Race Matters: Black Women Face Unique Barriers to Healing from Sexual Violence

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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.

Community Transformation After Sexual Harm: Churches and Religious Institutions

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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. 

Community-Centered Healing: Restorative Justice in Action

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April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month. Coordinated each year by the National Sexual Violence Resource Center (NSVRC) and supported by survivor advocacy groups and organizations across the country, SAAM focuses on raising awareness about the prevalence of sexual harm, providing support resources for survivors, and educating communities on prevention strategies. The focus of this year’s NSVRC campaign for Sexual Assault Awareness Month is “Building Connected Communities,” uplifting “the role of inclusive, equitable, and connected communities in reducing sexual abuse, assault, and harassment.”

The role of community in a survivor’s journey to justice and healing cannot be overstated. Sexual harm can profoundly disrupt an individual’s sense of identity, community, and belonging – a disconnection felt by millions in the U.S. alone. The NSVRC reports that 80 percent of women have experienced some form of sexual harassment and 1 in 5 girls and women have experienced an attempted or completed rape, most before the age of 24. Yet at the time when these survivors most need the support of their communities, our current justice systems provide only limited, restrictive, and isolating options to seek justice and healing.

To protect any potential case, the current criminal legal system requires survivors to report, recount, and engage on their own. While some jurisdictions do provide compassionate and capable victim advocates, these persons are unknown to the survivor and unlikely to be from their community. And once the criminal case is over – usually, as in the vast majority of reports, before any charges are filed – the survivor no longer has access to this support.

Recognizing these limitations of conventional justice systems, Shared Roots Mediation seeks to use restorative and transformative justice to bring together the survivor’s community not only to provide support but also to create a culture of allyship for survivors and active prevention for intimate harm overall. Whereas the criminal legal system focuses solely on the isolated incident of sexual harm and on punishing the person it finds most responsible, our approach to holistic healing and justice allows a survivor and their community to identify and address underlying beliefs, attitudes, and biases that allow sexual harm to happen in the first place. Reconnecting a survivor to their community will often require confronting long-held assumptions and addressing other conflicts that are ignored by or inappropriate for the legal system. Restorative and transformative justice provides a flexible, expansive forum in which the broad needs and concerns of the survivor and community can be fully addressed.

As we observe this year’s Sexual Assault Awareness Month, Shared Roots Mediation asks you to join us in rewriting the definition of justice for survivors, expanding it to embrace and include the community survivors need to heal and thrive. By building connected communities, we seek to reimagine justice for all.

Empowering Women: Reimagining Justice and Healing

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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.

Honoring the Legacy of Leaders

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In our work, the team at Shared Roots Mediation strives to honor and recognize the communities that originally built, nurtured, and modeled the healing-centered models of justice that we use in our practice today. We are following in the footsteps of generations of activists, organizers, and visionaries from Indigenous, Black, and other historically marginalized communities who have led the way. Time and again, those most impacted by injustice have risen up to demand change and offer solutions grounded in their lived realities. 

As we apply restorative and transformative frameworks in particular, we reflect on both the wisdom and the historical injustice intertwined with these roots and acknowledge that the very communities who pioneered alternatives to punitive justice were and continue to be targeted by violent systems, White supremacy, colonization, and cultural genocide. As we work to transform today’s broken systems, we must honor the lineage of restorative philosophies while consciously confronting this ongoing oppression and violence. Our conception of justice is incomplete without paying respect to those who have stewarded non-carceral, community justice through resilience and resistance; we cannot claim credit for their wisdom and resilience in the face of violence and dehumanization. Our responsibility is to see their full humanity and let their stories, struggles and strategies guide and shape our approach, rather than appropriating and co-opting their wisdom as our own. This work requires humility above all, and we are still learning how to show up in this way. But we are committed to keep listening, growing and working to realize the vision of justice that can only come when those rendered powerless reclaim their power.

In honor of Black History Month, our co-founder Christine Evans wishes to highlight and thank three of the many extraordinary Black women whose wisdom has shaped her understanding of justice and guided the path we seek to take Shared Roots Mediation. 

Dr. Angela Davis

Activist, author, and philosopher Dr. Angela Davis is a pioneering thinker and advocate of transformative justice. During my first semester studying conflict transformation and restorative justice, I read her 2003 book Are Prisons Obsolete? By the time I had finished reading this text, I was fully confronted with how my idea of justice was centered in carceral feminism. By tracing the complex interconnections between racism, capitalism, misogyny, and state violence that underpin the criminal justice system, Dr. Davis’s work helped me see how aligning my work for survivors of sexual harm with a punitive legal system reinforces the misogynist status quo. It was through Dr. Davis that I first began to understand that true justice for survivors requires so much more than a punitive, carceral response.
Mariame Kaba

Mariame Kaba is an organizer, educator, and activist who has made significant contributions to the restorative and transformative justice movements, particularly in advocating for community-based accountability as an alternative to the criminal legal system for addressing sexual and domestic violence. I first became aware of her work while searching for RJ practitioners who addressed sexual and domestic violence in their work and discovered her work in Chicago through Project NIA and the Just Practice Collaborative. I now regularly seek out her writing to educate me on topics such as the connection of carceral feminism to racial injustice, the criminalization of survivors of violence, and the retraumatization of survivors by the criminal legal system. The workbook “Fumbling Towards Repair”, which Ms. Kaba authored with Chicago activist Shira Hassan, has offered pivotal guidance as I seek to develop accountability measures outside of the legal system for survivors of sexual harm. 
Dr. Johonna McCants-Turner

Of all of these women, professor and scholar Dr. Johonna McCants-Turner had the most personal impact on me and my future work in restorative and transformative justice. As one of my professors at the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding, Dr. McCants-Turner helped me understand the intersection of racial justice and restorative practices and showed me the power of centering community voices and needs. During one particularly humbling conversation for me, I found myself touting my former work with an organization that sought to create misdemeanor charges for persons who perpetrated sexual harm, proud that this work would not increase the harms of the sex offender registry. Dr. McCants-Turner gently but clearly explained to me how creating more options for charging merely expands the criminal legal system, ever widening the carceral net men of color are often trapped in. This moment completely shifted my thinking around my work on behalf of survivors. Through this one comment, she reminded me of the need to center the human dignity of all participants in my ongoing justice work. Through her teaching and scholarship, Dr. McCants-Turner has modeled a standard of ethical, compassionate, and culturally-responsive activism that I continually strive to live up to.

We are profoundly grateful for the wisdom and guidance of these three women and the many other Black scholars, activists, and teachers who have shaped and guided our understanding of restorative and transformative justice. We hope our work at Shared Roots Mediation can fully honor their visions for justice.

How is mediation different from restorative justice/transformative justice processes?

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Mediation refers to a specific dispute resolution practice, which may also be used as part of a restorative justice or transformation justice process if deemed appropriate by those involved. You may be most familiar with the facilitative mediation process, in which the mediator – a neutral third party – assists the parties in the dispute through a negotiation to reach a mutually agreeable resolution. By asking questions, validating parties’ positions, and encouraging openness and honesty in joint sessions and separate party “caucuses”, the mediator seeks to identify the interests and needs of each party that may offer options for a resolution. While it may vary from mediator to mediator, facilitative mediation follows a specific process with little variation between particular disputes.

At Shared Roots Mediation, we will incorporate or use solely facilitative mediation if requested by the parties to a dispute. But we also seek to include the principles and practices of restorative and transformative justice as often as we can. In this way, we encourage parties to think beyond a particular conflict to examine the larger context involved in the dispute and how a resolution can address this context and possibly create space for social change.