0:00:00.4 Mo: Welcome to Resource on the Go, a podcast from the National Sexual Violence Resource Center on understanding, responding to, and preventing sexual abuse and assault. I'm Mo, and in this two-part series, I'll be talking with Syd and Diane about the Mapping Prevention Project, what we did and what we learned.

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0:00:37.8 Mo: I just wanna thank you both for being here again. I'm really glad that we get to talk again about mapping prevention. And I was wondering if you wanted to introduce yourselves.

0:00:46.9 Syd Jordan: Sure. I'm Syd Jordan, I'm a co-researcher on the Mapping Prevention Project. And I'm also an assistant professor at Portland State University, in the School of Social Work.

0:00:58.2 Diane: And I'm Diane. I'm one of the other co-researchers, and I am currently a manager at API Chaya. And yeah, really excited to be here.

0:01:11.0 Mo: So when we left off last time, you had introduced us to the core ideas in practice that came from the work being done by Mapping Prevention. And it was just all of these great interviews and surveys and a think tank. And so I'm wondering if, before we talk about those core ideas, could you say a little bit about how you used research or a data-driven process to arrive at those core ideas? 

0:01:35.9 SJ: Yeah, I could start with that. So this part of a study where we talk about these four core ideas or what we might think of as theories of prevention, these are really driven by the interviews that we did, and we conducted 46 in-depth interviews and used those interviews through a collaborative process. Part of our participatory research approach included not only conducting those interviews as a team, but also analyzing them together. So we used that data, transcripts from those interviews, as a way to really arrive at our thinking about these four forms of practice that we saw most occurring in the community that we're working in, King County, and with the kinds of organizers that we decided to interview. So I might let Dee talk a little bit about who we interviewed and why, how we approached people, and then what the interviews look like.

0:02:30.6 Diane: Great. So yeah, we sent out an email to, I don't know, quite a bit of people, and on a couple of lists, let people know we were gonna be doing this. It was amazing actually, to hear from people. We definitely wanted to focus on a couple of specific communities BIPOC folks, especially Black and indigenous people, and people of color, and also the queer and trans community. We had some ideas about... To hear from a certain number of young people or people under the age of 25, also some elders. And we had a really positive response from people. People were really excited about it. In addition to sharing that we were doing these interviews, we reached out to people individually, and I don't think there was a single person that I reached out to individually that didn't get back to us. I have the list in front of me, of folks that we did do the interviews with and, I don't know, it just brings me so much joy right now, just thinking about... Seeing their names altogether. And then the other thing that was fun was that we really thought about...

0:03:39.7 Diane: I was thinking about listening to a couple of the interviews and just, there was just so much laughter and enjoyment in the process of interviewing, and we wanted to make sure that when people left the meetings, they really felt like it had been a good experience of being at the meetings. And so, similar with the interviews, we wanted people to be having a good time and having it feel productive. And I remember in some of the interviews that I did, coming back to people later with like, "You wanted to hear more about this, or this resource, and so I have that for you." And in addition to emailing with people, there were some people that we texted with or just had more one-on-one outreach to. And I think a lot of the people that... Some of them met through this process and have stayed connected, so that's also really sweet.

0:04:34.0 SJ: I think it might be useful to say that we were really invested in talking with people who were doing anti-violence work, broadly defined, who saw their work as anti-racist or anti-oppressive in some central way, and also thought about their work as preventing domestic and sexual violence specifically. And we put out a call for people who wanted to participate in these interviews too, through the community, with those criteria. So we had a mix of people that we knew and reached out to and people who responded to that call to participate. I think in the end, almost everyone we spoke to, I think 43 out of 46 percent of the interviews were Black, indigenous, or people of color, or I should say Black, indigenous and/or people of color, and a really good portion of those people were also queer and trans and/or organizing in queer and trans communities as part of their anti-violence work.

0:05:37.4 Mo: Yeah, I was part of the interview process and it was really great to do and to be a part of. So what were some of the kinds of questions that you wanted to make sure you included in the interviews? 

