Conclusion: Breaking the Chains – Embracing Transformative Justice for a Just Society

This intervention experience arose from a collective complaint of sexual harassment filed by a group of high school students against one of their classmates. They specifically described the acts committed in writing and called for an environment of trust and safety at the school. This situation led to the implementation of a comprehensive approach based on the principles of restorative justice, transformative justice, and community accountability. This approach, based on the principles of restorative justice, transformative justice, and community accountability, rejected simple penalization or punishment, focusing instead on addressing the needs of the various stakeholders in the school community, while encouraging the targeted student to understand the causes and accept the effects of their actions. In this regard, the Positive Transformation of Community Conflicts approach was implemented. This approach understands that social conflict is not the sole result of individual wills but is based on exclusionary or unequal structures. Therefore, the school directs its actions toward changing the community values, ideas, and practices that allow events—in this case, acts of sexual harassment—to prevent their repetition.

BackgroundIntimate partner violence (IPV) disproportionately affects Black women, yet the current IPV justice response, relying on the criminal legal system, often fails them due to racialized, sexist stereotypes that disrupt Black women’s claims to survivorship. Transformative justice, a community-based approach designed to repair harm between the survivor and person who caused harm and transform the social conditions that perpetuate violence, may be a promising alternative approach to facilitate justice and accountability for IPV. However, little is known about the justice preferences of Black women IPV survivors. This qualitative study sought to understand Black women IPV survivors’ experiences interacting with police and their justice preferences following IPV.MethodsSemi-structured interviews with 15 Black women IPV survivors were conducted between April 2020 and April 2022. Inductive analytic techniques derived from grounded theory were used to contextualize Black women IPV survivors’ experiences.ResultsOne theme was identified that aligned with Black women IPV survivors’ experiences interacting with the police: 1) fear and distrust. Four themes were identified that aligned with justice preferences: (1) resolution through dialogue, (2) therapy and counseling services, (3) resource support, and (4) protection and prevention for children. Fear and distrust of the police was mainly driven by anticipated discrimination. Survivors’ justice preferences encompassed solution-based dialogue between the survivor and person who caused harm mediated by family and trusted individuals in the community, therapy services, housing support, and attention to preventing the intergenerational cycle of IPV for children as part of a community-based, holistic justice response.ConclusionsPolice interactions as part of the current justice response were counterproductive for Black women IPV survivors. Black women IPV survivors deserve alternative forms of justice and accountability for IPV. As an alternative justice response to IPV, transformative justice can encompass their justice preferences and promote equity and center Black women IPV survivors and their communities.Supplementary InformationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12889-024-20244-y.

Patrícia Silva and Deise Santos review Penal Abolitionism and Transformative Justice in Brazil by André R. Giamberardino. Author/s Disclosure Both authors are PhD students in André Giamberardino’s postgraduate programme in Law at the Federal University of Paraná. The book review editors took measures to ensure the accuracy of the statements made in the review so as to avoid any appearance of bias on the part of the authors or influence by Giamberardino.

Gender-based violence against women and children is a serious problem in Indonesia that reflects the inequality of social structures and the weakness of legal implementation. This study aims to examine the extent to which the Indonesian legal system is able to provide fair, equal, and gender-responsive protection to victims of violence, as well as assess the challenges in its application. The type of research used is a normative-critical study with a Feminist Legal Theory approach. The results of the analysis show that although there are regulatory advances such as the TPKS Law and the Presidential Instruction on Gender Mainstreaming, their application is still biased, not victim-friendly, and lacks a gender perspective. In conclusion, the law in Indonesia has not fully guaranteed substantive justice for victims. Therefore, it is recommended that legal reforms based on victims' experiences, increasing the capacity of law enforcement officials, and strengthening victim service institutions to encourage inclusive and transformative justice.

