Survivors at the Center

When she was 10, Aishah Shahidah Simmons told her parents her step-grandfather sexually abused her.

“They didn’t remove me from the situation because my grandparents provided the ‘safe nuclear home’ while they were out transforming the world,” she says. Simmons’ parents were activists. Her father was a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War. Her mother was beaten and jailed for registering Black people to vote during the Jim Crow era. But despite their involvement in radical movements, her parents did not protect her, Simmons says. “I always think it’s important to name that, particularly in activist circles,” she adds. “It’s important to do the external work, but in the words of my teacher Toni Cade Bambara, ‘If your house ain’t in order, you’re not in order. It’s easier to be out there than in here.’”

Simmons has since dedicated her life to examining the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and sexual violence as a cultural worker. Her 2006 film, NO! The Rape Documentary, shone a light on intraracial rape in the Black community. “Black people are under siege,” she says. “To speak about the violence against [Black] women, you were viewed as a traitor.” Her work has since expanded to amplify the experiences of Black LGBTQ survivors, and today she advocates for survivor-centered healing, non-carceral community accountability, and using intersectionality when uprooting abuse from our society. “This entire hemisphere was founded on rape, genocide, and enslavement,” she says. 

In the United States, a person is sexually assaulted every 68 seconds. Twenty-four people experience domestic violence each minute. More than one-third of Black women have experienced sexual violence in their lifetime. And women, impoverished people, and marginalized groups are the populations most likely to be victimized. But despite these statistics, Simmons rejects the idea that abuse is inevitable. “I don’t believe that we are born rapists,” she says. “I don’t believe that we’re born settlers. I don’t believe that we’re born misogynist [or] capitalist. We’re taught it. It’s indoctrinated.”

More than five years after #metoo was brought into the mainstream, abuse still has deep roots in many of our institutions, industries, and systems. While the hashtag became increasingly associated with encouraging survivors—particularly in Hollywood—to tell their truths, society has yet to truly center them. “While I do believe that the truth has the power to set us free, it also has caused a lot of harm for the survivors coming forward,” says Simmons. “I’m still navigating that legacy of not being believed, of being told, ‘Are you sure you’re not dreaming? Are you sure this really happened?’ Or ‘What were you doing there?’”

As interpersonal violence becomes more widely discussed, survivors like Simmons, community organizers, and social workers are reshaping how to address it. Through anti-carceral approaches in schools, queer-inclusive standards of survivor care, and holistic community responses rooted in anti-oppression, they are embracing the possibility of freeing our communities from violence—and putting survivors’ needs first.

Surviving the Institution

When Drew Davis experienced sexual violence and sexual harassment in college, they began the school’s Title IX protocol seeking resources and support. Instead, the process became an exhausting period of having to self-advocate for their basic needs. “The violence and harm caused by the institution that I attended really was so much worse than what had originally happened,” they say.

Title IX, the civil rights law protecting those in federally funded education programs from sex-based discrimination, is widely recognized for helping address gender-based violence in schools. But the administration of former President Donald Trump narrowed the definition of “sexual harassment” and limited the types of sexual misconduct universities were required to investigate. These updated guidelines did way more to protect those accused of sexual violence than survivors themselves. 

Though new regulations under President Joe Biden’s administration include better protections for LGBTQ students, Davis says it is not enough to rely on Title IX to end gender-based violence in schools: “The institution bears such a large responsibility for the harm and the trauma that is being enacted on, through, and against students on a daily basis.”

Enter Know Your IX, a survivor-led project by Advocates for Youth that provides education, training, organizing, and direct support to students seeking more understanding about Title IX. As an organizer for Know Your IX, Davis helps build and advocate for community-based support systems that “insulate students from institutional violence.” In 2021, the project released a report that showed 39% of survivors who reported violence to their schools experienced a “substantial disruption” to their education, including leaves of absence, transferring, or dropping out altogether.

But Davis says organizers are developing the knowledge and resources to change those numbers. This includes challenging an institutional culture that conflates self-advocacy with empowerment. “Institutions, and folks who are higher up in administration, really value this idea that self-advocacy is a good thing, and that students should be able to be independent and do it themselves,” Davis says. “It’s that whole American ‘pull yourself up by the bootstraps’ vibe and belief that [are] really violent. And I think that’s what is keeping these systems where they are.”

To counter this, Know Your IX advocates for and empowers survivors to receive support that is responsive to their individual needs and experiences, including having confidential advocates at schools “who have the ability and institutional authority to navigate and move the institution to support a survivor however they need.” 