0:05:48.0 Diane: We had definitely a list of questions that we asked, and we brought people through a training before the interview process. We really wanted people to gain the skill around interviewing but also a lot of the interviews ended up being very conversational, but trying to ask folks, "What brings you to an interview like this? How are you connected to gender-based violence, to domestic or sexual violence?" And we had some really cool responses from people there just, I think, trying to offer really broad questions so people could share about the depth of their work, how they saw their work connecting to anti-oppressive frameworks, talking about their anti-racism work.

0:06:32.8 SJ: I think one of the exciting things about a participatory research project is when we have this group that could really develop the kinds of questions that we felt like would be interesting for us to talk to people about, and not just for the purpose of the end goal, which was creating these recommendations, but also just what would help strengthen our relationships with each other in the community, and what would help us to find our own violence prevention practices. So, that was sort of the heart of the idea of even doing interviews to begin with. And Dee made this really sweet idea of matching people in our group with somebody who she thought or knew from what she knew about both members of our group or people would be interviewing, about who might make a good match in terms of [0:07:24.4] ____ community connections on learning. Then we saw just some very sweet things come out of that, where people then joined other people's projects or started working together, collaborating on something else in the world. So I feel like that was one of those benefits of doing the research in this way, and that we saw as an outcome of that.

0:07:43.3 Mo: So I know out of these interviews and out of the surveys and the work that was done came really four theories of practice. And I'm wondering if you can just say more about those. That's been such a big finding of this group.

0:07:56.4 SJ: So the idea of using data to really understand what violence prevention work meant in the lives and work and community-building practices of the people that we interviewed, meant that we were really using the transcripts to explore what people were doing, why they were doing it, what was sort of underneath their ideas about how they organized and how that related to preventing domestic and sexual violence. That's what we were looking for when we read the transcripts. The first category I wanted to talk about was what we called community and belonging. It actually shows up fourth in the report. I wanted to talk about community and belonging first, because it's an all-encompassing framework, and it's sort of an idea that's central to all the themes, but it also stands alone.

0:08:44.1 SJ: So we just saw patterns across all of our interviews, people talking about building community, strengthening community as really central to any sort of other kinds of violence prevention and violence intervention work that... Community, strengthening relationships and communities are a sort of antidote to the kinds of isolation and separation that we know that patterns of domestic and sexual violence rely on. So people who are more isolated and do not have as many community contacts become more vulnerable to these kinds or forms of violence, and therefore really doing the work to forge a sense of belonging, a sense of kinship, a sense of relation is, in itself, inextricably linked to preventing violence.

0:09:35.4 SJ: So central to this theory is that we can prevent violence by really cultivating a sense of belonging, not only to prevent vulnerabilities from being targets of violence, but from also enacting violence so that communities are also... Are the site of being held accountable for our actions. It was also like the sense of being connected to a community was really considered a prerequisite for some of the transformative community-level interventions we also had seen in our practice, and some people talk about in the interview. So of course, when we think about intervening in domestic and sexual violence, outside of the criminal legal system, we're thinking about the ways that communities can sort of engage in some of these practices that really relies on having close relationships. Yeah, Dee, do you wanna talk about some of how community and belonging showed up in the interviews and practice? 

0:10:33.5 Diane: Yeah, the first group that came to my mind when thinking about this theory of practice was... Actually, I think the first interview that I did, and thinking about a group that was working with young people that were interested and connected to sports, is also pretty place-based in King County. And I was also just thinking about... We interviewed a lot of people that work at culturally-specific programs, so either working in Muslim community or working in EPI community or... And we talked to folks working in the African American community locally, the Somali community. And I don't know, I think it just added so much depth to have all of these different kinds of identities that people were connected to. I think the first thing too, is around places where people already were or where they were actively choosing, and then that being the place where folks were doing the prevention work. We had a quote that came out of the interviews that I wanted to share from one of the interviews, which was, "I cannot imagine a way out of oppression, violence, domestic violence, without a collectivist communal approach."

