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history

tdc’s Healing Justice Lab seeks to explore uses of transformative justice in order to center healing within the aftermath of intimate partner and sexual violence. The Healing Justice Lab assists survivors and their community in crafting creative, compassionate, and collaborative solutions to patriarchal violence through the utilization of non-carceral, survivor-centered methods of crisis intervention and transformative justice processes. This space formed as a response to the growing carceral landscape of Atlanta and the South, and the absence of non-carceral solutions to harm for our most marginalized communities. Jenani Srijeyanthan and Lucky Ho began to craft the skeleton for the Healing Justice Lab in the beginning of 2020, and the two organizers began to take on cases from community members.

process & analysis

tdc centers transformative justice (TJ) as our framework and compass. 

Transformative justice is a framework used to address harm and violence without allowing more harm to precipitate and without replicating state violence.

Responses and solutions rooted in transformative justice are created with the intention of addressing and rectifying harm without a reliance on police or prisons or other harmful societal norms. TJ seeks to provide these solutions with a focus on the survivor, healing, accountability, and safety for all, all while recognizing the humanity of the both survivor and the person who committed harm. Transformative justice frameworks and processes seek creative solutions that not only fulfill the need for justice in the immediate moment, but also to address the conditions that precipitated the harm and to co-create a long-term plan and vision for collective liberation. We recognize that violence and harm do not happen in a vacuum and are an after-effect of living under racial capitalism and white supremacy. We do not seek to replicate the harm of the state or the condition of capitalism in which we dispose of people who have committed wrongdoings. We believe in the humanity of everyone and that everyone deserves the right to safety and community. 

Though there does not exist a blueprint for transformative justice and accountability processes, it is our hope that we can pursue this process in a way that allows for the healing of everyone involved.

The Healing Justice Lab has developed robust models of intervention and transformative justice processes for both rapid response cases and cases that require long-term accompaniment. TDC firmly believes that communities are the entities best equipped  to assess their context, needs, and solutions, and for that reason, our intent is to offer trainings to skill up individuals and communities to do this work, and we are currently only accepting cases that require external intervention due to the uniqueness or severity of the nature of the case. The goal of these interventions is to provide relief, healing, support to survivors and their community, as well as to provide support and accompaniment to those who have committed harm in order to rectify the harm and each the root of why harm happened in the first place to prevent it from recurring. 

Rapid Response:

  • Involves:
    • Individual who was harmed
    • Support pod for individual who was harmed
    • Facilitator
  • Should last no longer than two weeks and then be either resolved or transitioned into an accountability process

Long-term Accompaniment: 

  • Involves: 
    • Individual who was harmed
    • Support pod for individual who was harmed
    • Individual who caused harm
    • Support pod for individual who caused harm
    • Facilitator
    • Liaison
  • Duration can be 3 months, 6 months, or 1 year