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Safety without Coercion: Refining Advocacy Approaches in Domestic Violence Organizations
This workshop, facilitated by Love & Protect members, will reimagine what advocacy can look like when it centers self-determination and shared power. Using an abolition feminist framework, we will ground the discussion in the intersecting patterns and strategies of power and control within domestic violence and prison violence.
Our understanding of these intersections emerged from our work with criminalized survivors and is depicted in the dual wheels of DV and prison violence graphic, developed in partnership with Monica Cosby (MUAVI, Acting OutSide). Drawing from this understanding, we will turn to carceral policies, rules, and consequences that operate in domestic violence shelters.
We will create space to name and reflect on these by collectively developing a third wheel of power and control that links with DV and prison violence. We will close the workshop by generating strategies to reduce carceral policies and rules and by sharing examples from shelters that have done so.
Ann Russo - Presenter
Member, Love & Protect
Ann Russo is a member of Love & Protect. She teaches in Women’s and Gender Studies at DePaul University in Chicago. Her activist, organizing, and writing focus on queer, antiracist, and feminist abolition and transformative justice practices and projects. Her most recent book Feminist Accountability: Disrupting Violence and Transforming Power explores transformative justice and community accountability practices that cultivate communal healing, intervention, accountability and transformation in response to systemic intimate, interpersonal and state violence.
Chez Rumpf - Presenter
Member, Love & Protect
Chez Rumpf is a collaborator, educator, and recovering academic. She is a member of Love & Protect, an abolitionist collective that supports criminalized survivors of gender-based violence. Her scholarship and community-based work focus on gender-based violence, carceral systems, post-incarceration experiences, higher education in prison, and visual research methods. Her book Recovering Identity: Criminalized Women’s Fight for Dignity and Freedom was published with the University of California Press in May 2023. She is the Associate Director of Gender and Women’s Studies at University of Illinois Chicago.
