The Sisters Rise Circle is one of about a dozen circles run by Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth, a nonprofit based in Oakland that uses restorative practices to address conflict and promote healing.
Organizers launched the circle last fall as part of a response to what they saw as a large, unmet need among the communities and families they serve.
The Victim Offender Education Group, a restorative justice-centered program at a prison in Chino, is working to rehabilitate people who have caused harm.
The curriculum is grounded in principles of restorative justice, commonly defined as an alternative to punitive justice that promotes healing for the person who was harmed, the person who carried out the harm, and both of their communities.
As a child of undocumented immigrants from Guatemala, Jacquie Marroquin worried that speaking to anyone in authority about her father’s abuse would put her family in danger of being separated, or get her parents deported.
Now she is trying to help other families like hers. Recently, she became the first California-based responder working for a free, confidential helpline for people considering harming a loved one.
For one dedicated couple, embracing restorative justice was the first step toward healing their family.
The Contra Costa County Family Justice Center’s CHAT Project has been a beacon of hope, one that has given them the tools they each needed to co-parent effectively while mending their own relationship. By focusing on accountability and communication, the couple have been able to create a safe, stable home for their son.
With the help of a faith-based restorative justice program in Los Angeles I was able to choose forgiveness and find healing for myself and my son.
I made a decision that I was not going to raise my son with hatred. I was going to show him grace in an empowering way. It became my goal to bring about restoration.
Family Justice Centers are designed to provide one-stop support for victims of domestic violence, sexual assault, elder abuse, child abuse and human trafficking.
The goal is to make it easy for violence survivors and their children to get all of their needs taken care of in one place, and to spare them from having to visit multiple locations and retell their stories repeatedly.
My criminalization and incarceration has led me to a serious awakening of how corrupt and broken our justice system is.
The system incarcerates Black and brown people like me at a much higher rate than those who are white, and often hands us disproportionately longer punishments.
Domestic violence survivors often need mental health care. Like veterans of wars, these survivors have often been subjected to prolonged periods of extreme stress and fear for their safety.
Mental health care can be hard to access, but solutions exist.
Maury Danielle studied the flyer about a missing woman that a friend had shared on Facebook. Something about it was wrong, she thought.
The woman’s husband had created the flyer and was calling for help finding his wife. But he gave no context about why his wife had disappeared.
Danielle remembered the times she, too, had gone “missing” from her now-ex-husband. She’d been trying to escape.
I survived verbal and physical abuse throughout my childhood and much of my early adulthood.
Now, as part of my journey to heal those wounds, I am working to prevent domestic violence and child abuse because I don’t want anyone to have to go through what I did.