How Crime Survivors Are Fighting to Redefine Safety
Tinisch Hollins has lost more than 20 family members and neighborhood friends to gun violence, including two brothers.
Kali’ Battle is a survivor of human trafficking. From age 7 to 11, she was trafficked by a man who abused her and her mother.
When she was 19, Sandra Balbuena’s brother and father were shot in an attempted robbery orchestrated through a Craigslist scam. The robbery ended in her father’s death.
Impacted by different forms of violence and crime, all three are survivors who are turning their healing into action. All three are committed to lifting up the voices and needs of those most harmed and least helped. And all three are part of Crime Survivors for Safety and Justice (CSSJ), a growing network of survivors who are demanding new safety priorities that will truly make our communities safe and result in healing and transformation.
A project of Californians for Safety and Justice, CSSJ is a national movement of more than 10,000 survivors with five regional chapters across California and developing state chapters in eight additional states. At Crime Survivors for Safety and Justice, we are working for smarter policies at the local, state and national levels that prevent crime, reduce mass incarceration, and support survivors, families and communities. The good news is this work is getting results, including in California, where the state has created a nationally recognized network of trauma recovery centers that provide counseling, mental health services and supports for healing and recovery from harm.
The success and growth of our survivor movement holds three important lessons as advocates and communities continue to work for solutions to America’s criminal justice crisis:
Lesson #1: Listen to survivors. Crime survivors have a close-up view of both the flaws and the failures of the justice system, and the solutions we seek. When survivors speak, people listen. That’s why we’ve conducted extensive research on the views and opinions of survivors. Ask my colleague, Aswad Thomas, and other survivors about the biggest challenges our communities face, and most will point to a lack of access to supports that address trauma and recovery from harm. We know from our research that the communities most harmed have the least access to these supports. This is why so many survivors are calling for new safety priorities. By a two-to-one margin, survivors want more rehabilitation than punishment. In fact, 61 percent of crime survivors favor shorter prison sentences and more spending on prevention and rehabilitation instead of longer prison sentences.
Lesson #2: Elevate survivors’ voices. Every year, Crime Survivors for Safety and Justice brings over 500 crime survivors from across California to Sacramento for Survivors Speak. This powerful event, held during National Crime Victims’ Rights Week in April, brings together crime survivors, particularly from communities most affected by crime, to share stories, honor loved ones, and advocate for smart justice policies that transform families, communities and the state.
Lesson #3: Ensure survivors’ voices are at the center of justice policy debates and decisions. The movement of crime survivors is helping to redefine what we mean by safety. In California as in so many other states, too much money is invested on punishment and prisons instead of solutions that keep people from entering and cycling through the justice system. Crime survivors are organizing and getting results. We played a critical role in the passage of California’s Prop. 47 in 2014, the landmark ballot measure that reduced penalties for low-level offenses and directs the savings from lower incarceration rates to community crime prevention. And now, 10 percent of Prop. 47 savings will go to trauma recovery for survivors. Today, there are twelve trauma recovery centers in California.
I became involved in the work of justice reform because I, too, am a survivor I was separated from my birth family in South Korea as a baby, so I learned trauma before I learned to speak or walk. I am also a survivor of child sexual abuse. I have realized that every time we tell our stories, we get closer to both our individual and collective healing. My advocacy is part of my healing.
By telling our stories, lifting up our voices, and advocating for reform, we are working to heal our communities, our nation and ourselves.
Anna Cho Fenley is Director of Crime Survivors for Safety and Justice California.
