Notwithstanding the prevalence of exposure to domestic violence, sexual assault and criminalization, Black women demonstrate collective perseverance and resilience. While many faith-based organizations and social service providers often provide links to services that meet survivors’ basic needs (e.g., food, clothing, and temporary shelter), they often fail to provide a complete continuum of care that supports Black women’s resilience. This fact sheet outlines ABCs of supporting Black women's resilience.
Practitioners and systems often fail to incorporate a contextualized understanding of the ways in which both intimate partner violence and criminalization disproportionately impact Black women. This fact sheet provides trauma-informed and culturally-responsive strategies to help practitioners and system players improve current practices and meet the needs of criminalized Black women survivors of intimate partner violence.
Acknowledging the role of faith, spirituality and/or religion is crucial to enhancing cultural responsiveness and understanding the diverse needs of many people. This fact sheet outlines how faith communities can better support criminalized Black women survivors in their own communities and suggests that broader community-based anti-violence efforts should incorporate faith-based organizations into their responses.
Over the past 20 years, a growing number of young girls—disproportionately Black girls—have been criminalized and subjected to criminal and juvenile legal involvement. Notably, these girls have often experienced numerous forms of trauma before their involvement in the system, including poverty, racism, sexism, heterocentrism and transphobia, child physical and sexual abuse, sexual assault, dating violence, and exploitation.
This webinar will highlight the innovative work of the EMERGE Academy, an educational reentry pilot program for young women residing in Alameda County, who have had prior contact with the criminal or juvenile legal system. Falilah Bilal, senior trainer of the National Black Women’s Justice Institute, will share lessons learned from this pilot and offer intervention strategies for the field on responding more effectively to girls and young women reentering society.
As chief medical officer for New York City jails, Homer Venters realized early in his tenure that for many people dying in jail, the primary cause of death was jail itself. To document what was actually taking place behind bars, Venters and his team created a statistical category no one had dared to track before: "jail-attributable deaths." His work led him into frequent opposition with the security services. It also led to his book, Life and Death in Rikers Island.
This webinar addresses recent convenings and collaborations between domestic violence/sexual assault advocacy organizations and black women clergy and will share strategies to center the experiences of black women exposed to gender-based violence and impacted by criminalization.
Like a number of cities across the U.S., New York City is in the midst of a remarkable, often contentious, debate about the future and purpose of its jails. New Thinking host Matt Watkins recently moderated a public discussion of the city’s pledge to replace its notorious Rikers Island jail complex with a series of smaller, modern facilities—located near courthouses, not on an isolated island. It's a shift the mayor says will end the era of mass incarceration in the city.
In this podcast, which was produced as part of Project SAFE, Afua Addo is joined by Dr. Monique Morris, the co-founder and president of the National Black Women’s Justice Institute, and Andrea C. James, the founder and executive director of the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls.
The video, From Defendant to Survivor: How Courts Are Responding to Human Trafficking, profiles three courts that have forged new responses to sex trafficking. This guide is designed to help viewers understand the key principles of court models that effectively divert human trafficking and prostitution cases from prosecution.
