How We Show Up by Mia Birdsong
How We Show Up reimagines connection and community in a time of deep isolation. Birdsong challenges the idea that family and support must follow traditional structures, and instead offers a beautifully grounded blueprint for how we can build belonging through mutual care, vulnerability, and intentional relationships. It’s affirming, hopeful, and deeply human.

Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown
Brown weaves together lessons from nature, movement-building, and personal transformation to show how small shifts, when rooted in relationship and aligned with our values, can create powerful change. We love it for its poetic, practical, and spiritually energizing approach to justice work.

Sacred Instructions by Sherri Mitchell
Blending Indigenous wisdom, personal story, and deep insight, Sacred Instructions invites us to reconnect with the Earth, with each other, and with our responsibilities to future generations. We recommend it for those seeking healing justice rooted in ancestral knowledge and spiritual depth.

The Little Book of Restorative Justice by Howard Zehr
This is a foundational read for anyone curious about restorative justice. Zehr introduces key principles with clarity and compassion, making complex ideas accessible without diluting their power. We love it for how it grounds the practice in dignity, accountability, and repair.

Justice as Healing: Indigenous Ways, edited by Wanda D. McCaslin
This powerful collection brings together Indigenous voices sharing stories, frameworks, and practices of justice that honor the land, community, and spirit. We value it as an essential resource for understanding justice beyond punishment, one that centers healing, tradition, and sovereignty.

Sexual violence in the United States remains at epidemic levels, affecting people across race, ethnicity, class, and gender identities. Research clearly demonstrates that Black women face heightened risk of both sexual victimization and its devastating mental and physical health consequences compared to White women. This increased vulnerability stems from systemic factors – poverty, childhood trauma, and other risk factors linked to sexual harm disproportionally impact Black communities due to centuries of institutional racism. These same racist systems then deny Black survivors adequate care and support after violence occurs.

While reporting rates for sexual violence are dismally low across all demographics – only 20-30% of assaults are ever reported – Black survivors face unique barriers when engaging with formal systems. Having witnessed or personally experienced police brutality, many Black people must weigh their profound distrust of law enforcement against their desire for justice. Research confirms Black women regularly encounter dismissive, hostile reactions from medical personnel, police, and other first responders after disclosing sexual violence. As researchers note, “The U.S. healthcare system as well as legal system have enduring historical legacies of oppression toward Black women, and these interlocking systems of oppression are intimately tied to Black women’s postassault responses.”*

These negative experiences with formal institutions create a chilling effect, discouraging Black women not only from pursuing legal accountability but also from seeking crucial physical and mental healthcare after assault. The racially disparate treatment Black survivors receive directly contributes to their elevated rates of PTSD and other trauma symptoms.

Yet at this critical moment, certain voices demand we ignore or minimize these lived realities of racial inequity. This colorblind approach to sexual violence is dangerous – by refusing to acknowledge how race and gender intersect to shape both vulnerability and access to healing, we perpetuate harm. We cannot effectively distribute limited resources or reach those most in need while denying the role of systemic racism and oppression.

At Shared Roots Collective, we recognize that understanding systemic racism, white supremacy, patriarchal oppression, and intersectionality is fundamental to supporting survivors. Only by approaching each person’s experience with nuanced, individualized care can we account for the complex sociocultural factors affecting their path to healing, community, and justice. We refuse to accept a system that fails Black survivors, and we invite you to join us in building new pathways to healing and justice that honor every person’s lived experience.

Sources:

* Mosley, E.A., et al. (2021). Racial disparities in sexual assault characteristics and mental health care after sexual assault medical forensic exams, Journal of Women’s Health, 30(10), 1448.

Bryant Davis, T. et al. (2010). Struggling to survive: Sexual assault, poverty, and mental health outcomes of African American women, American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 80, 61-70.

Hakimi, D., et al. (2018). Relationship between negative social reaction to sexual assault disclosure and mental health outcomes of Black and White female survivors. Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy, 10(3), 270-275.

Smith, S.G. (2017). National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (2011-2012 state reports).

West, C. & Johnson K. (2013). Sexual Violence in the Lives of African American Women, National Online Resource Center on Violence Against Women.

Throughout the two decades of my legal work representing survivors of violent crime, I was often told that sexual harm is an individual problem, solely a conflict between the person who was hurt and the person who harmed them. Yet what I saw on a daily basis is that sexual harm goes beyond this binary, leaving holes in families, friend groups, and larger communities, fractures that are usually ignored and never addressed. Survivors are left with a tattered or non-existent support system, and people who experienced secondary or vicarious harm are given no opportunities at repair. Too often communities are not engaged as part of the healing process and are left vulnerable to further harm and violence. 

At Shared Roots, we use the term restorative justice to encompass both a philosophy and a social justice movement, rooted in indigenous practices and focused on how we, as a society, should address harm and wrongdoing without involving the traditional legal system. While our restorative justice processes center the harmed person and their needs and healing, true healing cannot occur in a vacuum; we must engage our communities and strengthen community-based systems to repair harm, mend community dynamics, and resist further violence. As stated by the founders of Creative Interventions, “To live violence-free lives, we must develop holistic strategies for addressing violence that speak to the intersection of all forms of oppression.”

