(30:46):
pleasure to talk with you about this project and think about the good
memories of us working together. Thanks for listening to this episode of
Resource on the Go. For more resources and information about preventing
sexual assault, visit our website at nsvrc.org. You can also get in touch
with us by emailing resources@nsvrc.org.
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