Those needs may not always be obvious, and for some survivors, their needs might require nixing the punitive, carceral methods schools often use to address violence. One confidential campus advocate drove more than an hour to buy wish paper from a craft store so that a survivor could burn it as part of their healing process. “That is abolition. It catered to the individual’s needs and their healing in such a specific way that I could never have anticipated,” Davis says. “Being responsive … that’s the key.”

Know Your IX not only addresses sexual violence on college campuses; the organization also works with students in K–12 schools. Davis is creating a workbook that will help middle and high school students better understand Know Your IX’s abolitionist approach. “[K–12 students] don’t live [at school] in the same way that you do on a college campus,” Davis says. “They don’t have access to the press like a lot of college students do” or “funding to do organizing.”

As a result, K–12 survivors are invisibilized. “Every single person needs to challenge that and needs to start thinking about how they can value young people and value children in a way that really holds them, and is just like, ‘Yeah, you are a full human, too,’” Davis says. “There is something so profound about when young people see something that is wrong—and name it as wrong—that is such an excellent moral register for us.” 

Revolutionizing Queer Survivor Care

While LGBTQ students are now protected from gender-based violence at the federal level, lawmakers continue to dehumanize queer communities. More than 500 anti-LGBTQ bills have been introduced, defeated, or are advancing in states across the country. “A lot of trans folks are literally afraid to go outside of their house—for work, for school, for help, for anything,” says michael munson, co-founder and executive director of FORGE, a nonprofit organization that empowers violence-focused service providers and crisis-intervention groups to offer culturally responsive, trauma-informed care for trans and nonbinary survivors. “It’s not just the legislation,” he says. “It’s the culture that we’re living in.”

Since 2009, FORGE has received federal funding to concentrate on the sexual and domestic violence that trans and nonbinary people experience, as well as stalking and hate crimes. It originally began as a general peer-to-peer support group for transmasculine individuals, then pivoted after munson noticed that at least half of group-meeting attendees were survivors. In 2004, FORGE conducted a national survey focused on trans survivors of sexual assault. Now it offers training and technical assistance to medical providers, coalitions, and organizations, and direct support to survivors. 

Trans and nonbinary survivors are often failed by organizations stuck in a gender binary. “Some of the barriers that we see are just total denial of care,” munson says. “People literally get turned away at the door if they seek help.” Or, survivors may not seek care out of fear of discrimination. “They might be asked for an ID that doesn’t match how they appear,” he says. “They might be trying to seek shelter and people say, ‘Oh, well, we only shelter [non-trans] women and men.’” 

But FORGE is disentangling trans-exclusive care and forming partnerships with other organizations to normalize inclusion wherever a survivor may seek support. One partnership with the International Association of Forensic Nurses helps train nurses across the country to provide proper care to trans survivors. “That’s helping people see beyond the binary, because they’re literally going to be able to see real-life trans people” in their curriculum. It can encourage a nurse to allow a trans patient to self-swab when collecting evidence after an assault, which “empowers the agency of that person,” munson says. “I view that as the standard of care, which is different [from] the cultural response.” 

To munson, survivor-centered care is culturally responsive care. “I don’t think it can be care if it’s not culturally responsive,” he says. “All of those words go together. And if they aren’t all there, it’s going to be a disservice to survivors.”

Queer folks are also meeting the needs of their local survivor communities through community-based organizing and service work. In Boston, The Network/La Red (TNLR) works to end partner abuse in LGBTQ, kink, and polyamorous communities. “Folks can live at the intersections of these communities,” says Cristina Dones, TNLR’s director of outreach, education, and organizing programs. “For folks who practice kink, there’s this idea that … if there’s abuse involved, that’s because you wanted it. There’s this stigma that polyamorous communities are promiscuous.”

Dones first joined TNLR around 2011. She worked for the organization’s free 24-hour hotline, responded to prison mail, and conducted outreach at events throughout Massachusetts. She credits TNLR, a survivor-led organization, with helping her to process how normalized domestic violence was in her childhood home. “I actually didn’t even realize it was abuse until I took [TNLR]’s training,” she says. “Then I realized it was happening in some of my relationships as well.”

Other services TNLR provides include Housing Pathways—a 30-day emergency shelter program for survivors and their families—and a transitional housing program, which provides up to two years of rental assistance. TNLR also offers telephone-based support groups for LGBTQ survivors of partner abuse, as well as specifically BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) LGBTQ survivors; educational training for survivors and service providers; and crisis intervention. It does not require that a survivor want to leave an abusive partner to receive services.

One training, called “Screening,” teaches domestic violence service providers how to “distinguish between who the survivor is and who the abuser is,” Dones says. “It’s about one person trying to maintain power and control, and one person trying to reclaim control over their own life.” Founded on anti-oppression principles, TNLR links partner abuse to the “larger violent culture which condones and rewards interpersonal, institutional, and imperialist abuse of power.” 

