Survivor-Centered Transformative Justice: An Approach to Designing Alongside Domestic Violence Stakeholders in US Muslim Communities

Abstract

While domestic violence (DV) is prevalent in all socioeconomic settings, identity highly impacts how one experiences and recovers from abuse. This work examines US-based Muslim women's challenges when seeking help and healing from domestic violence. Through participatory interviews with 23 participants within the DV ecosystem, we find that victim-survivors' autonomy is compromised throughout the abuse, within their immediate communities, and when involving the criminal justice system. To address such harms, we adapt a survivor-centered transformative justice (SCTJ) approach, a framework to discern individual and systemic harm, to understand how to design alongside victim-survivors, and to focus on victim-survivors' autonomy. We explain under what conditions an SCTJ approach may be productive for designers. We use insights from our interviews to highlight intervention areas for reducing harm, repairing harm, and promoting healing for victim-survivors. Lastly, we offer guidelines to design for harm reduction, accountability, and systemic change.CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in HCI .

"I Got Flagged for Supposed Bullying, Even Though It Was in Response to Someone Harassing Me About My Disability.": A Study of Blind TikTokers’ Content Moderation Experiences

“…The operationalization of transformative justice involves three main approaches [18,30,35,59]: 1) investigating the stakeholders of violations; 2) identifying the broader social context problems that lead to violations; 3) addressing the violations by resolving the social problems. Transformative justice frameworks have been used in many HCI studies to combat societal-level justice issues [21,25,60,84,85], including issues like child sexual abuse [85], domestic violence [63], and racism in educational contexts [25].…”

“…To gain a more nuanced understanding of this specific case and to propose viable solutions, we apply a transformative justice framework to analyze the experiences of BlindTokers and the harassment by trolls. Transformative justice is a holistic framework for analyzing justice [60,63,71,85]. It posits that harmful behaviors by offenders are often consequences of systemic injustice; rather than solely blaming and punishing individuals for violations and harm, transformative justice emphasizes identifying and addressing the systemic defects that contribute to such violations.…”