0:11:49.0 Mo: I really love hearing that quote, it totally brings me back to when we were doing the interviews and reading what came from the interviews and doing that sort of data work and finding the themes. It also makes me feel really hopeful, which is something I could use right now. Okay, let's talk about the next one, which is abolition and transformation.

0:12:10.3 SJ: So abolition and transformation as a theory of practice for violence prevention really relies on understanding that certain institutions have created exceptional or additional vulnerabilities to violence for some people. So when we're talking about abolition and transformation and how they showed up through our interviews with organizers we spoke to, we're talking about those who are thinking about violence prevention as requiring us to eliminate and fundamentally change some of these institutions where we know violence is incubated. So, people were talking about sort of the whole gamut of institutions where they saw that harm was reproduced or violence became more likely.

0:12:55.8 SJ: And thinking about how to build alternatives to those, and also work for a political and social change for those kinds of institutions no longer became viable. So people were talking about popularizing non-institutional tools for violence prevention, so what I mean by that is just thinking about, how can we encourage everyday people to think of themselves as agents of change and agents of care, that didn't rely on some of these systems that have been built up to do that kind of care work for us, that have in turn created more violence, especially for folks of color and for queer and trans people and other marginalized groups. So this theory of practice was engaged in a variety of ways. I think Dee is gonna talk a little bit about some examples we saw. And even if people weren't using that term, "abolition," we saw that as a through-line logic for how people were kind of relating to their work as violence preventionists, really thinking about building up community approaches to violence prevention.

0:14:07.0 Diane: Yeah. We talked to a lot of people that were involved in some of the mutual aid efforts here in King County, and it's exciting just to think about folks that were just trying to respond to so many needs in the beginning of COVID, that were just so vast. People were responding to any kind of need that was coming out though. Pretty exciting just to think about folks that were just like, okay, the society, the government, people aren't showing up. This is how we wanna do it, and this is how we're gonna run it and we're gonna figure it out. And we had this amazing quote, which was, "A lot of the times it felt like our generational charge is just to be the dismantlers not the builders. I didn't know that we would have a chance to be the builders. It's both daunting, but also inspiring". As Syd was talking about some of the things that emerged in this theory of practice, it was really exciting to see people that were like, "These things aren't happening. What are we gonna do about it? We don't know how to get everybody masks, we don't know how to get people food that they need, and just basic, essential needs. How can we make sure that's happening in a way that is safe and also responsive to what's real right now?"

0:15:24.8 Mo: I really like the idea that this generation will get to also be the builders, and that building is already happening. I love hearing this come through from what we learned in the interviews and through people's work, so thanks for talking about that. The next one is healing and accountability. Can we talk more about that one? 

0:15:46.2 SJ: Yeah. So in this theory of practice, organizers we spoke to, practitioners of violence prevention, were really making the link between experiencing violence and the trauma of experiencing violence, and the cycles of re-enacting violence. And so, healing and accountability acknowledges cycles of harm, it acknowledges the needs of survivors, but also people who have enacted harm, and thinks about healing work fundamentally reparative and required for violence prevention. But I think what was so exciting about the ways that we were able to think with people about healing was also moving from only thinking about it in terms of an individual or even a family system, to thinking about what it means to heal and repair from sort of the fundamental terms of, let's say, the nation, anywhere in the US, talking about this with people who were thinking deeply about history of colonization and slavery, and how we have to reckon with these systemic harms, historical harms, present-day harms, to really undo the problem of interpersonal violence.

0:17:06.5 SJ: So this theory of change is thinking at both levels or all levels about what healing means too, not just in the interpersonal sphere or the therapeutic, but also thinking in terms of political work that's about [chuckle] large-scale healing, whether that's reparations projects, about environmental protections, about even unionizing social service workers as a way to create response to the exploitation of workers, social service workers in this case, 'cause many of the people that we talked to for this project were in social service settings or had worked in those settings. So really thinking expansively about what healing means, and this relationship then of healing to accountability. So, creating accountable institutions. The unionization example, I think, is a good analogy for how we heard people talking about that more broadly, their work to create more accountable institutions and how that would then refract back onto more accountable relationships between people. I guess I would just say underlining this theory is the idea that we can prevent domestic and sexual violence by acknowledging harms, working to address those harms, and recognizing that everyone has experienced harm and everyone can benefit from learning how to address trauma.