Over the years, South African Courts have adjudicated on the status of English and Afrikaans in language policies of higher education institutions. This article reflects on the slow efforts by the South African government and higher education institutions towards the development and inclusion of languages indigenous to South Africa. Taking a textual analysis approach, the aim of this paper is to place emphasis on the need to develop and include indigenous languages of South Africa in the language policies of higher education institutions. The paper further seeks to contend that the inclusion of languages indigenous to South Africa will facilitate social cohesion and affirm restorative justice efforts given the historical marginalisation of black people in language and education. Building on a previously co-authored article addressing the use of indigenous languages in higher education institutions, this paper is limited to Chairperson of the Council of UNISA v AfriForum NPC 2021, the 2022 Commission of inquiry into allegations of racism at Stellenbosch university also known as the Kampepe Report, and the 2023 South African Human Rights Commission's Investigative Report into Allegations of Unconstitutional Language Practices at Certain Stellenbosch University Residences. The analysis presented in this paper will be grounded in transformative justice and a transitional justice framework.

The demand for perfect solutions to complex institutional problems creates excessive, ever-changing barriers for racialized peoples working toward transformative justice. The same demand is not made of the methods used to adopt the emerging technologies which appeal to the libraries desire to appear in perpetual growth. This paper employed autoethnographic analysis and Storywork to understand and make meaning from our lived experiences as racialized librarians in relation to the sociopolitical spaces in which we work. These methodologies allowed us to expose complexities and vulnerabilities in our experiences with community-led work to return sacred Knowledge and offered us a means to critique the systems in which we operate and call upon our colleagues to embrace solutions that are gradual, decentralized, and imperfect. In this article, we make a series of calls to our colleagues as a means of engaging their thinking on unchecked assumptions that create greater barriers, more labour and burnout racialized colleagues. These calls create an ethic in place of best practices that challenge our profession to be responsive to local issues in relational ways. We offer this defense of imperfection as a means of bringing attention to the labour of social justice work within our profession and to ask all of our colleagues to embrace and make imperfect solutions possible.

This article introduces the special issue entitled Gendered Violence, the State and the Individual. A Legal and Historical Approach by using a judgment issued by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in 2021 as example of the ambiguous societal and statal responses to gendered violence. Key feminist theories are outlined in order to expose the several facets and forms of violence and the State's critical role in combating, eradicating, and preventing, but also in perpetrating and perpetuating violence. Altogether, the special issue exposes the ambivalence of the State as protector and oppressor in both the public and private dimensions and aims to advocate for the need of a deeply socio-cultural, global and holistic approach that implements an inclusive and transformative justice.

The work required of politicized subjects to act together, across difference towards transformative justice, is inexhaustible, complex, and difficult. Sometimes it is a battle to speak to one's peers, let alone act in concert with them. This article addresses destructive tendencies of intracommunal queer relationality in particular. Recent events within queer networks have helped us to understand particular impasses in queer organizing as acerbic and self-destructive—what we term here as “acrid.” In such instances, although some useful spaces for critique, criticism, praise, questions, wonderings, rants, reflections, and connections opened up, battlefields on which allied community members viciously attacked one another also manifested. Although generative at times, the debates and dialogues contained a great deal of vitriol, judgment, complacency, demands for apologies and annihilation, and in some instances, threatening and violent language, all which inhibit the momentum of our movements. This article is neither a content analysis of these myriad breakdowns in queer collaboration, nor are we interested in proving that such examples of destructive paradoxical relationality indeed happen. They happen. Instead, we assess the damage of devastated intracommunal relations, consider their queer propensities, and creatively theorize alternative possibilities for better collaborations throughout our queer spaces, communities, and futures.

In this article, we assert that it is our responsibility as teacher educators to commit to fostering justice and equity in and through teacher education as an imperative. To document ingrained injustices across time and space, we engaged in critically reading the landscape of teacher education in the US, guided by the questions: What are the responsibilities and commitments of teacher education as a field? and How can teacher education become answerable to the communities it serves? Seeking to redress how justice and answerability have been peripherally positioned in and by teacher education, we propose shared commitments grounded in transformative justice to ensure that teacher education commits to interrupting its role in the re-production of inequities. We thus argue that such shared commitments have the potential to forge a path toward equity.