“Abuse, in all of its forms, is informed by oppression,” says Dones. “The tactics behind each to maintain power and control are the same. If we understand that, then we can change our approach to center the survivor.” 

The New York City Anti-Violence Project (AVP) is another anti-oppression organization using education, organizing, counseling, and advocacy to empower LGBTQ and HIV-impacted survivors of all kinds of violence. It offers a free hotline, legal services, and mental health support, and is the coordinator for the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs. 

“[AVP] really puts up-front into public consciousness … that violence does not exist in a silo,” says Aditi Bhattacharya, AVP’s deputy director of client services. “The biggest challenges right now continue, unfortunately but not surprisingly, to be the same challenges as 40 [to] 45 years ago—which are people’s reproductive rights, people’s rights to exist in the identities that they want, people’s rights to express their identity, their orientation, their truth, and their reality early on—and feel supported by their schools, by their families, by their churches.” 

As a whole, the organization’s teams work together to develop a holistic approach to violence. “We figure out among each other how we can actually balance what a collaborative community response within AVP looks like.” This often means recognizing and adapting to a survivor’s experience with both interpersonal and systemic violence. “Our legal team has had clients that they have held for more than 10 years,” Bhattacharya says. One client was an immigrant whose needs “traversed the spectrum.” “There was immigration-related support, systems-related support … there were benefits-related issues connected to housing, connected to violence,” she says. “This entire arc of this human being’s experience as an immigrant coming in with all of their identities and experiencing the Venn diagram of violences … is one example of how we’ve been doing this work.”

Reimagining Accountability

In addition to helping survivors navigate systems, AVP holds a support group for people who identify as being at risk of causing harm—a preventative measure that isn’t rooted in criminal justice. “Criminal justice kind of colonizes the movement of people who’ve experienced violence having the right, and the share of voice, to determine what healing would look like for them,” she says. “The country at large is slowly but surely recognizing that there needs to be a true reexamination of how systems have been allowed to exist and dictate the terms of healing.” 

Policing and prisons have been repeatedly exposed for their perpetuation of systematic, anti-Black violence. But they also carry an unpayable debt for the ways in which they reproduce abuse. More than 80,000 incarcerated people are sexually abused each year in the U.S. Abolitionists have strengthened calls to end incarceration because of it. Still, it can be challenging for some to imagine alternatives to addressing sexual violence. 

Though Simmons was raised in a radical household, she once believed incarceration to be the solution for rape. “That whole journey of making the [NO! documentary] helped me to see that no prison is going to stop rape,” she says. But the onus of figuring out what to do with those who cause harm shouldn’t be on survivors. Rather, “How do we, as a community, hold the harm-doers accountable?” Simmons asks. Part of this, she says, is encouraging people to think about the billions of dollars spent on policing and prisons. “If we siphoned off a fraction of that money and put it into counseling, healing—for clearly the survivors but also for the harm-doers—that, for me, is what survivor-centered accountability can look like.” Another part is giving survivors the space to use their personal experiences as the foundation for how we think about accountability.

In 2019, Simmons published Love WITH Accountability: Digging Up the Roots of Child Sexual Abuse, an anthology from AK Press featuring the works of 40 Black diasporic survivors, ranging in sexuality and gender, tasked to “envision how we can disrupt and end this epidemic without relying on the criminal justice system.” The project was born out of her own work holding her parents accountable for their lack of response to her step-grandfather’s abuse. “We learn in the family to keep things quiet … to protect the family,” she says. “That’s the first institution. Then it just ripples out to the school, to the church, the mosque, or synagogue, to the entertainer … the politician.” To Simmons, accountability requires that we not only focus on one individual as responsible. “It’s like plucking a leaf off a tree. We have to focus on the community [and] the structures that allow it to happen.” 

“We really need to be [doing] a lot of cross-movement organizing,” Davis says. “That’s the only way that we’re going to get anything done—if it’s happening everywhere.” 

While survivors like Simmons and Davis make way for decarceration, Bhattacharya emphasizes the need for organizations like AVP. “In the movement in anti-violence, especially community-based programs that work with multiple marginalized communities like LGBTQIA+ people, we do need more resources that seek to have these conversations … on our terms, informed by us,” she says. “Not dictated by mainstream systems.” 

This shift will determine whether collective healing and liberation can happen. “It remains to be seen, because it also means that it turns the current, existing economy of anti-violence work right on its head,” she says. In the meantime, centering survivors brings us one step closer.