Resources

This brief is intended to help organizers working to stop the violence of surveillance, policing and punishment and advance racial, reproductive, gender, LGBTQ, migrant, and disability justice to:

• make links between criminalization of care for trans youth across all of our struggles;
• understand how we can join the fight to challenge criminalization of trans health care;
• be of support to folks seeking and offering gender-affirming care;
• and connect the criminalization of gender-affirming health care to broader calls to defund police, decriminalize, and divest from surveillance, policing and punishment.

Survivors want safety and support. Defunding police is a survivor-led anti-violence strategy that stops police from looting resources survivors need to prevent, avoid, escape and heal from violence – and puts more money into violence prevention and interruption, and meeting survivors’ needs.

Amid all of the issues that exist in coverage and legal accountability when it comes to cases of police violence against Black people, separate hurdles remain when it comes to acknowledging the stories of Black women and queer people killed by the police. State violence against Black women, femmes, and queer folk is rarely at the center of mass mobilization and media attention. That’s despite the fact that Black women are overrepresented among the people shot and killed by the police. And also, the reality that transgender people are more than thee times as likely to experience police violence as cisgender people.

The Takeaway speaks with Andrea Ritchie, a co-founder of Interrupting Criminalization, an initiative that aims to end the criminalization of women and LGBTQ people of color. She’s also the author of “Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color.”

Amidst a growing national conversation about sexual violence sparked by #MeToo and the ‘me, too.’ movement originated by Tarana Burke, and an ongoing national reckoning around the violence of policing, one form of sexual and police violence remains shrouded in silence: police sexual violence.

This is a curriculum for sexual assault service providers intended to accompany Interrupting Criminalization’s report Shrouded in Silence: Police Sexual Violence – What We Know and What We Can Do About It. Facilitators and participants are strongly encouraged to review the report before using any of the exercises in this curriculum.

In the midst of a national reckoning around the violence of policing, and a national conversation about sexual assault prompted by #MeToo and the ‘me, too.’ movement launched by Tarana Burke, sexual violence by law enforcement officers – including local and state police, ICE agents and Border Patrol, school “resource” officers, federal law enforcement agents, probation and parole officers – remains shrouded in silence. Survivors of police sexual violence are rarely heard from or discussed in either conversation, and their experiences generally do not drive organizing and advocacy in either context.

This report, in conjunction with an accompanying curriculum for sexual assault service providers, is intended to contribute to breaking this silence, to summarize what we know about sexual violence by law enforcement officers, and to offer concrete steps toward prevention of police sexual violence and increased safety, support, and opportunities for healing for survivors. For more information and a more detailed analysis of police sexual violence, see Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color (excerpts available at invisiblenomorebook.com).