In the Foreword to Gerard Robinson and Elizabeth English Smith's Education for Liberation volume on educational initiatives in prison, Newt Gingrich and Van Jones note that educational programs “do something powerful: they give hope and dignity to the incarcerated.” The authors wholeheartedly agree and while they recognize the importance of higher education programs that confer degrees and therefore credentials out in the free world, they find that education can be broadly understood in prison in ways that greatly enhance the hope and dignity of the incarcerated. In this chapter, they explore the creation of a Japanese-style healing garden at the Oregon State Penitentiary (OSP), a maximum security, 2,000-person male prison in Salem, Oregon. This prisoner-led initiative was a resounding success, despite all the odds against it, because it was animated by a philosophy of transformative justice that both prison administration and prisoners could believe in, and it embraced the need for meaningful and inclusive community partnerships.

A crime victim in the traditional sense refers to a person who has been infringed
 on legal interests due to the criminal acts of others, and is limited to damage
 caused by crimes subject to the exercise of the right to punish the state, focusing
 on state power.
 However, theories aimed at establishing the concept of crime victims centered
 on victims and maintaining social stability and a sustainable community have
 recently been proposed through the concepts of not only restorative justice, but
 also transitional justice, independent justice, and transformative justice.
 All of these theories are continuously under discussion about the concept, and
 their meaning or content is not completely unified or agreed. However, unlike
 traditional crime concepts, it recognizes that there are blind spots that cannot be
 solved by traditional crime and crime victims and seeks a desirable solution to
 them, and unlike traditional crime concepts, it is a crime victim-centered approach
 rather than a national criminal rights and criminals-centered concept.
 Here, we will examine in detail the recently presented concepts of crime
 victim-centered justice. And by analyzing the current status of Korean laws,
 would like to consider the definition and legislation of the concept of human
 rights-friendly crime victims.
 In addition would like to emphasize that the concept of legal crime victims
 should not lead the national system and social consensus, but on the contrary,
 social consensus should be reflected in the law.

Epilogue: Higher Education and Transformative Justice

This chapter describes the framework to guide assessment, intervention, and evaluation in the carceral state. It first adopts an anti-oppressive stance, including antiracist and feminist principles. The framework also integrates strengths and evidence-informed perspectives. Finally, it incorporates a public health orientation for health, well-being, and restoration. A practice framework is vital because anti-oppressive social work has not been widely applied in the carceral state, with unique challenges and limits to participants’ individual choice and agency. For instance, the framework guides recognition of the tension between a push for care and control, which can be at odds with ideas about transformative justice and decarceration.

The slow ratification of the elimination of sexual violence draft law is evidence that the political system in Indonesia insensitive in responding to the issue of sexual violence victims. Meanwhile, the existing justice system has not been able to provide justice for sexual violence victims. That is why feminists formulate a justice that can meet the needs of sexual violence victims, which is called transformative justice. Transformative justice supported by community solidarity can bring about recovery for sexual violence victims to have courage to speak up and regain their destroyed self-esteem.

NICU clinicians strive to provide family-centered care and often encounter complex and ethical challenges. Emerging evidence suggests that NICU clinicians likely interact with families experiencing intimate partner violence (IPV). However, little research and training exists to guide NICU clinicians in their thinking and practice in the midst of IPV. In this review, we use a structural violence framework to engage in a critical analysis of commonly held assumptions about IPV. These assumptions include an overreliance on binaries including male-female and offender-victim, the belief that people need to be rescued, prioritization of physical safety, and the notion that mandatory reporting helps families who experience violence. By reexamining these assumptions, this review guides NICU clinicians to consider alternatives to carceral and punitive responses to IPV, such as transformative justice and reflexive engagement.