National Black Women's Justice Institute Content Topic Results

Gender-based violence—including domestic violence—impacts an astonishing number of Black women and girls. And when Black women and girls experience gender-based violence, the strategies they take to survive are often criminalized. Ending the systemic punishment and incarceration of Black women and girls requires that we decriminalize survival. This factsheet spotlights the impact of gender-based violence on Black women and girls and the ensuing criminalization that occurs.

Led and driven by currently and formerly incarcerated women, the Leadership of Voices of Experience (LOVE) Project has developed a training curriculum for victim service providers that builds providers’ capacity to support system-impacted women and gender expansive people—people who are transgender, gender nonconforming, gender queer, nonbinary.

This fact sheet outlines why we need to shift the narratives around sex trafficking to center Black survivors.

This report from the National Black Women’s Justice Institute explores how recognizing the pervasive and systemic nature of sexual violence against Black women, girls, trans, gender nonconforming and nonbinary people by police, penal, and immigration officers, in prisons, jails and/or detention facilities, and in social service, learning, and health care settings, calls into question our reliance on these systems and structures of dominance as responses to sexual violence, and as effective mechanisms of prevention, early detection, and healing.

This toolkit provides guiding principles and policy recommendations that are designed to improve interactions between girls of color and SROs, with the ultimate goal of reducing girls of colors’ disproportionate rates of contact with the juvenile justice system.