Collective Action for Safe Spaces is a Black trans, queer, and non-binary-led organization that uses public education, cultural organizing, coalition-building, and advocacy to build community safety. CASS cultivates the greater DC community’s capacity to respond directly to patriarchal and state violence through transformative justice and abolitionist frameworks.
How do we define Patriarchal Violence?
“Patriarchal violence is an interconnected system of institutions, practices, policies, beliefs, and behaviors that harm, undervalues, and terrorize girls, women, femme, intersex, gender non-conforming, LGBTQ, and other gender oppressed people in our communities. Patriarchal violence is a widespread, normalized epidemic based on the domination, control, and colonizing of bodies, genders, and sexualities happening in every community globally. Patriarchal violence is a global power structure and manifests on the systemic, institutional, interpersonal, and internalized level.
Examples include normalization of rape culture; the harassment, abuse, and murder of Black women by police and by community members, the criminalization of sex workers, homophobic and transphobic violence, the leading cause of death of Black trans and cis women being murder by partners, and the erasure of trans and nonbinary people in local and national policies.”
From “The Working Definition of Patriarchal Violence”, authored by a group of organizations that convened for the Abolishing Patriarchal Violence Innovation Lab in 2019, hosted by Black Feminist Future. More information can be found here
How do we define Transformative Justice?
We define transformative justice as a series of strategies, practices, beliefs, theories, and tools that reject punitive responses to harm and abuse, and actively seek to transform the conditions that cause harm and violence on an interpersonal and institutional level. Transformative justice is a framework birthed from communities recognizing that the carceral system thrusts survivors into cycles of harm and trauma and strips them (and harmdoers) of their agency, healing, and safety.
As defined by Generation Five, the goals of transformative justice are Safety, healing, and agency for survivors; accountability and transformation for people who harm; community action, healing, and accountability, and transformation of the social conditions that perpetuate violence – systems of oppression and exploitation, domination, and state violence.
At CASS, we implement a transformative justice framework through incubating a resource hub that includes cultivating study groups, community workshops, parallel youth cohorts, digital materials, and healing services for BIPOC women and LGBTQ+ survivors. CASS hopes to offer concrete tools to build the capacity of our community to respond to conflict, harm, and violence without police and prisons, and in a way that centers marginalized survivor’s agency, healing, safety, and community accountability.
How do we define Harassment and Assault?
CASS defines public gendered harassment and assault as any unwanted, disrespectful, and/or threatening actions or comments directed towards someone in a public space because of their real or perceived gender or sexual orientation, or the way these identities intersect with other marginalized identities. This can mean their gender, race, age, sexual orientation, gender expression, disability, religion, housing status, or any number of factors.
Values Statement
We work to honor and support DC-based Black, Indigenous, & POC survivors of patriarchal violence while also challenging the carceral state and the current institutional frameworks that diminish their voices and/or experiences, especially the voices and/or experiences of people who are marginalized by multiple layers of structural oppression. We believe in the power of community-driven, action-oriented solutions through a transformative justice and abolitionist framework to spark the individual, community, and societal culture changes that will create a world free of interpersonal and state violence.