What can a true community-engaged response look like? Let’s apply this process to a group of institutions that have faced many incidents of sexual harm: Religious institutions, including a number of churches in the Chicago area. 

Too often, these institutions deal with sexual harm by requesting the person doing the harm quietly step down from their roles, resign, or retire early; make a blanket statement to the congregation regarding repentance and forgiveness; and immediately fill the vacant role with little or no more done to address the harm that occurred. The persons directly harmed are left with no support and may even be blamed for the loss of a charismatic leader, leading them to leave the community due to embarrassment or shame. Other members of the community receive no further communication and must decide how to move forward on their own, with some inevitably leaving the community as well.

However, this process does not need to be so alienating. While it is appropriate for the person who caused the harm to relinquish their authority, true accountability must include an opportunity to take responsibility for their actions, express remorse, and work towards change. By engaging the broader church community in the restorative process through dialogue, education about sexual violence, and opportunities to support the persons harmed, the community becomes part of the solution in denouncing harmful behavior and helping to hold the person who did the harm accountable. The community can also help to identify and repair all the various harms caused by the abuse, including supporting the healing of survivors and persons who have experienced secondary harm, such as spouses and partners, church volunteers, and families and friends of the person harmed. 

The community can also help to identify and repair all the various harms caused by the abuse, including supporting the healing of survivors and persons who have experienced secondary harm, such as spouses and partners, church volunteers, and families and friends of the person harmed. 

Finally, by fully integrating the congregation as a whole, the church can critically examine and address aspects of the religious culture, power dynamics, theology, and practices that may have enabled or failed to prevent the harm. Together, the community can design and implement policies and structural changes to improve safety and accountability.  

Crafting these community-based processes requires a trauma-informed approach, with a deep understanding of the impacts of sexual harm and retraumatization risks, an approach in which few religious and lay leaders have experience. 

Shared Roots Mediation works in consultation and collaboration with each specific community to tailor our services to the specific needs of the institution and encourage participants to integrate their lived experiences to enhance the work. Through our services, we work with participants to navigate the nuances of addressing sexual harm, creating space for healing, prevention, and community accountability. By focusing on building skills within church leadership and the broader congregation through training and modeling restorative processes, we at Shared Roots aim to empower communities to identify and implement possibilities for accountability, support, and healing that lead to community transformation.

If you are a leader or a member of a church or religious institution that would like to explore restorative justice possibilities for past or current sexual harm, please contact Shared Roots Mediation at [email protected] to schedule a free consultation. 

Happy International Women’s Day! This global celebration honors women’s achievements and calls for us to imagine a gender-equal world, free of bias and discrimination. The IWD campaign theme for 2024 is ‘Inspire Inclusion.’ As highlighted by the official website, “When we inspire others to understand and value women’s inclusion, we forge a better world.”

Too often, women who experience trauma and violence are excluded from efforts to seek justice and accountability for this harm. These limited options, whether through the criminal legal system, a protective order, a workplace grievance process, or similar, in small and large ways, remove the agency from the survivor. Women who suffer sexual harm in particular are given few options for how to respond to this harm, often presented with pursuing accountability solely through formal legal or institutional systems. Specifically, in the criminal legal system, where nearly all survivors are directed, the survivor is relegated to the role of witness; all they can do is participate in the process as determined by the official actors of the criminal legal system. Survivors can no more unilaterally “press charges” than they can apprehend and arrest the person who harmed them. While they may be asked what they want to do and what they want to happen, there is no recourse if these wishes and desires are ignored.

Contradicting the limiting norms of these formal mechanisms, feminist psychologist Judith Hermann advises that the survivor must be “author and arbiter of her own recovery…. No intervention that takes power away from the survivor can possibly foster her recovery, no matter how much it appears to be in her immediate best interest.” To allow this agency, though, we must provide them with more than the current options available in our limited legal system. 

We at Shared Roots Mediation were inspired to start our practice by recognizing the need for women to be included in determining their own justice and healing journeys. By providing restorative and transformative justice options, Shared Roots seeks to empower women to ask, “How do I want to define justice and healing for myself?” We strive to put the power of creation into the survivor’s hands by moving away from society’s desire to assign blame and find fault and toward engaging the survivor directly in their own healing and justice process. 

For women who have experienced violence and trauma, restorative and transformative justice can be deeply empowering. It allows them to shape what their personal definition of justice looks like, rather than relying solely on the definition handed to them through the legal system. The possibilities for healing are only limited by the survivor’s wishes and definitions of recovery for themselves. 

Through our work, Shared Roots Mediation joins the movement for gender equality by including women in reimagining justice for survivors of sexual harm. When women are the leaders of their own healing journeys, the potential for individual and societal transformation is limitless. This International Women’s Day, join us in building a world where all women are valued, respected, and empowered to shape their own futures.