0:18:33.0 Mo: Yeah, this is one of my favorite aspects of what was found through this work, because we talk a lot, I think in the prevention field specifically about the different levels of prevention, like community level prevention, societal level prevention, and I love the way that this ties in how having healing and accountability within institutions and communities can really create that atmosphere where we really can prevent future violence. So thanks for talking about that, I know you have a quote too that you want to share right Diane? 

0:19:01.5 Diane: Yeah, so the traditional way of healing and Western culture didn't really help me, but having access to indigenous medicine and ceremonies has been really healing and... Yeah, I think when I think about the interviews that come to my mind first, I think about different healers that we talk to, both getting to work either as individual organizers or within a culturally-specific program where like ceremony and traditional medicine got to be a part of the work that they were doing that it wasn't a separate part of the work, that it was something that happened inside of the work and... Yeah.

0:19:45.2 Diane: I think about kids just getting to grow up with their parents and with their elders, really getting to be connected to their culture and having it be a valued part of their childhood too. Knowing the names for natural medicines and for plants, and even just for water, or how do you enter the water in a way that's in line with your ancestors, and how just being connected with other people who are also trying to teach their kids those practices, how that in and of itself is so healing and what's possible. The world that we want to live in being built actively.

0:20:37.7 Mo: Thanks for sharing about this and these three so far, there's one left, if you can even believe it, we've covered so much already, and I feel like it encompasses so much. So the last theory of practice is liberation and agency.

0:20:51.2 SJ: The last one might be most familiar to people who are listening in, because I feel like it might have, and the most overlaps, with what we might think of as sort of traditional domestic and sexual violence prevention work, and that is a theory of liberation and agency. So the people we spoke with talked about liberatory approaches or operation-based approaches to violence prevention in terms of freedom from oppression, in terms of envisioning or enacting the kind of world that we want, kind of world that exists when oppression has ended. And the theory imagining a transformation of existing conditions of domination, which we know underlying patterns of domestic and sexual violence.

0:21:38.6 Mo: I would say this was the theory that we heard about across every interview, the word itself, liberation. And comes up in many of the transcripts, it was spoken about as an aspirational concept, of course, this coming of what we might bring forth. But the language of liberation really was in everyday practice, it wasn't sort of imagined, but it was something that people spoke about sort of being manifesting in sort of an everyday way, it was characterized by people working together to gain knowledge about domination and oppression, really naming and articulating what oppression is and how it shows up in people's lives as a way to overpower the ways that those can become internalized.

0:22:27.6 Mo: It was also linked to this idea of collective agency then and solidarity, so what can be brought together by people learning together about oppression by naming oppression and by working together to overpower and change the ways oppression works. People really spoke about developing a liberatory form of violence prevention in an intersectional way, so really not thinking about gender oppression alone, but always thinking about it in relation to racism especially, since that was at the center of our study, but also other forms of oppression. And then to think then that sort of a liberatory approach requires us to think and learn together about how those systems of oppression interact, so really thinking about how to reach and utilize these theories of practice with people who are particularly vulnerable, and thinking about self-determination itself as sort of inherent to, but also requiring collective action so not theory in which an individual can, on their own, just rise above oppressive circumstances, but to really think about liberation-based theory as one that requires people to come together and work together.

0:23:48.9 Diane: Yeah, so a quote that we had, that dovetails with this was "Everyone is internalizing information about white supremacy and imperialist patriarchal world, and you have to actively unlearn it to not reproduce it", and I was thinking about one of the specific programs or organizing efforts that this makes me think about is actually working on defense campaigns or criminalized survivors campaigns, and trying to fight back and say, "Actually what the state is saying about this is just totally not true, and we're gonna have a whole other analysis in a way that we think about what should happen for this person," and I think this really speaks to too how that kind of organizing or a huge group of people, even internationally or... Is trying to say, "This person should not be criminalized for protecting themselves," really fits in neatly, I think, to some of the other categories that we talked about, and in particular in the last minute, I was like, "Maybe I should talk about defense campaigns actually in the abolition and transformation area," really fits in there, and I think this was a common thing that came up when we were doing the...

0:25:16.1 Diane: Looking more closely at the research was like, and the interviews in particular was like, they all in some way or another could fit into different categories or these different sections, and we had a, Syd, I thought really brilliantly came up with a way to describe that a couple of different ways, but one was like a Venn diagram where we looked at how they were overlapping all of these categories, and that many of the folks that we interviewed and many of the projects really could fit in to all of these categories, and a lot of the work around anti-racism does as well. So just wanted to speak to that.

0:25:58.7 SJ: We also have, on page 45 of the report, we actually did also try to make a table where we distinguished these four theories of practice in a more simplified version than we just describe them now, it's just one page. And while we saw all the overlaps between these practices, we actually found it useful and productive to try to articulate that there are multiple theories of practice operating here, and to try to name and clarify what some of them are, can help programs and projects and organizers really think through where they're intervening and where they're working, sort of what angle they're working, 'cause we need all these angles happening at the same time, but it doesn't necessarily mean that it makes sense for every program to try to enact and do every theory at the same time.

0:26:56.6 Mo: I will say for me, it's really expanded the way that I view my work and what the possibilities are in prevention, when we're thinking about things like community-level prevention or societal-level prevention. I feel like more doors are open than I thought were in the past, and more possibilities exist, and I'm really excited about that. What do you most want people to know or to integrate into their work based on what came out of the Mapping Prevention Project? 

0:27:27.9 Diane: I think I would love for people to know that they're probably doing a lot of the things already that need to be done, and maybe they're doing that in a way that isn't very supportive, I think especially when we're thinking about queer and trans community and BIPOC community and just you're doing a lot of amazing work already, and one quote that I was just trying to scroll through and find was around, "If you're doing gender-based violence prevention work and doing it well, then that also comes with doing anti-racist work and doing other forms of anti-oppression work and vice versa". And then also something about how the funders aren't the bosses, I think something around...

0:28:11.8 Diane: We saw this as an opportunity to get to lift up the work that was already happening and sort of showcase it, and how amazing and how awesome it was and how transformational it was, and also to say back to funders, there's a lot of really amazing work happening already, how can we sort of fund it in a way that isn't gonna be holding people back, and I think that research doesn't have to be scary or it can really support and help you, and it doesn't have to be a gruelling time while you're getting to it and you can learn just as much from the process as you do from the product at the end, so.

0:28:54.5 SJ: Yeah, there has been a dominant idea of violence prevention, of domestic and sexual violence prevention, that is pretty narrow in terms of where it thinks that that happens, and who are the sort of imagined beneficiaries of those programs, like the middle school classroom concept of domestic and sexual violence prevention. So one thing I really love about this project is not that it's developing other kinds of violence prevention work rather that it's recognizing and acknowledging other kinds of violence prevention work, and I think that by doing that, then we also could build and develop other kinds of programs and that funding to follow that impulse, you could follow that and research, that we could think beyond just measuring the impact of a one-time or one workshop series in a school that I think it's really imperative that we begin to think about violence prevention as really much more expansive way in the field.

0:30:02.9 Mo: Thank you both. It's so great to talk about this project all the time, it always makes me feel so happy and so hopeful. I wanna let folks know about where you can go to read more about the project, read about the people who are involved, get a hold of the resources, look at the map, go to mappingprevention.org. And then we also wanted to just let you know that if you are curious about what people who are part of the mapping prevention project are up to now, we'll be putting some of that information in our show notes. So make sure to check that out too, and you can find the links there also. Well, thank you so much for being here. It's always such a pleasure to talk with you about this project and think about the good memories of us working together.

0:30:55.0 Mo: Thanks for listening to this episode of Resource on the Go. For more resources and information about preventing sexual assault, visit our website at nsvrc.org. You can also get in touch with us by emailing resources@nsvrc.org.

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